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Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing was a randomized experiment that moved very low-income US families from high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty neighborhoods starting in the early 1990s. We modeled report of a child's baseline health problem as a predictor of neighborhood outcomes for households randomly assigned to move from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods. We explored associations between baseline health problems and odds of moving with the program upon randomization (1994-1997), neighborhood poverty rate at follow-up (2002), and total time spent in affluent neighborhoods and duration-weighted poverty. Among 1,550 households randomized to low-poverty neighborhoods, a smaller share of households reporting baseline child health problems (P= 0.004) took up the intervention (38%) than those not reporting a health problem (50%). In weighted and covariate-adjusted models, a child health problem predicted nearly 40% lower odds of complying with the experimental condition (odds ratio = 0.62, 95% confidence interval: 0.42,0.91; P= 0.015). Among compliers, a baseline child health problem predicted 2.5 percentage points' higher neighborhood poverty at take-up (95% confidence interval: 0.90,4.07; P= 0.002). We conclude that child health problems in a household prior to randomization predicted lower likelihood of using the program voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood within the experiment's low-poverty treatment arm and predicted selection into poorer neighborhoods among experimental compliers. Child morbidity may constrain families attempting to improve their life circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the article "Dreams Fulfilled, Dreams Shattered: Determinants of Segmented Assimilation in the Second Generation" by William Haller, Alejandro Portes, and Scott M. Lynch, published in the March 2011 issue of the journal "Social Forces."

This article analyzes the pattern of reporting of ethnic ancestry in the U.S. by Whites through the 1980 census. The ethnic question introduced in the 1980 decennial census of the U.S. has generated surprising results. There is simplification, inconsistency, and instability in the ethnic origins reported. Simplification often occurs, for example, when we compare the origins of parents with the origins they. report for their children. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the ethnicity reported for one child in a family to be inconsistent with what is said about a sibling. Likewise, there is evidence of instability within a life span, particularly at the time of marriage and when leaving home. It is tempting to interpret these responses as merely reflecting enumeration errors; the new question that generates these results is not entirely clear in its verbal construction, its instructions to respondents, and its goals. This article has three main goals. First, after reviewing both the question and the surprising results reported thus far, we evaluate the competing interpretations for the inconsistent results obtained from the 1980 ethnic origins question.