PREDICTING MARITAL SUCCESS FOR PREMARITAL COUPLE TYPES BASED ON PREPARE

Recent studies have shown that group differences in marital stability and satisfaction can be predicted based on premarital relationship quality. There is also a growing literature indicating that there are distinct types of relationships, both premaritally and developmentally over time. This study examined the relationship between the four premarital types (Vitalized, Harmonious, Traditional, and Conflicted) identified by Fowers and Olson (1992) and relationship outcome over a 3-year period with 393 couples. A substantial relationship was found, with conflicted couples being the most likely to separate or divorce. Vitalized couples had the highest levels of satisfaction, followed by Harmonious, Traditional, and Conflicted couples. Traditional couples were less likely to have divorced than Harmonious couples, even though Harmonious couples had higher premarital relationship satisfaction scores.     

Sustainability when capital management has stochastic consequences

Sustainability is usually defined as a requirement of each generation to manage its stocks of man-made and natural capital such that the utility that it ensures itself can be shared by all future generations. Here we extend this definition to the case where capital management does not have deterministic consequences. A characterization is offered where the sustainability of one generation's behavior can be determined by comparing its utility with the utility of the succeeding generation, provided that the latter behaves in a sustainable manner. The properties of the definition are investigated and illustrated. Received: 26 April 1994/Accepted: 15 April 2002     

Marital status and subjective well-being: A changing relationship?

It is well established in the literature that married people have a higher level of subjective well-being than the never married, widowed, or divorced/separated. However, previous research has yielded conflicting results on changes in the relationship between marital status and well-being. American happiness data in particular provide evidence of a declining relationship, whereas other studies suggest the opposite trend. The present study analyzes time trends in the relationship between marital status and two outcome measures, suicide rates and self-reported distress. The hypothesis that the relationship between marital status and these well-being indicators has declined during the last 10–20 years is clearly rejected. There is even some evidence that the relative position of never married men has become more unfavorable during this period. However, the causal interpretation of these trends is problematic.     

Enrich marital inventory: a discriminant validity and cross-validation assessment

To assess the validity and clinical utility of the marital inventory ENRICH, a discriminant validity study was conducted using a national sample of 5039 married couples. The sample was randomly split in order to form a cross-validation group. ENRICH is a multidimensional scale and two types of analysis were conducted to assess the value of these various scales. Results from discriminant analysis indicated that using either the individual scores or couples' scores, happily married couples could be discriminated from unhappily married couples with 85–95% accuracy. These results were cross-validated with a second sample. Using regression analysis, it was clearly demonstrated that background factors account for little of the variance in discriminating happy from unhappily married couples compared to their relationship dynamics, i.e., scale scores. All ENRICH scales except equalitarian roles proved significant, indicating the validity of a multidimensional inventory.     

Tractable Consideration Set Structures for Assortment Optimization and Network Revenue Management

Discrete‐choice models are widely used to model consumer purchase behavior in assortment optimization and revenue management. In many applications, each customer segment is associated with a consideration set that represents the set of products that customers in this segment consider for purchase. The firm has to make a decision on what assortment to offer at each point in time without the ability to identify the customer's segment. A linear program called the Choice‐based Deterministic Linear Program (CDLP) has been proposed to determine these offer sets. Unfortunately, its size grows exponentially in the number of products and it is NP‐hard to solve when the consideration sets of the segments overlap. The Segment‐based Deterministic Concave Program with some additional consistency equalities (SDCP+) is an approximation of CDLP that provides an upper bound on CDLP's optimal objective value. SDCP+ can be solved in a fraction of the time required to solve CDLP and often achieves the same optimal objective value. This raises the question under what conditions can one guarantee equivalence of CDLP and SDCP+. In this study, we obtain a structural result to this end, namely that if the segment consideration sets overlap with a certain tree structure or if they are fully nested, CDLP can be equivalently replaced with SDCP+. We give a number of examples from the literature where this tree structure arises naturally in modeling customer behavior.     

Decomposing the Male/Female Wage Gap: Within and Between Establishment Differences

ABSTRACT: Using Norwegian data from interviews with about 3,500 employees in 759 establishments, the male-female wage differential is decomposed into its between and within establishment components. In the private sector, the gross wage differential of 23 percent is reduced to 13 by checking for human capital and job characteristics, and to 8 by (also) checking for industry and establishment affiliation. Only this within-establishment differential will be affected by equal pay and comparable worth legislation. In the public sector the gross wage gap between men and women is smaller (17 percent). The inter-establishment component is very small, probably due to centralized wage setting and standardized pay schemes. This has not, however, affected the within-establishment differential which is as large as in the private sector.     

Does one Size Fit All?—Linking Parenting With Adolescent Substance Use and Adolescent Temperament

Using longitudinal Swedish data from 1,373 early‐adolescent youths, this study aims to answer the question of whether the previously established protective function of parental knowledge and its sources—adolescent disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control—on substance use among early‐adolescents is moderated by the adolescent's temperament. Adolescent temperament moderated several links between parental knowledge and its sources and adolescent substance use. The most pronounced moderating results were found for those adolescents with fearless, socially detached and thrill‐seeking tendencies. For these “detached thrill‐seekers”, bidirectional links between adolescent disclosure and substance use, and negative links between parental solicitation and substance use were found. We recommend, therefore, that adolescent temperament is considered when designing parenting programs.     

Benefits and costs associated with mutual-help community-based recovery homes: The Oxford House model

We used data from a randomized controlled study of Oxford House (OH), a self-run, self-supporting recovery home, to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the program. Following substance abuse treatment, individuals that were assigned to an OH condition (n = 68) were compared to individuals assigned to a usual care condition (n = 61). Economic cost measures were derived from length of stay at an Oxford House residence, and derived from self-reported measures of inpatient and outpatient treatment utilization. Economic benefit measures were derived from self-reported information on monthly income, days participating in illegal activities, binary responses of alcohol and drug use, and incarceration. Results suggest that OH compared quite favorably to usual care: the net benefit of an OH stay was estimated to be roughly $29,000 per person on average. Bootstrapped standard errors suggested that the net benefit was statistically significant. Costs were incrementally higher under OH, but the benefits in terms of reduced illegal activity, incarceration and substance use substantially outweighed the costs. The positive net benefit for Oxford House is primarily driven by a large difference in illegal activity between OH and usual care participants. Using sensitivity analyses, under more conservative assumptions we still arrived at a net benefit favorable to OH of $17,830 per person.     

Missing item imputation for quality-of-life instruments with application to asthma quality-of-life questionnaires

There has been increasing use of quality-of-life (QoL) instruments in drug development. Missing item values often occur in QoL data. A common approach to solve this problem is to impute the missing values before scoring. Several imputation procedures, such as imputing with the most correlated item and imputing with a row/column model or an item response model, have been proposed. We examine these procedures using data from two clinical trials, in which the original asthma quality-of-life questionnaire (AQLQ) and the miniAQLQ were used. We propose two modifications to existing procedures: truncating the imputed values to eliminate outliers and using the proportional odds model as the item response model for imputation. We also propose a novel imputation method based on a semi-parametric beta regression so that the imputed value is always in the correct range and illustrate how this approach can easily be implemented in commonly used statistical software. To compare these approaches, we deleted 5% of item values in the data according to three different missingness mechanisms, imputed them using these approaches and compared the imputed values with the true values. Our comparison showed that the row/column-model-based imputation with truncation generally performed better, whereas our new approach had better performance under a number scenarios.