Effects of cultural change on health and fertility in Amazonian Indian societies: Recent research and projections

Presented at the 156th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990 for the Symposium: Cultural Change and Population Growth: An Evolutionary Perspective.     

Reply to Sloan [on proxies for birth control

Sloan (1984) argues that annual changes in marital fertility of Swedish wives aged 35-39 between 1911 and 1974 is not a result of annual changes in the use of birth control, but is due to changes in health conditions that increase or decrease marital fertility. As evidence of the lack of effect of contraceptive practice on fertility Sloan cites a study published in 1916 whose author concluded that contraceptive use or nonuse had no effect on family size. Sloan is unaware of the shroud of ignorance that blinded such research in the distant past. There was no accepted methodology to determine contraceptive effectiveness until the 1930s, and scientists did not know key elemental facts about human reproduction. For example, the relationship of ovulation to the risk of pregnancy was unknown in 1916, and was to remain a mystery for more than a decade thereafter. Sloan's "declining health" explanation of low fertility in the West is merely a variant of an older attempt to explain low fertility as a result of high protein intake. Sloan's view that modern couples do not contracept to reach a desired family size and that changes in family size preference will not affect birth control practice among older (or younger it appears as well) couples seems to us to be an idiosyncratic view at best and directly opposed by all survey research. Couples do contracept most effectively when they are trying to prevent an additional birth. The view that failure of some Western couples to reproductively compensate for their child deaths as explained by poor reproductive health seems to assume that couples in non-Western population do so compensate, but this is wrong. The idea that such bereaved couples should have another child is so insensitive to tragedy as to defy further reply. Sloan's acceptance and use of reports that some couples say they wanted more children than they had ignores massive research findings of unwanted fertility among couples in populations with long histories of birth control practice. Further, it is difficult to have much faith in such responses since about 1/2 the couples in the Whelpton el al. study cited by Sloan also said they were fecund. These responses mean that couples may say that they want more than they actually had, but they deliberately did not have such a large and "ideal" family size because of other factors not considered by Sloan. Since it appears that Sloan was unable to find another authority, he cites a 3 page comment of his own in support of the hypothesis of deteriorating environment. He does not actually empirically link age patterns of chronic disease with fecundity loss; his view also ignores research indicating improved health conditions, at least among US women, after the mid-1930s that increased fecundity and then fertility. Thus, his argument that factors other than voluntary birth control could explain annual change in Swedish marital fertility among older couples is unsupported by empirical evidence. His remarks are also irrelevant to the use made in the author's article concerning marital fertility rates as a proxy for the use of annual birth control change among younger unmarried women. The marital rate varies, as does the illegitimacy rate. Annual increases in marital fertility are related to annual increases in illegitimacy; annual declines in marital rates to annual declines in illegitimacy. Sloan's hypothetical trends in fecundity have no bearing on our empirical study of annual change in Swedish illegitimacy rates. Finally, Sloan's claim that social demographers do not view a changing environment as problematic is unsupported and unjustified.     

Independent social choice correspondences

A fixed agenda social choice correspondence on outcome set X maps each profile of individual preferences into a nonempty subset of X. If satisfies an analogue of Arrow's independence of irrelevant alternatives condition, then either the range of contains exactly two alternatives, or else there is at most one individual whose preferences have any bearing on . This is the case even if is not defined for any proper subset of X.     

Processes Linking Social Class and Racial Socialization in African American Dual-Earner Families

We examined the links between social class, occupational self-direction, self-efficacy, and racial socialization in a sample of 128 two-parent African American couples raising adolescents. A series of multivariate, multilevel models revealed that mothers' SES was connected to self-efficacy via its association with occupational self-direction; in turn, self-efficacy partially explained the association between occupational self-direction and racial socialization. The link between maternal self-efficacy and racial socialization depended on whether or not children had experienced discrimination. For fathers, a strong link between SES and occupational self-direction emerged, but significant associations were not found between occupational self-direction and self-efficacy, or self-efficacy and racial socialization. The discussion focuses on mother-father differences and the role of child effects in racial socialization.     

Popularity and Acceptance as Distinct Dimensions of Social Standing for Chinese Children in Hong Kong

This study attempted to validate distinctions between popularity and social acceptance in the cultural context of Hong Kong. We recruited 280 Chinese children (132 girls, 148 boys, mean age = 9.5) from Hong Kong primary schools. These children completed a peer nomination inventory assessing popularity, social acceptance, social rejection, aggression, peer victimization, and social behavior. Consistent with research conducted in western samples, we found that social acceptance was correlated primarily with positive behavioral characteristics (i.e., assertiveness‐leadership and low levels of submissiveness‐withdrawal). In contrast, popularity was associated with a more mixed pattern of features including high levels of aggression. The overall pattern of findings closely replicates past research conducted in North American and European settings.     

Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

This quarter's column features a report from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference, held April 10–13, in Indianapolis, IN, and a workshop titled, “Developing Issues in Licensing: Text Mining, MOOCs, and More,” which was co-sponsored by the Collection Development and Electronic Resources Management Interest Groups of the Association of College and Research Libraries New England Chapter (ACRL/NEC), an independent chapter of ACRL, and which took place April 25, 2013 at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.     

From C. P. Ellis to School Integration: The Social Psychology of Conflict Reduction

In this article, the authors review social psychological theories of intergroup conflict reduction. Emphasis is placed on three interrelated social conditions which facilitate conflict reduction: intergroup contact, superordinate goals, and shared identities. Bridging experimental research with real‐world studies of schooling, these concepts are applied to understanding the process of school integration. Social contexts which present conflicting parties with a new shared goal and identity, as well as opportunities to become familiar with others beyond stereotypes and anxious reactions, dramatically increase the likelihood of diffusing conflict.     

Managing Public Relations for Nonprofits

Making the News: A Guide for Nonprofits and Activists, by Jason Salzman. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. 320 pp., $19.95 paper. Strategic Communications for Nonprofit Organizations: Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Plan, by Janel M. Radtke. New York: Wiley, 1998. 256 pp., $49.95 paper.     

Early Adolescent School Adjustment: Associations with Friendship and Peer Victimization

This study investigates shared and unique associations of early adolescent friendship and peer victimization with self reports of school liking and teacher reports of academic competence. Participants were 398 sixth and seventh grade students and their teachers and peers. Measures of friendship included self reports of friendship support and mutual friendship nominations, and measures of peer victimization also included self and peer reports. Regression analyses revealed that friendship support and mutual friendships were uniquely associated with higher school liking and academic competence, and peer‐reported victimization was uniquely associated with lower academic competence. Moderation analyses revealed that self‐reported victimization was associated with lower school liking among students who reported higher friendship support but not among students who reported lower friendship support. The developmental context of findings and potential mechanisms are discussed.     

Positive Effects of Talking About the Negative: Family Narratives of Negative Experiences and Preadolescents' Perceived Competence

Family narratives about the past are an important context for the socialization of emotion, but relations between expression of negative emotion and children's emerging competence are conflicting. In this study, 24 middle‐class two‐parent families narrated a shared negative experience together and we examined the process (initiations and collaborations) and function (the expression and explanation of emotions) of co‐constructed narratives in relation to preadolescents' perceived competencies and self‐esteem. Family narratives in which specific emotions were expressed and explained in a collaborative fashion, especially negative emotion, were positively related to preadolescents' reported competencies and self‐esteem, whereas family narratives that expressed general positive emotion were negatively related to preadolescents' perceived competencies. Implications of family narratives about emotional events, specifically the ways in which families discuss emotion, in relation to preadolescents' self‐development are discussed.