Globalization and Free Trade Agreements: A Profile of a Nicaraguan Factory Community

This study examines a Nicaraguan community 3 years after the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to learn how families, living in a community constructed near a US-owned factory, maintained resilience under growing negative conditions. These conditions relate to family dislocation, loss of support systems, lack of childcare, safe water, and food security, in addition to labor injustices. Although maintaining relatively high scores on a baseline resilience test, these families and others like them in Central America, demonstrate a struggle for survival in a globalized context.     

The impact of breastfeeding patterns on regional differences in infant mortality in Germany, 1910

This paper examines the impact of breastfeeding practices on the large regional differences in infant mortality in Germany around 1910. Breastfeeding is strongly negatively associated with infant mortality and remains so after controlling for public health measures and for demographic, economic, and social factors that also affect infant mortality. But it contributes much less to regional differences in infant mortality than do access to medical care, percentage illegitimate and marital fertility. Breastfeeding is less important than these other factors because it affects fewer causes of death and has a smaller impact on cause-specific infant mortality rates.     

Ties that bind: A case study of the link between employers, families, and health benefits

Most US residents receive health benefits from their employer. Groups of employees and their families are therefore the basis for health care financing. Health care costs rose dramatically during the 1980s and employers looked for ways to control them. One approach is to control the size of the group provided health benefits by an employer. This paper uses a demographic perspective to explore the determinants of change in an employer's group. It examines the linkages among employer policies, employee turnover, and family dynamics. How much control does an employer have over group size? We identify the relative contributions of employment and demographic processes to changing group size. We use a decomposition technique based on matching individual records between consecutive years. We apply this technique to a case study of the health benefits group consisting of General Motors salaried employees and their families. We find that employers face limits to the control that they can exert over the size of the health benefits group associated with their active workforce. Demographic processes unrelated to employee turnover or transfers to layoff or retirement accounted for a large portion of the population change in the case study.     

Determinants of temporal and areal variation in infant mortality in Germany, 1871–1933

This article investigates how sociodemographic, economic, medical, and public health factors influence infant mortality by using data about German administrative areas from 1871 to 1933. Marital fertility has the largest impact on infant mortality, followed by illegitimacy, medical care, urbanization, and infant welfare centers. The variables considered here account for most of the variation in infant mortality. Some of the unexplained variance is due to factors associated with regions, such as breastfeeding patterns, and with time periods, such as national health insurance. The analyses found no evidence that advances in medical technology affected infant mortality or that the influence of economic development changed over time.     

Familiarity plays a small role in noun comprehension at 12–18 months

Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with particular items, each of which is representative of a broader category that often shares perceptual features. Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels to new category members. While young infants have been found to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study compares 12‐ to 18‐month‐olds’ word comprehension in the context of pairs of their own items (e.g., photographs of their own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same category (e.g., a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate previous work showing that noun comprehension improves rapidly over the second year, while also suggesting that item familiarity appears to play a far smaller role in comprehension in this age range. This in turn suggests that even before age 2, ready generalization beyond particular experiences is an intrinsic component of lexical development.     

Improving the quality of evaluation participation: a meta-evaluation

This study presents a meta-evaluation of a beta-test undertaken of a customer service training programme. The initial evaluation showed a low level of participation in the beta-test evaluations. Therefore, the meta-evaluation (or an evaluation of the evaluation) focused on issues related to the conduct of the initial evaluation and reasons for non-response. The meta-evaluation identified solutions to the participation problem as related to authority, capacity and motivation.     

The impact of breast feeding patterns on the biometric analysis of infant mortality

A major assumption of the biometric analysis of infant mortality as developed by Bourgeois-Pichat is that the age structure of infant deaths after the first month of life is virtually constant across time and cultures. Reanalysis of results from studies which compare the mortality of infants according to the type of feeding indicated that the relationship between mortality and age within the first year of life followed different patterns for breast fed and artificially fed infants. Historical data for populations with different breast feeding customs reveal similar differences in the age pattern of infant mortality. In populations where breast feeding was uncommon or of very short duration, infant mortality rises particularly steeply during the early months of the first year of life. The age structure of infant mortality in less developed countries where breast feeding is decreasing rapidly may be similarly affected. When substantial deviations from the linear relationship are evident, particular caution is required in applying the biometric technique, since in such situations the estimated endogenous mortality is very much affected by the particular set of data points within the first year of life which are chosen for the basis of the estimates.