Marriage and conjugal roles in Swaziland: persistence and change

"This paper examines one set of relationships central to the Swazi household--marriage and conjugal roles--and how those relationships have changed over the last half century. Information has been analyzed on such topics as types of marriages contracted, the age at marriage, choice of spouse, attitudes towards and participation in polygyny, the nature of conjugal roles, and the question of divorce. This study has drawn upon a wide range of sources including (1) an analysis of civil records from the office of the District Commissioner in Manzini, Swaziland; (2) data collected previously by other social scientists; and (3) survey data gathered especially for this study. The study concludes that while changes have occurred, many traditional patterns of marriage and family continue to be important in contemporary Swazi society."     

Obesity and hospitalization over the adult life course: does duration of exposure increase use?

Consistent with a new genre of research on life-course analyses of health-service use, this study explores the consequences of long-term exposure to a risk factor. Drawing from cumulative-disadvantage theory, the study examines whether obesity, especially chronic obesity, increases hospitalization admission and length of stay. Analyses make use of hospital records abstracted over 20 years from a national survey of adults 41 to 77 years of age at baseline (n = 4,574). Multiple measures of body weight are used to calculate adult obesity duration. Results reveal that obesity increased hospital admissions and length of stay over the 20 years studied. Among persons obese at any time during the study, years of obesity also led to longer stays. The findings highlight the utility of measures of the duration of risk exposure for both life-course studies of health and tests of cumulative-disadvantage theory.     

Research on Domestic Violence in the 1990s: Making Distinctions

This review of the family literature on domestic violence suggests that two broad themes of the 1990s provide the most promising directions for the future. The first is the importance of distinctions among types or contexts of violence. Some distinctions are central to the theoretical and practical understanding of the nature of partner violence, others provide important contexts for developing more sensitive and comprehensive theories, and others may simply force us to question our tendency to generalize carelessly from one context to another. Second, issues of control, although most visible in the feminist literature that focuses on men using violence to control “their” women, also arise in other contexts, calling for more general analyses of the interplay of violence, power, and control in relationships. In addition to these two general themes, our review covers literature on coping with violence, the effects on victims and their children, and the social effects of partner violence.

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School-level policies and the efficiency and equity trade-off in education

This paper identifies the relationship between pupils’ Family Background, their mathematics scores, and school-level policies, using the 2012 Programme of International Student Assessment for Italy and multilevel modelling. School-level policies have played a leading role in recent school reforms in many countries, but there is no straightforward empirical evidence for how they affect pupils’ outcomes and the equality of educational outcomes. Our findings show that that only some school policies intensify the Family Background Effect – (educational equity) and affect student outcomes (educational efficiency) simultaneously. We find that competitive schools are able to screen students by selecting higher socio-economic status parents, which mainly harms equity without having much effect on efficiency. There are some policies which allow some trade-off between aforementioned objectives, mainly policies related to management schools.     

A profitability model for tactical planning

Simple models reflecting changes in aggregate company behaviour in response to changes imposed by management decisions and/or factors outside the direct control of management provide useful tools for tactical planning purposes.One such model is discussed in this paper. The model enables management to assess explicitly and quantitatively the effect on the rate of return on capital employed of primary causes of change in any of the key variables affecting company performance, such as the unit price, the unit cost, the output level and the capital employed. Simple functional relationships are proposed between the major variables in the model, such as the level of output and the unit cost, the unit price and the volume of sales, the working capital requirements and the general level of the firm's activity, etc. and these are based on analytical considerations, empirical evidence and a series of assumptions. These relationships give rise to a set of parameters which are incorporated in the model and describe the operational (cost structure), financial (capital structure) and marketing (elasticity of demand) position of the company under study.Numerical results obtained from the model seem to suggest that the sensitivity of the rate of return to some of the parameters and underlying assumptions is relatively small, implying that the inter-dependence between some of the variables can be ignored, thus simplifying the problems associated with data collection and model evaluation.Both the model and the methodology of analysis employed are flexible enough to allow: (1) application of the model to alternative sets of functional relationships between variables and/or underlying assumptions; (2) further decomposition of the model to include additional variables depending on the particular objectives of the study; (3) modification of the model to explore the effects of management decisions or those of changes in external factors on productive unit and product profitability; and (4) analysis of models reflecting the effects of changes which are imposed on the system on measures of business performance other than the rate of return on capital employed.     

Factors Linked with Coparenting Support and Conflict After Divorce

We examined the relationship between personal and interpersonal indicators of postdivorce adjustment and dimensions of coparenting (support, overt conflict, covert conflict) using data from 176 recently divorced mothers. Mothers’ satisfaction with the divorce decree, perceptions of fathers as important for child development, and being satisfied with fathers’ parenting were associated with more supportive coparenting. Mothers’ satisfaction with the divorce decree and fathers’ parenting were associated with less overt conflict. Factors differed for mothers’ reports of their own and their former spouses’ use of covert conflict behaviors, with these factors linked to satisfaction with the divorce decree and perceived stress, respectively.     

Volunteering and depression in later life: social benefit or selection processes?

Does volunteer participation reduce depressive symptoms among older people? Does depression influence whether older people will volunteer? Might nonrandom attrition in a longitudinal study bias the relationship between volunteering and depression? This research addresses these questions with three-wave data from theAmericans' Changing Lives study. Multigroup structural equation models for complete and incomplete data are used to estimate the joint causal relationship between volunteer work and depression. The results reveal a beneficial effect of formal volunteering on depression, but not for informal helping. Depression was shown to be associated with a subsequent increase in formal volunteering, suggesting voluntarism as a means of compensation. Functional health problems, not depression, emerged as the important barrier to volunteering. In addition, a sample selection effect--depressed persons and nonvolunteers were less likely to complete the panel study--was detected and accounted for in the analysis. The results are discussed in light of the legitimacy of formal social integration.