Women's Attitudes Toward Family Formation and Life Stage Transitions: A Longitudinal Study in Korea

Although it is well documented that family attitudes become less traditional over cohorts, little is known about how individuals' attitudes change over time. More research also is needed on how the within‐individual changes relate to important life stage events such as marriage, childbirth, and transitions in education and work. Evidence is particularly lacking in Asian countries, which have socioeconomic and cultural contexts very different from those in the West. To fill these gaps in the literature, the authors analyzed the attitudes toward family formation of Korean women in their 20s and 30s (N = 6,042). Individual fixed effects regression using the panel data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families revealed that women became more traditional over time and that transitions to marriage and motherhood partly accounted for the change. These findings are explained within the context of very low fertility in Korea and have implications for other rapidly changing societies.     

Children with challenging behaviour: past and present in the United Kingdom

The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the historical and current understanding of and care for children with learning difficulties who displayed challenging behaviour in the United Kingdom. It is clear that challenging behaviour is not a new phenomenon but has existed throughout the history of learning difficulty.     

Low Self-Control and Co-occurrence of Gambling with Substance Use and Delinquency Among Chinese Adolescents

Relatively little is known about gambling co-morbidity in Asian youth populations. The role of trait self-control in co-morbidity also remains under-explored in the gambling literature. This study examined the association between gambling, substance use and delinquency among Chinese adolescents, and the extent to which these forms of risk behavior are commonly predicted by low self-control. Data from a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of a stratified, random sample of 4,734 high school students aged 12–23 years in Hong Kong were analyzed. The prevalence of gambling pathology, frequency and attitudes showed statistically significant, positive and consistent relationships with tobacco use, alcohol use, and delinquent acts at the p < .001 level. Further analyses revealed that low self-control significantly (p < .001) predicts at-risk/probable pathological gambling, frequent gambling, strong permissiveness toward gambling, heavy use of tobacco and alcohol, and delinquent involvement, even after controlling for the potential shared correlates of socioeconomic characteristics, parental monitoring and peer delinquency. Hence, the concept that gambling problems and strong receptivity to gambling are likely to be part of a general problem behavior syndrome is evinced cross-culturally among young people in a Chinese context. It may also be cost-effective to increase intervention efforts to improve the self-control deficit in adolescents, as this should reduce their gambling and concurrent problem behavior.     

Conditions for Facilitation by Voluntary Organizations to Enhance Social Cohesion in China

Social Indicators Research - Clarifying conditions for advancing volunteers’ cohesion toward society (i.e., social cohesion), which means attachment to and benefiting society, is relevant to...     

Does Individual Secularism Promote Life Satisfaction? The Moderating Role of Societal Development

This study was designed to examine the link between values and life satisfaction, examining the role of culture in this process. Secularism was found to predict life satisfaction scores at a small but statistically very significant level in persons from all nations participating in all four waves of the World Values Survey. The direction and strength of this relationship was moderated, however, by the country’s human development index—people in low-HDI countries consistently showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness across the four waves of the WVS; people in high-HDI countries initially showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 1 and 2, but a positive relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 3 and 4. These results thus appear to support a “cultural fit” hypothesis consistently for persons in low HDI countries, and a transition towards a “cultural fit” for persons in HDI countries as data was collected across the four waves. By Wave 4, it is clear that citizens who endorse values consistent with their county’s developmental trajectory are more satisfied with their lives. This study demonstrates the amenability of the data collected by the World Values Survey to individual-level analysis of psychological process that is responsive to the shaping influence of variations in their nation’s societal characteristics.     

Filtered Life Satisfaction and Its Socioeconomic Determinants in Hong Kong

Filtering the measure of life satisfaction through the bias of social desirability and response styles would furnish an adequate analysis of socioeconomic impacts on the filtered life satisfaction. The filtering is necessary because social desirability and the response styles of acquiescence, extremity, and centrality are likely to contaminate the measure of life satisfaction. Based on survey data from 1,993 Hong Kong Chinese adults, the study applied the filtering on the Personal Wellbeing Index to obtain filtered life satisfaction. Results indicated the bias of social desirability and response styles to justify the filtering. They further manifested that socioeconomic impacts on filtered life satisfaction were somewhat different from those on unfiltered life satisfaction. Some of the impacts on unfiltered life satisfaction were attributable to the contamination of life satisfaction by social desirability. Eventually, family income per capita appeared to contribute to filtered life satisfaction; and education and receiving public benefits tended to diminish the satisfaction. The results imply that while the availability of resources explains some of the findings, it does not provide the only or dominant explanation.     

Social Isolation and Spousal Violence: Comparing Female Marriage Migrants With Local Women

This research examined the impact of network participation, social support, and social control on the violence victimization of female marriage migrants by a spouse. Data were from a household survey of 492 cross‐border and 379 local married couples in Hong Kong in 2007. The findings indicated that female marriage migrants were more vulnerable to spousal violence and more socially isolated, compared with local women. Husbands of marriage migrants were also more socially isolated compared with men who married locally. The network participation of both husband and wife was associated positively with spousal violence against women, whereas their perceived social control was associated negatively with violence. Female marriage migrants' greater vulnerability to spousal physical assault was a result of their younger age compared with local women, but their greater vulnerability to spousal psychological aggression and sexual coercion was related, in part, to their own and their husbands' network participation as well as their level of social control.     

A New Pearson-Type QMLE for Conditionally Heteroscedastic Models

This article proposes a novel Pearson-type quasi-maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) of GARCH(p, q) models. Unlike the existing Gaussian QMLE, Laplacian QMLE, generalized non-Gaussian QMLE, or LAD estimator, our Pearsonian QMLE (PQMLE) captures not just the heavy-tailed but also the skewed innovations. Under strict stationarity and some weak moment conditions, the strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the PQMLE are obtained. With no further efforts, the PQMLE can be applied to other conditionally heteroscedastic models. A simulation study is carried out to assess the performance of the PQMLE. Two applications to four major stock indexes and two exchange rates further highlight the importance of our new method. Heavy-tailed and skewed innovations are often observed together in practice, and the PQMLE now gives us a systematic way to capture these two coexisting features.     

Attribution of Human VTEC O157 Infection from Meat Products: A Quantitative Risk Assessment Approach

To address the risk posed to human health by the consumption of VTEC O157 within contaminated pork, lamb, and beef products within Great Britain, a quantitative risk assessment model has been developed. This model aims to simulate the prevalence and amount of VTEC O157 in different meat products at consumption within a single model framework by adapting previously developed models. The model is stochastic in nature, enabling both variability (natural variation between animals, carcasses, products) and uncertainty (lack of knowledge) about the input parameters to be modeled. Based on the model assumptions and data, it is concluded that the prevalence of VTEC O157 in meat products (joints and mince) at consumption is low (i.e., <0.04%). Beef products, particularly beef burgers, present the highest estimated risk with an estimated eight out of 100,000 servings on average resulting in human infection with VTEC O157.     

Genetic algorithm to production planning and scheduling problems for manufacturing systems

Fundamental and extended multi-objective (MO) models are designed to address earliness/tardiness production scheduling planning (ETPSP) problems with multi-process capacity balance, multi-product production and lot-size consideration. A canonical genetic algorithm (GA) approach and a prospective multi-objective GA (MOGA) approach are proposed as solutions for different practical problems. Simulation results as well as comparisons with other techniques demonstrate the effectiveness of the MOGA approach, which is a noted improvement to any of the existing techniques, and also in practice provides a new trend of integrating manufacturing resource planning (MRPII) with just-in-time (JIT) in the production planning procedure.