Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration?

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In this article, we map the recent intellectual history of gender and migration in the field of sociology and then systematically assess the extent to which studies on engendering migration have appeared in four widely read journals of sociology (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces). We follow with a discussion of these studies, and in our conclusions, we consider how future gender and migration scholarship in sociology might evolve more equitably.     

How does Inequality Hamper Subjective Well-being? The Role of Fairness

Social Indicators Research - In this study, we aim at clarifying the role of economic inequality on the subjective well-being of individuals. For this purpose, we use more than 180,000 individuals...     

Bayesian unit-root tests for Stochastic Volatility models

In this article, we consider Bayesian inference procedures to test for a unit root in Stochastic Volatility (SV) models. Unit-root tests for the persistence parameter of the SV models, based on the Bayes Factor (BF), have been recently introduced in the literature. In contrast, we propose a flexible class of priors that is non-informative over the entire support of the persistence parameter (including the non-stationarity region). In addition, we show that our model fitting procedure is computationally efficient (using the software WinBUGS). Finally, we show that our proposed test procedures have good frequentist properties in terms of achieving high statistical power, while maintaining low total error rates. We illustrate the above features of our method by extensive simulation studies, followed by an application to a real data set on exchange rates.     

Strategic Intersectionality and Political Representation: Female Muslim Councilors in London

This article addresses questions of how race/ethnicity, gender, and religion influence political representation. We use original interview data to test a strategic intersectionality theory developed by Fraga and colleagues (2005) in the case of female Muslim councilors in London, the United Kingdom. The original strategic intersectionality theory proposes that women are more effective advocates for ethnic group interests due to their unique capacity to leverage three primary resources: a substantive policy focus, multiple identity advantage, and gender inclusive advantage. We modify the thesis by analyzing religion as an additional identity marker and further disaggregating the three primary sources of leverage. We use the modified thesis to test whether female Muslim councilors of three London boroughs are more effective advocates for Muslim interests than their non-Muslim colleagues. We find mixed evidence for the presence of the three sources of leverage associated with strategic intersectionality, resulting in a more complex theorizing of this phenomenon than that found in prior research. This study offers a new contribution to the operationalization of intersectionality and the literature on intersectionality and political representation.     

Temperament moderates the effects of early deprivation on infant attention

Institutional care has been shown to increase the risk of attention problems in children, but some children are more sensitive to their environment, both for better and for worse. With this in mind, the current study examined the moderating role of temperament (falling reactivity) between early adversity and attention skills. Six- to 15-month-old infants residing in institutions (n = 63) and infants reared by their biological families from low socioeconomic environments (n = 59) were recruited. The infants’ attention skills were measured by calculating the length of time they spent looking at toys. The infants’ temperaments were measured by a subscale of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (falling reactivity/rate of recovery from distress). The findings were in line with the differential susceptibility theory. Compared to infants with high levels of falling reactivity, infants with lower levels of falling reactivity had better attention skills if they were in a family group, but they had lower attention skills if they were residing in institutions. The attention skills of the infants who had higher scores for falling reactivity did not appear to be affected by the adverse environment.     

Generalisation of Mood's Test to Factorial Designs to Detect Heterogeneity of Variances

Mood's test, which is a relatively old test (and the oldest non‐parametric test among those tests in its class) for determining heterogeneity of variance, is still being widely used in different areas such as biometry, biostatistics and medicine. Although it is a popular test, it is not suitable for use on a two‐way factorial design. In this paper, Mood's test is generalised to the 2 × 2 factorial design setting and its performance is compared with that of Klotz's test. The power and robustness of these tests are examined in detail by means of a simulation study with 10,000 replications. Based on the simulation results, the generalised Mood's and Klotz's tests can especially be recommended in settings in which the parent distribution is symmetric. As an example application we analyse data from a multi‐factor agricultural system that involves chilli peppers, nematodes and yellow nutsedge. This example dataset suggests that the performance of the generalised Mood test is in agreement with that of the generalised Klotz's test.     

Discovering Diverse Mechanisms of Migration: The Mexico–US Stream 1970–2000

Migrants to the United States are a diverse population. This diversity, identified in various migration theories, is overlooked in empirical applications that describe a typical narrative for an average migrant. Using the Mexican Migration Project data from about 17,000 first‐time migrants from Mexico to the US between 1970 and 2000, this study employs cluster analysis to identify four types of migrants with distinct configurations of characteristics. Each migrant type corresponds to a specific theoretical account and becomes prevalent in a specific period, depending on economic, social, and political conditions in Mexico and the US. Around the period when each migrant type becomes prevalent, a corresponding theory is also developed.