Household size and composition in the developing world in the 1990s

This study uses data from recent household surveys in 43 developing countries to describe the main dimensions of household size and composition in the developing world. Average household size varies only modestly among regions, ranging from 5.6 in the Near East/North Africa to 4.8 in Latin America. These averages are similar to levels observed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. About four out of five members of the household are part of the nuclear family of the head of the household. Household size is found to be positively associated with the level of fertility and the mean age at marriage, and inversely associated with the level of marital disruption. An analysis of trends and differentials in household size suggests that convergence to smaller and predominantly nuclear households is proceeding slowly in contemporary developing countries.     

西夏语言研究简论

自明代中叶以后,西夏文字几乎无人使用,世人极少知道历史上曾有过这种特殊的文字。19世纪初,清代学者张澍首次揭示了西夏文字在历史上的存在。其后,对西夏文字解读至为重要的文献《番汉合时掌中珠》的出世,使西夏语言文字研究方面的成绩颇为显著。20世纪80年代进入西夏语言文字研究的黄金时代,这一时期成果颇丰,著作递增,水平超前。本文综合学界研究成果,拟就西夏语言文字结构、语法特点及其史料价值等作出简要评述,以飨读者。     

Invisible Mothers: Parenting by Homeless Women Separated from Their Children

Though surveys repeatedly demonstrate that most women who are homeless alone have minor children living apart from them, there is little information on the circumstances of their separations or whether and how they remain involved with their children. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews with mothers, relatives caring for their children, and shelter and child welfare staff highlights a tension between perspectives and aspirations of mothers and the agendas and social processes through which institutional systems manage the family life of women marginalized by homelessness and disability. Though women’s agency is evident in their efforts to maintain parenting roles, without facilitating resources and supportive structures, agency is often reduced to unpalatable choices among constraining alternatives. We consider how service systems might mitigate barriers to mothering as well as broader changes needed to genuinely support women’s aspirations for themselves and their families.

真理的等级论与交互文本论

在各种不同学科的真理之间的关系问题上 ,真理的等级论长期以来是占主导地位的理论。亚里士多德为真理等级论做出了经典论证。近代出现了真理等级论的三种不同模式 ,它们在现代被进一步发展 ,并遇到了难以摆脱的困境。由此出现了消解真理等级论的趋势 ,这在后现代主义哲学中达到了登峰造极的地步。但消解真理的等级论并不意味着否认不同学科真理间的制约关系 ,并不一定要陷入真理的“原子论”。真理不是一种封闭的属性 ,而是一个开放的过程。各个学科之间的真理是相互制约的 ,真理是在文本间碰撞过程中显示出它的力量。     

单晶炉二次增料技术与装置

针对单晶炉投料量不足而导致单炉产量低、石英坩埚寿命短等缺点,提出二次增料技术,并设计了单晶炉二次增 料装置的机械结构。在设计二次增料装置时,采用了一种“无金属底盖”的设计思路,完成具有拉杆外置、内筒由2个半 圆筒组成为特点的结构设计。实践表明：该装置结构新颖实用、可操作性强,可使单晶炉每月单炉的产量提高20%,具 有一定的推广价值。     

Welfare and the unemployment crisis: Sweden in the 1990s

In the 1990s Sweden went through a deep economic recession accompanied by a massive increase in unemployment and a rapidly growing budget deficit. The crisis had large repercussions for the welfare of many citizens and it generated cutbacks in virtually all social policy programmes. This halted a welfare-state expansion that had been going on for decades. It also caused great concern about the state of welfare of the nation. In 1999 the Swedish Government appointed a 'Welfare Commission', a team of academic researchers who were assigned the task of drawing up a balance sheet for the development of welfare in the 1990s. The Commission delivered its final report in October 2001. This article is a condensed account of one of the more central issues for the Commission; namely, how the unemployment crisis affected already socially and economically vulnerable groups. Looking at the development over the entire decade, three groups stand out as particularly disadvantaged in terms of individual welfare resources: young adults, immigrants and single mothers. The downturn for these groups was especially accentuated in terms of employment and income. Young people and immigrants trying to get into the labour market during the crisis years faced the problems of newcomers to the systems of social protection. The poor economic development for single mothers could essentially be attributed to the shortage of work in general and of full-time work in particular that followed from the unemployment crisis. As a consequence, the importance of selective benefits increased and the relative size of all public transfers – despite rationing measures – stayed fairly unchanged. The results highlight the great influence of macroeconomic conditions and policy making for the welfare of vulnerable groups in society.     

