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Much research has argued for the existence of a marriage benefit to men, women, and children. Although the commonly suggested current response to a husband's violence has been for the couple to separate, traditionally women were often told to “stay for the children.” This paper uses the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods longitudinal data to examine the relationships among marital stability, husband violence, and children's behavior problems. Among married mothers who reported husband violence at time 1 (N= 414), the negative relationship between child behavior problems and remaining in the marriage dissipated when selection bias and husband violence recidivism were controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper (Pergams & Nyberg 2001) we found that the proportion of the prairie deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus bairdii), among all local Peromyscus museum specimens collected in the Chicago region, had significantly declined over time. This proportion changed from about 50% before 1900 to <10% in the last 25 years. Based on this proportion a regression model predicted the local extinction of the prairie deer mouse in 2009. To evaluate that prediction, we estimated current deer mouse abundance by live trapping small mammals at 15 preserves in Cook and Lake counties, Illinois (USA) at which prairie deer mice had previously been caught or that still contained their preferred open habitat. In 1900 trap nights, 477 mammals were caught, including 251 white-footed mice (P. leucopus), but only one prairie deer mouse. The observed proportion of Peromyscus that were prairie deer mice, 0.4%, was even lower than the 4.5%predicted for 2000. Here we also introduce a simple, new community proportions model, which for any given geographic region compares the proportions of species recently caught with the proportions of species in museums. We compared proportions of seven species collected in Cook and Lake counties and examined by Hoffmeister (1989) with proportions of these species that we caught. Ten percent of the museum community was prairie deer mice, but only 0.2% of our catch was. The current local scarcity of the prairie deer mouse is consistent with the regression-based prediction of its eminent local extinction. More conservation attention should be paid to changes in relative abundance of once-common species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The May 25th, 1979 Chicago DC-10 crash provides the opportunity to test an important proposition in the theory of consumer product safety: Can market forces provide safety when products are too complex to permit buyer prepurchase inspection? This paper combines economic theory with modern finance theory to measure the cost of the crash to shareholders of the plane's manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas. The results indicate that the DC-10 crash resulted in a $200 million loss to McDonnell Douglas stockholders and that this amount exceeds any reasonable estimate of regulatory or liability costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]