Search

Previous studies have shown that living with both parents as the indicator of family structure in childhood has a positive effect on health and survival over the life course. Less is, however, known how the effect is moderated by one's own family structure in adulthood. The purposes of this study are to examine if family structure in childhood is associated with mortality risk and how the association varies by marital status in adulthood. We analyze the hazard of death in 18 waves of the General Social Survey from 1978 through 2002 after linking the data to death certificate data from 1979 through 2008 from the National Death Index. The findings show that living with both biological parents in childhood reduces the hazard of death significantly, with the effect partially mediated through better educational achievements and economic resources in adulthood. The family structure advantage in childhood, however, switches to a disadvantage when one's marriage is involuntarily terminated by spousal loss. The findings suggest that spending one's childhood with both parents may have a deleterious effect on survival by increasing vulnerability to marital disruptions when people experience an unwanted life event such as spousal loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sought to find the effect of job mobility experiences over the life course on mental and physical health outcomes. Three hypotheses were drawn from the life course and cumulative inequality theory. Unique effect hypothesis predicted that more jobs in the life course would lead to more risks of mental and physical health status. Trajectory effect hypothesis predicted that the effect of earlier job change is partially mediated by the socioeconomic status in later life. Cumulative advantage hypothesis illustrated intentional job quits seeking upward mobility would lead to positive effect on later health status. Using Korean Longitudinal Survey of Aging (KLoSA) dataset surveyed in 2006 through 2012, 8,605 respondents were analyzed and random-effect regression models of logit and poission were applied to the probability of major depression and 10 chronic diseases comorbidity index. Results supported the unique effect hypothesis as larger number of jobs one experiences was found to lead to more risks of having depression and more chronic diseases. Moreover, cumulative advantage hypothesis was partially demonstrated. While the negative effect of the number of jobs still remains significant, more experiences of job mobility for better job was not positively related to physical health status but only significantly related to mental health. This paper concluded that health inequality among olders can be originated from job insecurity over the life course, and urged further researches on different levels of life insecurity and welfare policy that counterpart those effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how low reliability of a measure affects its estimation and statistical inference and what happens when the measure is collinear with another variable with higher reliability as predictors in a statistical model. First, we provide a series of Monte-Carlo simulations to show that (1) the effect of an unreliable measure tends to be underestimated, and (2) its underestimation becomes more serious while a more reliable collinear predictor is overestimated in the same model. Then, we examine Male Attitudes Regarding Sexual Health (MARSH), a survey of 2,173 men in the United States, 40 years of age and older broken by racial/ethnic subgroups: Whites, African-Americans and Hispanics. We find in MARSH that the sum of IPSS-7 items for lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), as a risk factor for erectile dysfunction (ED), is considerably underestimated for Hispanics when another risk factor, the sum of CES-D8 items for depressive symptoms, is introduced. We infer that IPSS-7 could have been more unreliably measured among Hispanics than among Whites or African-Americans, noting comparably high correlations between CES-D8 and LUTS. LUTS questions may be particularly sensitive for Hispanic males, who are known for machismo, and may as well belong to T-ACASI module without an interviewer, rather than to CATI, in future survey. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes four forms of organizational behavior at the intersection of organizational ecology (inertia vs. change) and neoinstitutionalism (normative vs. deviant): innovative (deviant change), reformative (normative change), conservative (normative inertia), and reactionary (deviant inertia) in the order of the life-course of an organizational form. Then, it further identifies economic implications underlying each dimension of those forms: risk-aversion vs. risk-taking underlying inertia vs. change and certainty vs. uncertainty underlying normative vs. deviant. Simply speaking, the choice between inertia vs. change is a matter of experience whereas that between normative vs. deviant is a matter of information. This integration between organizational theories and economic perspectives leads us to hypothesize various behavioral outcomes corresponding to various types of diversification in an application of the typology to venture capital (VC) industry. Analyzing U.S. VC firms' investments to target companies from 1981 through 2002, this paper finds three distinctive relationships between VC firms' investment-diversification and subsequent investment behaviors: First, target-diversification leads to conservative (as opposed to innovative) investments; Second, industry-diversification leads to innovative (as opposed to conservative) investments; Third, stage-diversification leads to reformative (as opposed to reactionary) investments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since McDonald and Moffitt (1980) introduced the decomposition of tobit coefficients into two different mechanisms (i.e. changes in the probability of having nonlimit values and actual changes of the nonlimit values), sociological literature has applied the decomposition method to substantial interpretations of tobit coefficients, particularly for the second mechanism. McDonald and Moffitt, however, did not highlight two limitations of the decomposition, and following sociological practices have been partly misleading. First, a decomposition ratio between the two mechanisms depends on the choice of values of respective predictors in a model. Sociological literature has performed the decomposition only at the mean point of sample and wrongly generalized the ratio to the whole sample. Second, once the values of predictors are fixed, a decomposition ratio is the same across all coefficients or across all predictors. Namely, two mechanisms are not substantially different in tobit model, but wrongly assumed to be different in research. Specific errors and confusions in literature are reviewed, and alternative utilities of the decomposition are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of competitive crowding on social action. Our contributions are twofold. First, we clarify a structural determinant of conduct in a sharply defined hierarchy. Although empirical studies in different areas of sociology have demonstrated the multifaceted consequences of crowding around social positions, much of the existing work has addressed lateral rather than hierarchical differentiation. Here, we specify the unique effect of crowding by those positioned behind a focal actor in a hierarchical ordering, net of the opportunity to surpass others located above that actor. Our results show that crowding matters more than opportunity. Second, we document a contingent effect of crowding as a function of the stability of the hierarchy in which actors are embedded. We posit that hierarchies exert sway only are after their constitutive elements lock into place and appear reasonably stable among those competing for positions within them. The empirical context we examine is the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). Using panel data on NASCAR's Winston Cup Series, we model the probability that a driver will crash his car in a given race. We find that (a) drivers crash with greater frequency when their positions in the temporally unfolding hierarchy are increasingly at risk of displacement by their nearby, lower ranked counterparts and (b) the effect of crowding appears only after the first few races in the season, by which time a reasonably stable structure of ranks has materialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing Chicago Health and Social Life Survey, conducted from 1995-1997, I found that longer distance with sex-partner is associated with spatial, social disembeddedness of the sexual relationship. One major finding is that a single parent living with own children needs to disembed his/her sexual relationship from their residential place because the place materialized his/her parent-child relationship and has qualitatively different meanings from other places. It is not crucial how far is the other place from his/her residential place for this case. And this effect of parent-child co-residence explains why African-American singles tend to have their sexual partner outside their own community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]