Family Policies and Children's School Achievement in Single‐ Versus Two‐Parent Families

We investigate the gap in math and science achievement of third‐ and fourth‐graders who live with a single parent versus those who live with two parents in 11 countries. The United States and New Zealand rank last among the countries we compare in terms of the equality of achievement between children from single‐parent families and those from two‐parent homes. Following a multilevel analysis, we find single parenthood to be less detrimental when family policies equalize resources between single‐ and two‐parent families. In addition, the single‐ and two‐parent achievement gap is greater in countries where single‐parent families are more prevalent. We conclude that national family policies can offset the negative academic outcomes of single parenthood.     

‘Undeserving’ mothers? Practitioners’ experiences working with young mothers in/from care

Although teen pregnancy is on the rise in Canada, and while adolescent mothering in general has received considerable recent attention from researchers, there is a paucity of information about the particular experiences of young women who become mothers while in government care. Emerging out of a study guided by a grounded theory methodology to address this knowledge gap, this paper examines the experiences and perspectives of government‐based social workers who work with young mothers in/from care. Our findings indicated that social workers reflect prevailing middle class values, including norms about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting, and centred around the belief that adolescent pregnancy is, in and of itself, bad. One of the most significant ramifications of workers’ values was their belief about the inevitability of ‘the cycle’: of children in care begetting children who ultimately came into care. Ironically, though workers and young mothers were both preoccupied by the concept of ‘the cycle’, and each were determined to break it, the two groups had very different ideas about what the cycle was all about and what perpetuated it. Unfortunately, this disjunction in perspectives, along with major recent shifts in the direction of child welfare policy and practice and related constraints in the resources at workers’ disposal, conjoined to create significant barriers to what workers and young women both recognized as supportive practice with youth in care.     

Young Mothers and the Care System: Contextualizing Risk and Vulnerability

Although the UK has the highest levels of teenage pregnancyin Western Europe, and while adolescent mothering has receivedconsiderable recent attention from researchers, there is a paucityof research literature about the particular experiences of youngwomen who become mothers in or following local authority care.Findings from our empirical study reveal the significance ofrisk and vulnerability faced by a group of fifty-five youngmothers following their exit from care. This paper exploresthe impact of risk and vulnerability and also highlights thatalthough pregnancy may not be a planned activity, young womendemonstrate choice and rationality in their decision to becomemothers.     

Sparse cluster analysis of large-scale discrete variables with application to single nucleotide polymorphism data

Currently, extreme large-scale genetic data present significant challenges for cluster analysis. Most of the existing clustering methods are typically built on the Euclidean distance and geared toward analyzing continuous response. They work well for clustering, e.g. microarray gene expression data, but often perform poorly for clustering, e.g. large-scale single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. In this paper, we study the penalized latent class model for clustering extremely large-scale discrete data. The penalized latent class model takes into account the discrete nature of the response using appropriate generalized linear models and adopts the lasso penalized likelihood approach for simultaneous model estimation and selection of important covariates. We develop very efficient numerical algorithms for model estimation based on the iterative coordinate descent approach and further develop the expectation–maximization algorithm to incorporate and model missing values. We use simulation studies and applications to the international HapMap SNP data to illustrate the competitive performance of the penalized latent class model.