Japanese and American Identities: Values and Their Transmission in the Family

In this paper, we are studying social identities within a cross-national framework as they are reflected in values regarding social institutions. We compare value items to infer similarities and differences between Japan and the US, but more importantly we analyze value configurations, using factor analysis, as an expression of underlying cultural expectations. We also argue that the way values are transmitted further defines the distinctive cultural basis of social identities. Using a unique data set, The Generations Survey , we propose to contribute theoretically and methodologically to understanding the role of culture in postmodern societies. Our research, based on identical national surveys collected in 1995, provides a systematic way to compare values in two countries. The research builds on and specifies existing ethnographic case studies and in-depth interviews around a variety of themes that shape social identities such as the link between family and work expectations, the role of ethical values in business, the importance of national identification, and the meaning of community involvement. The paper concludes by suggesting that despite homogenizing trends and surface similarities, cultural distinctiveness persists in the ways values cluster and is transmitted in the family, shaping the social identities of Japanese and US respondents.     

Institutional Constraints and Deforestation: An Application to Mexico

Following North (1990), this article hypothesizes that effective rural institutions may impose additional costs on tropical deforestation through agricultural conversion. This allows a formal agricultural household analysis of institutional constraints on deforestation and therefore a method of empirically testing whether there is any significant difference in the actual level of forest land conversion under institutional constraints compared to the level of conversion under pure open access. A dynamic panel analysis for agricultural planted area in Mexico at state level and over the 1960–85 period confirms that institutional constraints on land clearing affected deforestation during the pre-NAFTA era.     

Rural Income-Generating Programs and Fertility Limitation: Evidence from a Microdemographic Study in Nepal1

Abstract Participation in rural development programs that organize members into local cooperative groups can alter the decision-making environment facing couples to reflect some of the negative consequences of childbearing. This study uses data from Nepal, collected through a combination of ethnographic and survey methods, to test the effects of participation in such a development program on fertility behavior. Results demonstrate that program participants are much more likely to use contraceptives to limit their fertility than are non-participants. The study provides empirical support for theories linking this type of institutional change to fertility and indicates a policy option that can allow some negative consequences of childbearing to affect couples' fertility decisions.     

Boosting with Bayesian stumps

Boosting is a new, powerful method for classification. It is an iterative procedure which successively classifies a weighted version of the sample, and then reweights this sample dependent on how successful the classification was. In this paper we review some of the commonly used methods for performing boosting and show how they can be fit into a Bayesian setup at each iteration of the algorithm. We demonstrate how this formulation gives rise to a new splitting criterion when using a domain-partitioning classification method such as a decision tree. Further we can improve the predictive performance of simple decision trees, known as stumps, by using a posterior weighted average of them to classify at each step of the algorithm, rather than just a single stump. The main advantage of this approach is to reduce the number of boosting iterations required to produce a good classifier with only a minimal increase in the computational complexity of the algorithm.     

Robust confidence interval for a residual standard deviation

The residual standard deviation of a general linear model provides information about predictive accuracy that is not revealed by the multiple correlation or regression coefficients. The classic confidence interval for a residual standard deviation is hypersensitive to minor violations of the normality assumption and its robustness does not improve with increasing sample size. An approximate confidence interval for the residual standard deviation is proposed and shown to be robust to moderate violations of the normality assumption with robustness to extreme non-normality that improves with increasing sample size.     

Determinants of Perceived Interfirm Dependence in Industrial Supplier Relations

Studies of industrial buyer-supplier relations mostly focus on structural characteristics of the transactions between parties, and assume a direct relation between these factors and characteristics of the relationships. This paper focuses on the psychological dimension of transaction relations, reflected in perceptions of dependence, from the perspective of an industrial supplier. In the first step of the analysis, three groups of structural determinants of perceived supplier dependence are explored: factors related to goal mediation, factors related to relation-specific assets, and factors related to network embeddedness. After that, the influence of these structural factors and of perceived supplier dependence on the ordering of buyer-supplier relations is investigated. Data come from a study of the micro-electronics assembly industry in the Netherlands. The findings show that sales to a particular buyer as a percentage of the total sales of the supplier and the growth of sales to a particular buyer (two forms of goal mediation) are important determinants of perceived supplier dependence. Human asset specificity is also related to perceived supplier dependence. Network embeddedness variables play only a minor role in explaining perceived supplier and buyer dependence in this study. The data further show that perceived dependence has an effect on the degree of ordering in the relationship, next to structural factors like the extendedness of the relationship beyond the focal transaction and physical asset specificity. The effects of human asset specificity and dedicated assets on ordering are contrary to what was expected on the basis of the literature.     

Body Satisfaction and Sexual Health in Dutch Female University Students

Studies in the field of body image have primarily addressed its negative aspects, such as body dissatisfaction. The present study focused instead on women who are satisfied with their bodies and on how body satisfaction relates to sexual health. A sample of 319 Dutch female university students completed an online survey that included items about body image evaluation, body image investment, overweight preoccupation, body image affect during sexual activity, sexual frequency, sexual functioning, and sexual self-esteem. We found that the level of body dissatisfaction was minimal in our sample. The majority reported neutral or mildly positive body evaluations, and in 30% of the sample these evaluations were clearly positive. Comparisons between women who reported positive versus neutral body evaluations showed that the body-satisfied women had lower body mass indexes (BMIs) and reported less body image investment, less overweight preoccupation, and less body self-consciousness during sexual activity. With regard to sexual health, they reported higher sexual self-esteem and better sexual functioning. Furthermore, we found that body image self-consciousness was negatively associated with sexual functioning, sexual self-esteem, and frequency of sexual activity with a partner. Body satisfaction did not account for a portion of the relationship of body self-consciousness during sexual activity with sexual health.     

Emerging coherence and relations to communication among executive function tasks in toddlers: Evidence from a Latin American sample

Recent work within early executive function (EF) seems to suggest that toddlers show distinct patterns of development, involving poorly correlated performance across EF tasks and significant improvements over relatively short periods of time. The present study sought to extend these findings by investigating evidence for these patterns in toddlers and the existence of more traditional patterns of EF (e.g., correlations between tasks, links to language) when using the same tasks in a novel Latin American sample. Eighty toddlers (18–24 months) and sixty young preschoolers (30–36) months completed a battery of EF tasks, early social communication, and receptive and expressive language measures. Results indicated that toddlers showed similar distinct patterns of development (i.e., few relations between tasks and links to responding to joint attention), but by early preschool a more cohesive EF and links to language were present. Further, work demonstrated significant age (older children outperformed younger children), gender (girls outperformed boys), and socioeconomic differences (satisfied basic needs outperformed unsatisfied basic needs, but only on the snack delay). This work provides evidence for patterns of emerging EF development within this novel cultural sample (and evidence for group differences) that may be supported by communicative and representational development.