Relations Between Measures of Irritability and Contingency Detection at 6 Months

The hypothesis that irritability and contingency detection are negatively correlated was examined in thirty‐one 6‐month‐old infants. Observation and maternal report‐based assessments of irritability were correlated with both a criterion score and a continuous score of contingency detection. Results indicated that greater irritability in infants was associated with lower contingency detection scores. Discussion focuses on identifying processes by which the 2 constructs may be associated.     

The Determinants of Racial Disparities in Perceived Job Insecurity: A Test of Three Perspectives

Why do African Americans report higher levels of perceived job insecurity than whites? We analyze data from the 1996 and 1998 General Social Survey to test alternative predictions from the compositional, inclusive‐discrimination, and dispositional perspectives concerning the sources of the racial gap in perceived insecurity. Results from ordered probit regressions provide most support for the inclusive‐discrimination perspective, which maintains that employment practices associated with “modern racial prejudice” induce perceived insecurity on a widespread and generalized basis among African Americans. Accordingly, compared to whites, African Americans experience perceived insecurity net of human capital credentials and job/labor market characteristics. Additional analyses provide one qualification to these findings: dynamics associated with the inclusive‐discrimination perspective are more pronounced in the private sector than the public sector.     

A general inverse sampling scheme and its application to adaptive cluster sampling

Not having a variance estimator is a seriously weak point of a sampling design from a practical perspective. This paper provides unbiased variance estimators for several sampling designs based on inverse sampling, both with and without an adaptive component. It proposes a new design, which is called the general inverse sampling design, that avoids sampling an infeasibly large number of units. The paper provide estimators for this design as well as its adaptive modification. A simple artificial example is used to demonstrate the computations. The adaptive and non‐adaptive designs are compared using simulations based on real data sets. The results indicate that, for appropriate populations, the adaptive version can have a substantial variance reduction compared with the non‐adaptive version. Also, adaptive general inverse sampling with a limitation on the initial sample size has a greater variance reduction than without the limitation.     

Compatibility,Leisure, and Satisfaction in Marital Relationships

This study challenges the prevailing view that marital companionship promotes marital satisfaction. By following a cohort of married couples for over a decade and by incorporating several methodological improvements—such as refining the measurement of marital satisfaction, determining how much spouses enjoy doing the leisure activities they pursue together and apart, and using diary data to portray marital leisure patterns—we found that the association between companionship and satisfaction is less robust than previously believed, and that it depends on how often spouses pursue activities that reflect their own and their partner's leisure preferences. Over time, involvement in leisure liked by husbands but disliked by wives, whether as a couple or by husbands alone, is both a cause and a consequence of wives' dissatisfaction.     

A timely measure of unemployment

Conventional unemployment statistics have two dimensions—size and date. Population-at-risk unemployment rates add a third dimension—time. They are unlikely to revolutionise our picture of the nature of unemployment, says Ray Thomas . But they do give a more accurate and comprehensive picture than existing measures, and provide new insights into old problems, such as indicating the importance of statistics of entrants in helping to explain geographical variation in unemployment.