North Americans' Attitudes Toward Illegal Drugs

Public opinion polls conducted from 1969 to 2003 found a variety of opinions on the use, possession, and legalization of marijuana. Public opinion about legalizing marijuana use is increasing, but it is also increasing toward harsher penalties for those who possess a small amount of marijuana. Public opinion regarding the legalization of illegal drugs appears to be influenced by the times. The majority of Americans increasingly believe that the country has made some progress in dealing with the problems of illegal drugs, but Americans are also reporting more difficulty within their families related to marijuana. This article examines trends based in public opinion polls on the use of marijuana in the United States and Canada and discusses the social and political history of marijuana and the biophysical effects, medical uses, definitions, and previous research related to marijuana.     

Socio-economic wellbeing in Australian mining towns: A comparative analysis

Understanding the links between resource dependence and socio-economic wellbeing has long been a subject of interest amongst social scientists in North America. By contrast, relatively few Australian studies exist on this topic. This is despite the significant role of resource industries in shaping Australia's economic and social geography. Where research has been undertaken it tends to focus on the experience of a single town or region. This paper presents a cross-sectional analysis of socio-economic performance across 33 small mining towns in Western Australia. We design and test a number of empirical models that are hypothesised to account for the variability in socio-economic performance across different resource industry contexts. The results of the analysis suggest that socio-economic wellbeing in these towns is highly variable, and contingent on a range of factors including the nature of the particular commodity, company structure, and location.     

Estimating the immediate impact of the COVID-19 shock on parental attachment to the labor market and the double bind of mothers

Review of Economics of the Household - I examine the impact of the COVID-19 shock on parents’ labor supply during the initial stages of the pandemic. Using difference-in-difference estimation...     

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play

ABSTRACT

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play is at once a memory-scape and a mytho-biography set to poetry, movement, and mixed media. A performance poem spanning from the Antebellum South to present-moment Chicago, it tells the story of a nomadic spirit named little-she who shape-shifts through the memories and imaginings of her sister, the narrator. Through the characters little-she and the narrator, the solo-performance explores embodied ways to rupture and relieve the impact of macro forms of violence in the micro realm of the everyday. To this end, little sister witnesses and disrupts the legacy of violence in the lives of queer Black women through a trans-temporal navigation of everyday encounters within familial, small groups and intimate partner spaces.     

Intergenerational Coresidence in Developing Countries

Newly available census microdata from IPUMS‐International are used to assess trends in intergenerational coresidence in 15 developing countries. Contrary to expectations, we find no general decline in intergenerational coresidence over the past several decades. There have been, however, significant changes in the configuration of intergenerational coresidence. Families in which a member of the older generation is household head—a configuration consistent with traditional patriarchal forms in which the older generation retains authority—are becoming more common in most of the countries. Intergenerational families headed by a member of the younger generation—the configuration one would expect if intergenerational coresidence were motivated by a need for old‐age support—are on the decline in most of the countries. Multivariate analysis reveals that intergenerational families headed by the older generation are positively associated with measures of economic development. These findings are at variance with widely accepted social theory. We hypothesize that housing shortages, economic stress in the younger generation, and old‐age pensions may contribute to the change. More broadly, in some developing countries rising incomes may have allowed more people to achieve their preferred family structure of intergenerational coresidence following traditional family forms.     

A Model for Policy Analysis Applied to the Goodridge Case

Judicial decisions, especially Supreme Court decisions, are becoming, more than ever, major contributors to social policy creation. The political implications of such decisions have far reaching implications for policy analysts, advocates, systems, and individuals. In the case of Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health(2003), the state asked the court to limit the civil rights of a certain group of people because of their sexual orientation. Despite the impact court decisions have on policy, there are few models designed to be used to connect the impact of court decisions to the societal and personal values that underlie them. This paper describes a new model designed by the author to analyze judicial decisions, one that includes a value critical approach, and shows its application to the Goodridge(2003) ruling granting same sex couples the right to legally marry in Massachusetts.     

Widowhood and Mortality: A Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression

The study of spousal bereavement and mortality has long been a major topic of interest for social scientists, but much remains unknown with respect to important moderating factors, such as age, follow-up duration, and geographic region. The present study examines these factors using meta-analysis. Keyword searches were conducted in multiple electronic databases, supplemented by extensive iterative hand searches. We extracted 1,377 mortality risk estimates from 123 publications, providing data on more than 500 million persons. Compared with married people, widowers had a mean hazard ratio (HR) of 1.23 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.19–1.28) among HRs adjusted for age and additional covariates and a high subjective quality score. The mean HR was higher for men (HR, 1.27; 95% CI, 1.19–1.35) than for women (HR, 1.15; 95% CI, 1.08–1.22). A significant interaction effect was found between gender and mean age, with HRs decreasing more rapidly for men than for women as age increased. Other significant predictors of HR magnitude included sample size, geographic region, level of statistical adjustment, and study quality.     

Transcending a Double Bind: The Case of Jenna

Although all women's career development has been largely ignored, gifted women, in particular, have been virtually invisible within the career field. Many people assume that choosing a career should be easy for women with high intelligence and multiple gifts; however, the challenges to occupational choice for gifted women are frequently amplified because they are expected to use their talents while conforming to societal expectations of them as women. In this article, the authors seek to enhance awareness of some of these issues by first discussing one gifted woman's difficulties and then addressing treatment issues, using an ecological perspective.     

A goodness-of-fit index for blockmodels

The ‘fit’ between blockmodels and data networks is extended from a binary to a continuous concept. An index of goodness-of-fit for α-fit blockmodels is proposed, based on the purity (density of 1's or 0's) of the submatrices of the data matrix(es) after the blockmodel partition is imposed. The characteristics of this index are compared with those of correlation coefficient. Some applications are described.