Cohabitation and commitment: partnership plans of young men and women

Popular commentators on marriage and the family often interpret the increase in heterosexual couples living together without marrying as reduced willingness to create and honour life‐long partnerships. Survey and in‐depth interviews with samples of 20–29 year olds living in an urban area of Scotland finds little support for the postulated link between growing cohabitation and a weakened sense of commitment to long‐term arrangements. Most of the cohabiting couples strongly stressed their ‘commitment’. Socially acceptable vocabularies of motive undoubtedly influenced answers but interviews helped to explore deeper meanings. Many respondents’ views were consistent with previous research predictions of a weakening sense of any added value of marriage. At the same time, some respondents continued to stress the social significance of the distinction between marriage and cohabitation, consistent with research interpreting cohabitation as a ‘try and see’ strategy part‐way to the perceived full commitment of marriage. The notion that ‘marriage is better for children’ continued to have support among respondents. While, on average, cohabiting couples had lower incomes and poorer employment situations than married couples, only very extreme adverse circumstances were presented as making marriage ‘too risky’. Pregnancy‐provoked cohabitation was not always in this category. Cohabitation was maintained because marriage would ‘make no difference’ or because they ‘had not yet got round to’ marriage. Most respondents were more wary of attempting to schedule or plan in their personal life than in other domains and cohabitees’ attitudes to partnership, including their generally ‘committed’ approach, do not explain the known greater vulnerability of this group to dissolution.     

Jobs,Gender, and Foetal Protection Policies: From Muller v. Oregon to Johnson Controls

The issue of work place hazards that may threaten the health of an unborn child has long been problematic for women, business decision-makers, and lawmakers. The desire to protect the developing foetus must be balanced against a woman's legal right to get and keep the job of her choice. The issue has never been easy to resolve, as this historical analysis shows. An overview of the potential effects of work place hazards on reproductive health is presented. Relevant fair employment laws are summarized, and a brief history of court cases and employer practices is provided. It is argued that ultimately, foetal protection policies had little or nothing to do with protection of foetuses. They may have had more to do with protecting the employer from potential liability and with perceptions of women's status in the work place than with protecting the next generation. Finally, suggestions for future research are presented.     

Attracting Micro‐Enterprises To Learning

Micro‐enterprises, i.e. firms with less than 10 employees, are traditionally the hardest to engage in learning; they are also least likely to participate in such measures as business advice and guidance provision and initiatives to support information communication technology (ICT) adoption. Through a community‐based initiative initially targeting parents (unemployed or employed) to participate in ICT, 30 micro‐enterprises were attracted to learning for the first time. These companies had carefully avoided similar initiatives taking place locally, which emphasized business success and growth; they had only participated in this ICT skills training because of their children. The paper takes a case study approach to evaluate the reasons for participation, explores barriers and implications for those organizing similar activities, and calls for a more holistic view of owners and managers of small firms as fathers, mothers, etc. rather than just as ‘entrepreneurs’.     

Do Volunteers Volunteer to do More at Work? The Relationship Between Volunteering,Engagement, and OCBs

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Many non-profit organizations rely on volunteers to further their mission, but volunteer rates linger at only 25% of the...     

Overcoming medication refusal using a patient-centered approach

The refusal of psychotropic medication is a challenge faced by many healthcare providers when treating patients with mental illness. Controversy surrounds medication refusal because some mental health professionals believe that psychiatric patients should be forced to take medications for the safety of the general public, while patients are often acutely aware of potential lifelong adverse side effects and are sometimes reluctant to comply. The proposed alternative to this problem begins with developing the patient-provider relationship through a patient-centered approach. This approach emphasizes the individual needs of patients and creates opportunities for input from patients about their care, which helps form relationships of mutual trust and respect between patients and providers. This article explores the literature to: (1) understand some of the challenges and controversies involved in patient medication refusal from a clinical and societal level; (2) identify some issues in a patient-centered approach; and (3) make some brief clinical and policy recommendations that might help to bring about an increase in the use of patient-centered care. Hopefully, as efforts are made toward a patient-centered approach, increased psychotropic medication adherence and decreased medication coercion will result as providers listen and act upon the needs of their patients.     

The Value of Information in Decision‐Analytic Modeling for Malaria Vector Control in East Africa

Decision analysis tools and mathematical modeling are increasingly emphasized in malaria control programs worldwide to improve resource allocation and address ongoing challenges with sustainability. However, such tools require substantial scientific evidence, which is costly to acquire. The value of information (VOI) has been proposed as a metric for gauging the value of reduced model uncertainty. We apply this concept to an evidenced‐based Malaria Decision Analysis Support Tool (MDAST) designed for application in East Africa. In developing MDAST, substantial gaps in the scientific evidence base were identified regarding insecticide resistance in malaria vector control and the effectiveness of alternative mosquito control approaches, including larviciding. We identify four entomological parameters in the model (two for insecticide resistance and two for larviciding) that involve high levels of uncertainty and to which outputs in MDAST are sensitive. We estimate and compare a VOI for combinations of these parameters in evaluating three policy alternatives relative to a status quo policy. We find having perfect information on the uncertain parameters could improve program net benefits by up to 5–21%, with the highest VOI associated with jointly eliminating uncertainty about reproductive speed of malaria‐transmitting mosquitoes and initial efficacy of larviciding at reducing the emergence of new adult mosquitoes. Future research on parameter uncertainty in decision analysis of malaria control policy should investigate the VOI with respect to other aspects of malaria transmission (such as antimalarial resistance), the costs of reducing uncertainty in these parameters, and the extent to which imperfect information about these parameters can improve payoffs.