The Latent Dimensions of Poor Self-Rated Health: How Chronic Diseases,Functional and Emotional Dimensions Interact Influencing Self-Rated Health in Italian Elderly

Self-Rated Health (SRH) is becoming one of the most popular indicator of population health. Nevertheless, a limited understanding still remains about the elements to which individuals refer when evaluating their health and how those elements act and interact in the evaluation process. In this study we use a structural equation model with latent variables to identify direct and indirect influences of various health dimensions (chronic morbidity, functional abilities and emotional health) and socio-demographic covariates (age, gender and education) on poor SRH. The sample consists of 25,183 Italian elderly aged 65 years and over, interviewed in the 2005 National Health Interview Survey. The results have pointed out the higher direct effect of psychological and emotional health on SRH, while the higher total effect is caused by chronic morbidity, which influences SRH both directly and altering functional and emotional health. Growing older, being a woman and having a low education negatively impacts on SRH. However, this is almost completely the result of the indirect effect exerted by the covariates, while their direct effect is not significant (gender), negative (age) or very modest (education).     

… Do as the Romans do. A model of conformity with the endogenous formation of preferences

This note is an answer to a previous model on conformity in public goods contributions developed by Carpenter (2004), where a population evolution is allowed according to the standard replicator dynamic (Taylor and Jonker, 1978, Maynard Smith, 1982). To confirm his theoretical prediction, Carpenter developed an experiment showing that free riding actually grows faster when agents have the information necessary to conform. The model and the experiment are, however, inherently different, for the time scales of the model are not able to capture the short run convergence of behavior in the experimental laboratory.We here present a model of conformity which offers the same laboratory results as Carpenter without resorting to evolutionary models, and also gives agents the chance to adopt different strategies implying various levels of cooperation.     

The role of county‐based funders in sustaining nonprofits within rural and urbanized counties

Social service nonprofit organizations in the United States originally relied on private donations and charitable events to sustain their operations. Using case studies, this article examines the role played by local officials in the thirty‐year survival of certain Indiana Youth Services Bureaus (YSBs) and highlights the salient factors that influenced the viability of some nonprofit organizations over the others.     

Payments and social ties

Monetary payments fall into three categories: gift, entitlement, and compensation. Each one corresponds to a significantly different set of social relations and systems of meanings. People making payments use a number of earmarking techniques to distinguish those categories of social relations and meanings from each other, impose substantial controls over the proper uses of money received within each category, and attach great importance to the distinctions involved, thus creating partly separate currencies even when the medium involved is legal tender. In the United States, bureaucratization, commercialization, and monetization significantly altered the scope, form, and content of monetary gifts, entitlements, and compensation, but did not reduce the importance of such earmarking and control. Investigation of (1) bonuses in commercial firms and (2) sexual payments illustrate the significance of these principles. In keeping with the bridge this paper makes between past and present work, I have adapted a substantial section of the text from various parts ofThe Social Meaning of Money (1994). I am grateful to audiences that have responded to different versions of the paper at the session “Lumping and Splitting,” 1995 Annual Meetings of the Eastern Sociological Association, the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Miami Law School, and to Eviatar Zerubavel for his encouragement to prepare this version.     

Changes in Cohabitation After the Birth of the First Child in Chile

In Chile, as in other Latin American countries, most children born outside of marriage are born to currently cohabiting couples. After having their first child, parents could marry, separate, or experience no change in union status. This paper explores changes in cohabitation that occur after the birth of the first child in Chile and analyzes how these changes might be associated with the birth of children and socioeconomic status. The data come from the New Chilean Family Survey, a small longitudinal survey administered to women after giving birth (n = 564). I use life tables and event history techniques to assess changes in respondent union status up to 4 years after the birth of the first child, and to study the transitions out of cohabitation. The results indicate that the unions in the sample are relatively stable, because less than 40 percent of cohabiters change status over the period of 4 years. However, marriage still appears to be a more stable type of union than cohabitation. Among cohabiters, there is evidence of a nonlinear relation between union stability and educational attainment, because the most stable unions are the unions of women with a high school diploma and not the unions of women who did not complete their secondary education. Having planned the first birth and the birth of an additional child seems to consolidate the cohabiting union, because these variables are not related to the entry into marriage, but they are related to lower risks of dissolution. These findings suggest that the Chilean case differs from the cases of Europe and the United States.     

Generational Shifts in Language Use Among US Latinos: Mobility,Education and Occupation

The role of language and linguistic assimilation among Latinos has a direct impact on both education and occupation in terms of social mobility. The relationship can be examined with a generational context as language usage changes from first generation immigrants to third generation immigrants. The specific question being addressed herein is whether language or ethnicity had more impact on Latinos’ mobility in terms of educational achievement and occupational prestige. Results presented in this paper imply the importance and impact of the maximization of the accumulation of linguistic capital in order to accelerate the acquisition of educational attainment.     

The Geography and Disparities of Community Philanthropy: A Community Assessment Model of Needs,Resources, and Ecological Environment

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Community foundations exemplify a growing form of place-based philanthropic efforts for addressing public problems....     

Prediction in Multilevel Logistic Regression

The purpose of this article is to present a new method to predict the response variable of an observation in a new cluster for a multilevel logistic regression. The central idea is based on the empirical best estimator for the random effect. Two estimation methods for multilevel model are compared: penalized quasi-likelihood and Gauss–Hermite quadrature. The performance measures for the prediction of the probability for a new cluster observation of the multilevel logistic model in comparison with the usual logistic model are examined through simulations and an application.