Inequality in Volunteering: Building a New Research Front

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the...     

Assessing Water Poverty in China Using Holistic and Dynamic Principal Component Analysis

In 1988, James Coleman observed that “social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors-whether persons or corporate actors-within the structure.” If one looks at the state of social capital research, it is clear that this is truer than ever before. This paper seeks to help researchers overcome the major challenges of social capital research, namely, measuring a concept that is notoriously difficult for measurement and choosing among the exhaustive list of direct, casual and consequential measures. It does so by arguing for a typology of social capital that considers five major types of social capital and then reviewing a diverse selection of data available from national surveys. This provides a resource for scholars wishing to pursue large-scale social capital research. Additionally, it draws six lessons from this body of theory and measurement to improve the study of social capital.     

Self‐regulation in early childhood: The role of siblings,center care and socioeconomic status

Differences in children's self‐regulation are assumed to be explained by genetic factors, socialization experiences, and sociodemographic risk. As for socialization, little research has addressed the influence of having siblings or attending early center based child care on emerging self‐regulation. As regarding sociodemographic risk, few studies have been conducted in countries characterized by high equality and little poverty. In a longitudinal study following 1157 children, we investigated presence of siblings, center care exposure in the first 3 years of life (attendance, hours, and child group size), and family socioeconomic status (SES) as predictors of hot and cool effortful control (EC), at the child's age 48 months. The results showed that having a sibling was consistently related to better hot EC, whereas higher SES predicted better cool EC. A small effect implied that hours in center care at 36 months negatively predicted hot EC, whereas center care group size at 36 months modestly predicted better cool EC. Otherwise, center care variables were unrelated to self‐regulation.     

Avoiding Intimacy—An Ethnographic Study of Beneficent Boundaries in Virtual Voluntary Social Work

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Within the rich literature on volunteering, the topic of volunteer–user interaction and the mechanisms causing or...     

The demographics of same-sex marriages in Norway and Sweden

The present study investigates the demographics of same-sex marriages--that is, registered partnerships-in Norway and Sweden. We give an overview of the demographic characteristics of the spouses of these partnerships, study patterns of their divorce risks, and compare the dynamics of same-sex couples with those of heterosexual marriages. We use longitudinal information from the population registers of the two countries that cover all persons in partnerships. Our demographic analyses include information on characteristics such as age, sex, geographic background, experience of previous opposite-sex marriage, parenthood, and educational attainment of the partners involved. The results show that in many respects, the distributions of married populations on these characteristics differ by the sex composition of the couples. Patterns in divorce risks are rather similar in same-sex and opposite-sex marriages, but divorce-risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages. The divorce riskforfemale partnerships is double that for male partnerships.     

A Voice,but not a Vote: A Youth Generation at Risk?

The aim of this paper is to address risks young people in the late 20th and 21st century are exposed to with regard to political participation. Based on qualitative data and ordinary language interviews with 27 Norwegian pupils in upper secondary school, we address how the construction of the political space is understood by young people themselves. By analysing how young people define political interest and engagement, the findings indicate that a gap exists in the perception of ‘own’ and ‘institutionalised’ political participation. This paper concludes that exploring the understanding of politics among the young may reduce vulnerability of this particular group in their democratic participation as well as facilitate their political empowerment.     

A behavioral two‐sex marriage model

In this paper we propose a particular marriage model, i.e., a model for the number of marriages for each age combination as a function of the vectors of the number of single men and women in each age group. The model is based on Dagsvik (2000) where it is demonstrated that a general type of matching behavior imply, under specific assumptions about the distribution of the preferences of the women and men, a convenient expression for the corresponding marriage model.

Data from the Norwegian Population Register for nine years are applied to estimate the model. We subsequently test the hypothesis that, apart from a random “noise”; component, the age‐specific parameters of the model change over time according to a common trend. We find that the hypothesis is not rejected by our data.     

A Demographic Analysis of Registered Partnerships (legal same-sex unions): The Case of Norway

In 1993, Norway became the second country in the world to introduce registered partnerships. As with same-sex marriages, registered partnerships give the same rights and duties as marriages for opposite sex couples, with a few exceptions. The present article describes this ‘new’ demographic event based on Norwegian experiences. Compared to the number of new cases each year of opposite-sex marriages, registered partnerships amount to less than 1%. Gay partnerships are more common than lesbian partnerships, but the proportion of female partnerships has increased since the law came into force. In one out of five partnerships, one or both partners have been previously married to a person of the opposite sex. At the time they entered into the partnership, 24% of the women and 13 of the men had at least one child. When examining the registered partnerships entered into in Norway between 1993 and 2001 we estimated the probability of divorce to be 16% after six years. We also carried out a multivariate analysis of the divorce risk and found that the divorce risk for female partnerships is double that of the risk for male partnerships. Another high risk group is partnerships between a Norwegian and a person from a non-Nordic country.Noack T., Seierstad A. and Weedon-Fekjær H., 2005, A Demographic Analysis of Registered Partnerships (legal same-sex unions): The Case of Norway, European Journal of Population, 21: 89–109.Noack T., Seierstad A. and Weedon-Fekjær H., 2005, A Demographic Analysis of Registered Partnerships (legal same-sex unions): The Case of Norway, European Journal of Population, 21: 89–109.     

On the Changing Civic Landscape in Denmark and its Consequences for Civic Action

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Throughout the past three decades, changing governments in Denmark have been cultivating a more proactive role for civil...