Becoming Custodial Dads: Exploring Parenting Among Low‐Income and Working‐Class African American Fathers

The authors use an ecological framework and grounded theoretical analysis to explore the circumstances in which working‐class and low‐income custodial African American fathers gain custody of their children, their transition from part‐time to full‐time parents, and the role of support networks in enhancing or inhibiting these men's parenting. Twenty‐four men from an impoverished Midwestern urban area participated in the study. The findings suggest that these men, and perhaps others sharing their demographic profiles, generally become parents by default and are often reluctant to take on a full‐time, single parenting role. Adaptation to the role seems to be enhanced by these men's use of extended kin support networks and shared living arrangements. However, low wages, a lack of sufficient assistance from public assistance programs, and informal custody arrangements often inhibit their fathering.     

Quantifying uncertainty in the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales

Summary.  A crucial issue in the current global warming debate is the effect of vegetation and soils on carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in the atmosphere. Vegetation can extract CO₂ through photosynthesis, but respiration, decay of soil organic matter and disturbance effects such as fire return it to the atmosphere. The balance of these processes is the net carbon flux. To estimate the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales, we address the statistical problem of inference for the sum of multiple outputs from a complex deterministic computer code whose input parameters are uncertain. The code is a process model which simulates the carbon dynamics of vegetation and soils, including the amount of carbon that is stored as a result of photosynthesis and the amount that is returned to the atmosphere through respiration. The aggregation of outputs corresponding to multiple sites and types of vegetation in a region gives an estimate of the total carbon flux for that region over a period of time. Expert prior opinions are elicited for marginal uncertainty about the relevant input parameters and for correlations of inputs between sites. A Gaussian process model is used to build emulators of the multiple code outputs and Bayesian uncertainty analysis is then used to propagate uncertainty in the input parameters through to uncertainty on the aggregated output. Numerical results are presented for England and Wales in the year 2000. It is estimated that vegetation and soils in England and Wales constituted a net sink of 7.55 Mt C (1 Mt C = 10¹² g of carbon) in 2000, with standard deviation 0.56 Mt C resulting from the sources of uncertainty that are considered.     

Zusammenfassungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung German translations by Monika Lütke-Daldrup.     

Will taxpayers ever like taxes?: Responses to the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986

Major policy changes like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA) in the United States provide natural experiments to study attitudinal and behavior responses to law. Surprisingly, public evaluations of the TRA became increasingly negative after passage, while general support for the tax system became more positive in response to the changes. To explain this puzzle, we propose a dynamic model of taxpayer attitudes that is consistent with the observed loose linkage between logically-connected concepts. We briefly review the political context, objectives and impacts of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and present several studies testing the impact of self-interest, prior beliefs, and social discussion on changes in attitudes and behavior.Results suggest that the complexity of taxes and difficulty in knowing objective impacts weakens the role of self-interest in attitudinal changes, thereby strengthening the role of prior beliefs and discussion. Evaluations of tax laws are most responsive to more politically-oriented influences.     

Child‐Care Usage and Mother‐Infant “Quality Time”

Mothers' time‐use patterns were compared in families in which infants spent more than 30 hours per week in child care (In‐Care group; n= 143) versus 0 hours per week (At‐Home group; n= 183) from birth to 6 months of age. In‐Care group mothers spent about 12 fewer hours per week interacting with their infants, for about 32% less time; fathers of these infants were more involved in caregiving. The groups did not differ in the quality of mother‐infant interaction. In the In‐Care group, quantity of interaction was related to greater separation anxiety and concerns about effects of maternal employment. Time‐use data were not related to child outcomes at 15 months of age. Results suggest that the effect of extensive time spent apart on the quantity and quality of mother‐infant interaction may be smaller than anticipated.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Running Against a Woman: Do Female Opponents Shape Male Candidate Behaviors?*

Objective. The male‐dominated nature of U.S. politics still means that the vast majority of women who run for office face a male opponent. As a result, one dramatic change in U.S. politics—the increase in women candidates—may contribute to another change, that being the experience of men who run for office. The research reported here begins to consider how running against a woman might have influenced the behavior of male candidates for Congress in 2002 and 2006. Past research suggests that men who run against women feel that they need to take steps to appeal to women voters by giving attention to issues of concern to women in their campaigns. Methods. To test the hypothesis that men will alter their attention to women's issues in the face of a woman candidate, I use campaign websites to examine the issue priorities of men who ran against women and compare them to a sample of men who ran against other men. Results. Counter to expectations, I find no evidence that men “play” to women voters through their attention to women's issues and instead demonstrate the relatively limited visibility that men give to these issues when they run against a woman. Conclusions. Running against a woman may have some limited impact on male candidate behaviors, but does not appear to be a significant influence.