Latin American convergence and divergence towards the mortality profiles of developed countries

It is uncertain whether Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries are approaching a single mortality regime. Over the last three decades, LAC has experienced major public health interventions and the highest number of homicides in the world. However, these interventions and homicide rates are not evenly shared across countries. This study documents trends in life expectancy and lifespan variability for 20 LAC countries, 2000–14. By extending a previous method, we decompose differences in lifespan variability between LAC and a developed world benchmark into cause-specific effects. For both sexes, dispersion of amenable diseases through the age span makes the largest contribution to the gap between LAC and the benchmark. Additionally, for males, the concentration of homicides, accidents, and suicides in mid-life further impedes mortality convergence. Great disparity exists in the region: while some countries are rapidly approaching the developed regime, others remain far behind and suffer a clear disadvantage in population health.     

Existence and Nash implementation of efficient sharing rules for a commonly owned technology

Suppose that a group of individuals owns collectively a technology which produces a consumption good by means of a (possibly heterogeneous) input. A sharing rule associates input contributions with a vector of consumptions that are technologically feasible. We show that the set of allocations obtained by any continuous sharing rule contains Pareto efficient allocations. We also present a mechanism that implements in Nash equilibrium the Pareto efficient allocations contained in an arbitrary sharing rule. Received: 29 June 1998/Accepted: 15 November 2000     

Integrating Family Resilience and Family Stress Theory

The construct, family resilience, has been defined and applied very differently by those who are primarily clinical practitioners and those who are primarily researchers in the family field. In thisarticle, the family resilience perspective is integrated with conceptual definitions from family stress theory using the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response (FAAR) Model in an effort to clarify distinctions between family resiliency as capacity and family resilience as a process. The family resilience process is discussed in terms of (a) the meaning of significant risk exposure (vs. the normal challenges of family life) and (b) the importance of making conceptual and operational distinctions between family system outcomes and family protective processes. Recommendations for future family resilience research are discussed.     

Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an ntent/m76333242r211l4t/xxlarge8220.gif" alt="ldquo" align="MIDDLE" BORDER="0">hourglassntent/m76333242r211l4t/xxlarge8221.gif" alt="rdquo" align="MIDDLE" BORDER="0"> economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.