Personal Beliefs and the Experience of Problems: A Study in Adolescence

Summary This paper presents the results of a study of the views of across-section of young people in the 14–15 year old agegroup. It indicates how personal views and attitudes can beeffective in increasing or reducing the impact of the normalproblems of adolescence. The vital importance of a healthy relationshipwith parents is emphasised by the results.     

Listening to Children--Who Cares?

Summary The intent of this article is to reinforce the idea of listeningto children in care. It is the author's belief that when giventhe opportunity to be heard, children can provide observationsthat are both relevant and important. To illustrate this beliefthe article provides verbatim comments of children obtainedas part of a larger research endeavour. It concludes with observationsextracted from children's evaluations of a Canadian ‘WhoCares?’ conference held in 1979, the Year of the Child.     

Children's residence patterns and educational attainment in rural South Africa, 1997

Using data collected by the Agincourt Health and Population Programme in a rural sub-district of South Africa's Northern Province, this paper describes the residential arrangements of a population in rural South Africa, and analyses the impact of these arrangements on children's educational attainment. Children with co-resident parents generally have higher levels of schooling than those who have one or no co-resident parents. However, having a father who is away from home as a migrant appears to benefit older children whereas, for girls aged 11 to 15, having a mother who is a migrant lowers educational attainment. Children who live in households headed by Mozambican refugees have lower levels of schooling than those who live in non-refugee households. Living in a household headed by a woman is not associated with lower levels of education and, for some age-sex groups, appears to be an advantage.     

Parental divorce and partnership dissolution in adulthood: Evidence from a British cohort study

From a longitudinal survey of a British cohort born in 1958 this study finds that, by age 33, off-spring of parents who divorced are more likely to have dissolved their first partnerships. This finding persists after taking into account age at first partnership, type of first partnership (marital, pre-marital cohabiting union, and cohabiting union), and indicators of class background and childhood and adolescent school achievement and behaviour problems. Some of these factors are associated with partnership dissolution in their own right, but the association between parental divorce and second generation partnership dissolution is largely independent of them. Demographic factors, including type of and age at first partnership, were important links between parental divorce and partnership dissolution. Moreover, the estimated effects of parental divorce were substantially reduced when the demographic variables were taken into account, suggesting that cohabitation and early partnership may be important pathways through which a parental divorce, or the unmeasured characteristics correlated with it, affect partnership dissolution.     

CHARITIES, NO; LOTTERIES, NO; CASH, YES: MAIN EFFECTS AND INTERACTIONS IN A CANADIAN INCENTIVES EXPERIMENT

The effects on response rates to mail surveys of prepaymentcash incentives, charitable donations, and the chance to wina lottery prize are examined in a true experimental design.A survey on environmental issues was conducted during the fallof 1994 among 3,088 households drawn from the Grand River watershedregion of southwestern Ontario, Canada. The 20-cell incentivesexperiment crossed three levels of prepaid monetary cash incentive($2, $5, and $10) with a control group (no cash incentive),plus the offer to make a charitable donation ranging from $2to $10 on behalf of the respondent, or participation in a lotteryfor prizes of $200. The overall response rate to the survey,with three follow-ups, was 70.7 percent with the effects ofthe prepaid cash rewards demonstrated, but not those for thelottery or charitable donations. Logistic regression analysisof response rate supports a main effects model for cash incentivesbut does not support either of two alternative models for maineffects of the lottery and charitable donations or interactions.Further analysis demonstrates a pattern of earlier responseas a result of prepaid incentives. The findings are discussedin terms of their cost-benefit implications and with respectto conceptualizations of respondents' motives for completingmail questionnaires.     

Why Does Presidential Popularity Decline? A Test of the Expectation/Disillusion Theory

According to the "expectation/disillusion" interpretation ofthe decline of presidential popularity over time, popularitydeclines as unrealistically high expectations of presidentialperformance inevitably give way to more realistic assessments.This paper puts that interpretation and several specific aspectsof it to the test through analysis of data from a series ofnationwide polls conducted between 1977 and 1979.     

Regression models for binary longitudinal responses

Some conditional models to deal with binary longitudinal responses are proposed, extending random effects models to include serial dependence of Markovian form, and hence allowing for quite general association structures between repeated observations recorded on the same individual. The presence of both these components implies a form of dependence between them, and so a complicated expression for the resulting likelihood. To handle this problem, we introduce, as a first instance, what Follmann and Wu (1995) called, in a different setting, an approximate conditional model, which represents an optimal choice for the general framework of categorical longitudinal responses. Then we define two more formally correct models for the binary case, with no assumption about the distribution of the random effect. All of the discussed models are estimated by means of an EM algorithm for nonparametric maximum likelihood. The algorithm, an adaptation of that used by Aitkin (1996) for the analysis of overdispersed generalized linear models, is initially derived as a form of Gaussian quadrature, and then extended to a completely unknown mixing distribution. A large scale simulation work is described to explore the behaviour of the proposed approaches in a number of different situations.