Changes in functional limitation and survival among older Taiwanese, 1993, 1996, and 1999

Using data from the Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan, we investigate changes in difficulties in walking and climbing stairs, tasks that represent basic lower-body movements less likely to be influenced by changes in environment and social roles than are activities and instrumental activities of daily living. Results are shown for unadjusted prevalence rates and rates adjusted for changes in population composition. The findings indicate that Taiwan does not appear to be experiencing the improvements in functioning witnessed recently in the United States. Prevalence of functional limitation increased between 1993 and 1996 and between 1996 and 1999. One possible reason is the change in old-age survival, which appears to have benefited those who have functional limitations, especially in a severe form. The Universal Health Insurance programme, established in 1995, may have increased access to care and thus the survival of those in poorest health.     

SHORT REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000 Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years Elisabeth Croll, Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Eds.), Re‐Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China David T. Graham and Nana K. Poku (Eds.), Migration, Globalisation and Human Security Paul Harrison and Fred Pearce, AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment Russell King, Paolo De Mas, and Jan Mansvelt Beck (Eds.), Geography, Environment and Development in the Mediterranean Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs and United Nations Population Fund, Low Fertility and Policy Responses to Issues of Ageing and Welfare National Assessment Synthesis Team, Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. Report for the US Global Change Research Program Jacques Vaixin and Thérèse Locoh (Eds.), Population et développement en Tunisie: La métamorphose     

Mitigating the Combined Distributional Consequences of the Georgia Lottery for Education and the HOPE Scholarship*

Objective. Research demonstrates that nonwhite, lower‐income households bear the Georgia Lottery's tax burden, yet receive fewer benefits. However, local disparities in grading standards may mitigate the observed income redistribution. Our objective is to determine whether certain localities obtain more HOPE scholarships than expected, mitigating the observed redistribution. Method. We use fixed‐effects regression and a sample of Georgia's counties (1996–2002). Results. Our results indicate that some localities obtain more HOPE scholarships than expected, mitigating the observed redistribution. Conclusions. We conclude the income‐redistribution research result does not reveal a complete picture because it overlooks the HOPE scholarship's extraordinary allocation mechanism.     

Varieties of liberalism: A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States

The United States is generally recognised as an exemplar of liberal policy regime types. However, given evidence of state-level divergence in social policy, this article investigates to what extent such variation is present and relevant in state-level family policy. To this end, we pose a primary and secondary research question. Our primary question is whether varieties of liberalism exist across the 50 states in the United States. Our secondary question is whether these varieties of liberalism correspond to variety in social indicators of families' economic well-being. To answer our primary question, we first construct a family policy index that scores the relative generosity and coverage of state-administered social programmes that contribute to the (de)commodification and (de)familialisation of households with children. We then perform a cluster analysis to group states by shared decommodifying and defamilialising features. To answer our secondary question, we investigate how our family-policy clusters are associated with social indicators of families' financial security. Our findings suggest that varieties of liberalism do, indeed, exist within the United States. With the exception of Vermont, which stands out with respect to its comparatively generous family policies, we classify states into two groups: those with ‘soft’ liberal family policy in states featuring relatively generous and accessible policies and ‘hard’ liberal family policy in states achieving little of either. We find that these differences help explain state-level heterogeneity in levels of economic security among households with children, particularly single-mother households.     

Toward Probabilistic Prediction of Flash Flood Human Impacts

This article focuses on conceptual and methodological developments allowing the integration of physical and social dynamics leading to model forecasts of circumstance‐specific human losses during a flash flood. To reach this objective, a random forest classifier is applied to assess the likelihood of fatality occurrence for a given circumstance as a function of representative indicators. Here, vehicle‐related circumstance is chosen as the literature indicates that most fatalities from flash flooding fall in this category. A database of flash flood events, with and without human losses from 2001 to 2011 in the United States, is supplemented with other variables describing the storm event, the spatial distribution of the sensitive characteristics of the exposed population, and built environment at the county level. The catastrophic flash floods of May 2015 in the states of Texas and Oklahoma are used as a case study to map the dynamics of the estimated probabilistic human risk on a daily scale. The results indicate the importance of time‐ and space‐dependent human vulnerability and risk assessment for short‐fuse flood events. The need for more systematic human impact data collection is also highlighted to advance impact‐based predictive models for flash flood casualties using machine‐learning approaches in the future.     

Ambivalent economizations: the case of value added modeling in teacher evaluation

Theory and Society - Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic...     

Care earnings in the United States and 24 European countries: The role of social policy and labour market institutions

Care occupations are gendered and remain relatively poorly paid, particularly in the United States. Prior research on the ‘care penalty’ primarily points to individual, relational, and market-valuation factors in explaining the relative earnings of care workers. This study integrates these explanations with a comparative institutional perspective. Using higher-quality data and methods than previous comparative research in the field—that is, harmonized micro-data from the Current Population Survey and EU-SILC from 2005 to 2016, country and year fixed effects models, and a counterfactual analysis—we find that national variance in labour market and welfare state institutions explains most of the difference in the relative earnings of reproductive care workers between the United States and European countries. Higher rates of collective bargaining coverage, stronger employment protection and welfare state spending contribute to higher relative earnings for reproductive care occupations, and lower relative earnings for high-status nurturant care occupations. Differences in the relative earnings of care workers appear to be mostly a construct of social policy and labour market institutions rather than individual, relational, and market-valuation factors.     

Personality Disorders Among Pathological Gamblers

The objective of this study was to investigate the prevalence of DSM-III-R diagnostic categories of personality disorders in pathological gamblers and to highlight the possible association between such disorders, psychological distress and selected forms of gambling. The Personality Disorders Questionnaire-Revised and a battery of psychometric measures were administered to a sample of 82 consecutive admissions to a behavioral treatment program for gambling problems at an impulse control disorders research unit in Sydney, Australia. Seventy-three percent of subjects were male. The total sample reported having gambled a mean of 15 years of which, on average, the last 6.4 years were associated with problems. Results indicated that the majority of subjects met diagnostic criteria for at least one Personality Disorder (93%), with an average of 4.6 personality disorders per subject. The majority of gamblers evidenced personality disorders from the Cluster B grouping with particularly high rates of borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders which were found to be associated with high levels of impulsivity and affective instability. Antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder were both found to be possible mediators of the severity of the problem gambling behaviours.