Negotiating the Dependency/Nurturance Tightrope: Dilemmas of Motherhood and Disability*

La féminité normative place les mères dans une situation difficile, entre la dépendance et la tendance à se dévouer; d'un côté, les bonnes mères devraient être dépendantes dans une relation avec un mäle pourvoyeur. Inversement, elles devraient fournir de bons soins par un maternage actif, habile ainsi que par leur engagement. Cette condition pose des défis aux femmes ayant une incapacité et dont la dépendance à l'égard d'un partenaire masculin peut entrainer de la vulnérabilite par rapport à l'abus, alors que de la dépendance envers l'Etat peut découler de la pauvreté et de la surveillance. L'auteure explore les dilemmes que les mères handicapées rencontrent pour concilier leur position de dépendance par rapport aux besoins de leurs enfants d'etre maternés. Compliquant les conceptions négatives de la dépendance, plusieurs femmes ont décrit comment certaines relations de dépendance leur ont apporté, a elles et à leurs enfants, des réseaux positifs de soutien. Normative femininity offers mothers a tightrope of nurturance and dependency. On the one hand, good mothers should be dependent through a relationship with a male provider. Conversely, they should provide nurturance through active, involved and expert mothering. This tightrope poses challenges to women with disabilities whose dependency on male partners can bring vulnerability to abuse, while dependency on the state can result in poverty and surveillance. This article explores the dilemmas disabled mothers face, reconciling their position of dependency against their children's need for nurturance. Complicating negative conceptions of dependency, many women described how some relations of dependency provided them and their children with positive networks of support.     

Intrinsically Dynamic Multistate Models

Multistate life table models, which follow persons through more than one living state, have found increasing use in demographic analyses. Multistate stable populations, however, are infrequently used because the constant rate assumption is quite strong and such populations can take centuries to approach stability. Dynamic models, that is models where the rates can change over time, are examined to derive a new solution for the size and composition of a multistate population in terms of the sequence of underlying population projection matrices (PPMs). Constraints on the subordinate eigenvalues and the subordinate eigenvectors of the time-varying PPMs produce a model population that grows according to the dominant eigenvalues of each time-specific PPM and has a state composition that depends only on the most recent PPM. The two living state model is examined in detail, relationships between the PPM elements and the size and composition of the model are explored, and two illustrative applications of the model are presented.     

Diaspora and mapping methodologies: tracing transnational digital connections with ‘mattering maps’

There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investigations to approach diaspora in static ways that contrast with theories of diaspora as a dynamic cultural formation. On the other hand, qualitative, ethnographic work tends not to engage with digital methods and quantitative data‐driven investigation. In this article, we sketch this methodological and disciplinary disconnect and address it by proposing a model for understanding digitally mediated formations of diaspora that combines digital methods techniques with a sensitivity to ethical and theoretical discussions of migration and diaspora. Drawing on interpretive epistemologies and feminist research ethics, we present a case study analysis of a locally informed, Turkish–Dutch issue. We argue for a method that produces ‘mattering maps’. This involves tracking and visualizing digital traces of an issue across web platforms (Google Search results, Facebook pages, and Instagram posts) and integrating this with an analysis of the face‐to‐face interview responses of a key issue actor.     

COMPARING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REGULATION AND PRO‐SOCIAL EMOTIONS TO ENHANCE COOPERATION: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM FISHING COMMUNITIES IN COLOMBIA

This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro‐social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a public goods context. The random public revelation of an individual's contribution and its consequences for the rest of the group leads to significantly higher public good contributions and social welfare than regulatory pressure, even under regulations that are designed to motivate fully efficient contributions. (JEL C93, H41, Q20, Q28)     

PARENTAL ALTRUISM AND SELF-INTEREST: CHILD LABOR AMONG LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FAMILIES

Intergenerational relationships within late nineteenth-century industrial families are analyzed using several large-scale, contemporary household surveys. Nonaltruistic behavior by parents was pervasive. Even among families with positive assets, child labor was common in certain industrial settings, suggesting that child labor (or nonschooling) did not simply reflect parental borrowing constraints. Neither did physical asset transfers offset human capital losses among working youth. A quantitative estimate of parental nonaltruism is derived from an equilibrium labor market model: approximately 90 percent of all child earnings was implicitly competed away through lower adult wages as families migrated to areas with abundant child labor opportunities.     

Semi‐Parametric Models for the Multivariate Tail Dependence Function – the Asymptotically Dependent Case

Abstract. In general, the risk of joint extreme outcomes in financial markets can be expressed as a function of the tail dependence function of a high‐dimensional vector after standardizing marginals. Hence, it is of importance to model and estimate tail dependence functions. Even for moderate dimension, non‐parametrically estimating a tail dependence function is very inefficient and fitting a parametric model to tail dependence functions is not robust. In this paper, we propose a semi‐parametric model for (asymptotically dependent) tail dependence functions via an elliptical copula. Under this model assumption, we propose a novel estimator for the tail dependence function, which proves favourable compared to the empirical tail dependence function estimator, both theoretically and empirically.     

The Analysis of Survey Data with Framing Effects

A well-known difficulty in survey research is that respondents’ answers to questions can depend on arbitrary features of a survey’s design, such as the wording of questions or the ordering of answer choices. In this paper, we describe a novel set of tools for analyzing survey data characterized by such framing effects. We show that the conventional approach to analyzing data with framing effects—randomizing survey-takers across frames and pooling the responses—generally does not identify a useful parameter. In its place, we propose an alternative approach and provide conditions under which it identifies the responses that are unaffected by framing. We also present several results for shedding light on the population distribution of the individual characteristic the survey is designed to measure.