The Varied Impact of Couple Relationship Breakdown on Children: Implications for Practice and Policy

This review of international literature assesses the impacts that the relationship breakdown of parents has on children and factors that can provide support should this occur. The parental separation process causes significant albeit short‐term distress for most children, with a minority reporting longer‐term outcomes such as socio‐economic disadvantage, behavioural problems, poor educational achievement, and physical and emotional health problems. Factors increasing the likelihood of sustained disadvantage include: poverty; poor parent–child relationships; continuing parental conflict, multiple transitions in family formation; and poor maternal mental health. Supporting the factors that can improve child outcomes, exploring opportune ways to strengthen couple and family relationships, and integrating the views of children (for example, in court‐based dispute resolution) are the leading implications for practice and policy.     

Marriage in the New Millennium: A Decade in Review

This review focuses on broad themes characterizing marital research in the past decade. In addition to continuing themes, such as a focus on conflict, violence, and impact on physical and mental health outcomes, we also address the impact of the Healthy Marriage Initiative on marital research and recent advances in methodology. We highlight an overarching theme that characterizes much of the literature: the importance of context in understanding marital outcomes and the impact of positive marital transactions and marital strengths. Given the increasing diversity of married couples, the attention given to context over the past decade has been timely and appropriate, providing an increasingly solid foundation for future research.     

Conflict,Power, and Violence in Families

Research on conflict, power, and violence in families in the 2000s developed a promising focus on the interconnections between types of violence and between the experience of violence and locations in larger structures of power and inequality. I examine research on poly‐victimization, typologies of violence, dyadic research, and links between violence and inequalities of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Additionally, this review evaluates research on the connections between violence in families and other arenas of family study, including teen pregnancy, marriage formation, cohabitation, and divorce. The review concludes with a discussion of studies showing declines in rates of abuse within families in the 2000s.     

Intimate partner violence and women's experiences of grief

A greater understanding of women's emotional and behavioural responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) may be aided by an examination of the grief course. Women going through the process of leaving their abusers, like women leaving non‐violent partners, experience grief during and at the termination of their relationship, even if they feel relief at the cessation of violence. Through qualitative interviews with 14 female survivors of IPV, we critically examine the utility of Kubler‐Ross' grief model to understand how women come to terms with their experiences of violence and the end of their violent relationships. Results suggest that Kubler‐Ross' model helps explain the emotional reactions and decision‐making of IPV survivors in regard to staying, leaving and returning to their partners. While a model developed to explain grief due to death may not entirely explain the reactions of IPV survivors going through the process of leaving abusive partners, and does not account for psychological reactions to trauma, social workers and mental‐health professionals can use this grief model as a framework to better tailor services to survivors of IPV.     

Does the “Marriage Benefit” Extend to Same-Sex Union?: Evidence From a Sample of Married Lesbian Couples in Massachusetts

This study investigated the relationship between wellbeing and marital quality in a married lesbian sample from Massachusetts. Two hundred twenty five (225) participants responded to this mailed survey study. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS), and the World Health Organization Quality of Life-Brief Instrument (WHOQOL-Bref). DAS scores were a strong predictor of reported wellbeing in all quality of life domains including physical, psychological, and financial wellbeing. Results support the finding in the heterosexual marriage literature that healthy marriage is associated with distinct wellbeing benefits for lesbian couples. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Quasi-complete separation in random effects of binary response mixed models

ABSTRACT

Clustered observations such as longitudinal data are often analysed with generalized linear mixed models (GLMM). Approximate Bayesian inference for GLMMs with normally distributed random effects can be done using integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA), which is in general known to yield accurate results. However, INLA is known to be less accurate for GLMMs with binary response. For longitudinal binary response data it is common that patients do not change their health state during the study period. In this case the grouping covariate perfectly predicts a subset of the response, which implies a monotone likelihood with diverging maximum likelihood (ML) estimates for cluster-specific parameters. This is known as quasi-complete separation. In this paper we demonstrate, based on longitudinal data from a randomized clinical trial and two simulations, that the accuracy of INLA decreases with increasing degree of cluster-specific quasi-complete separation. Comparing parameter estimates by INLA, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and ML shows that INLA increasingly deviates from the other methods in such a scenario.     

中国政治体制改革的路径探析

中国政治体制改革的根本目标是发展社会主义民主政治。文章主要从完善人民代表大会制度、发展党内民主、基层民主自治和实行党政分开等四条基本路径入手,对中国政治体制改革路径进行探析,以不断深化发展。     

柏拉图理想同的理念论解读

柏拉图的理想国及其“哲学王”思想是其政治哲学的核心,是以理念论作为哲学基础的。柏拉图认为,世界分离为两个不同的领域,即可感世界和可知世界。真实的世界是在具体事物之外的存在,是人类理性才能把握的抽象的理念的世界。知识的获取过程是对理念世界的认知和接近,是灵魂对迷失的理念的“回忆”。最高的理念是“善”,它是宇宙万物的最高原理,只有在“善”的理念引导下的城邦才会具有正义的品质,而拥有这种最高智慧是哲学家的天性。“哲学王”是在政治生活领域中的理性治国的体现,是柏拉图政治思想中最核心和最有独创性的地方,是一种知识与权力相结合的政治制度,是建立在作为本体论的理念世界中的理性国度。     

市场化进程、二权分离程度与会计稳健性研究——来自中国资本市场的证据

本文以我国2004--2006年间金融类A股上市公司为样本,采取Ball和Shivakumar的权责发生制模型检验市场化进程、二权分离程度和会计稳健性之间的关系。研究结果表明,控股股东的二权分离程度对公司会计稳健性产生了影响,而且这一影响程度视控股股东的控制权程度而不同,进一步研究发现外部治理环境会对会计盈余的稳健性程度也产生了明显影响。     

从夫妻财产制度的沿革论男女平等原则的逐步实现

世界上存在资本主义和社会主义两种性别法律制度演进模式,社会性别分析是研究男女平等问题的新方法。在我国,男女平等原则的宣示性规定具有社会主义性别法律制度演进模式的鲜明特征。随着夫妻财产制度的逐步完善,男女平等原则由形式平等向实质平等转变。物权法第99条关于共有财产分割的＂重大理由＂的规定,为夫妻财产规定的完善和男女平等原则的进一步实现提供了依据,婚姻法应予以细化。