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At present, we know very little about how grandparents' relationships influence the parent-child relation over time. Research on aging and grandparents tends to respond to social problems, (caregiving for relatives, housing, grandparents raising grandchildren), rather than consider theoretical issues. Most of the existing research is based on relations between specific grandchildren or on the grandparents' overall relationship that are inherently limited in their capacity to examine differences in perspectives of other family members. The existing research is also limited in that most studies use one unit of assessment for describing the family dynamics and fall short of capturing the complexity of multiple interrelationships & kinship organization. We adopt a life course perspective & social constructionist approach with inductive qualitative methodology to explore multi-generation households, examine family & health transitions, and changes during status transitions in later life. Results show that individuals are experiencing both parental and grandparental roles for far longer than has been historically the norm. Most experience intergeneration relationships at the macro/micro level and younger people experience older people as their own kin, not as an unknown group of strangers. We find affective kinship ties form important bonding between generations. We also consider factors influencing kin-keeping, intergenerational transfers, and transmission of values.

The current paper presents a computer model of early diastolic (E-wave) left ventricular filling through the mitral valve. It is believed that this lumped-parameter model will be clinically useful, for example in the diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction.The model is based on the solution of the ordinary differential equations describing flow through the mitral valve, as well as equations that model the intrinsic and extrinsic behaviour of a mitral valve with variable orifice area (mimicking the opening and closing of the valve leaflets).The model was developed and calibrated using porcine data. The model has now been further validated in 12 canine trials. Values are reported of canine atrial and ventricular stiffness, active relaxation characteristics, valve natural frequency, damping coefficient, and effective orifice area measured by solving the inverse problem to obtain a best-fit match between canine empirical and simulated waveforms. The best fit was determined by minimizing the error between the simulated and empirical pressure and velocity waveforms using a minimized sum-of-squares figure of merit.The paper also presents human data addressing the feasibility of using the model in man, with Doppler velocity waveforms as the primary input to the model. The paper reports parameters measured in human patients by solving the inverse problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 are used to estimate a series of models of entry into marriage, entry into cohabitation, and nonmarital pregnancy. Our models account explicitly for the endogeneity of one outcome as a predictor of another by taking into account both heterogeneity across individuals due to unmeasured factors that may affect all these outcomes and the correlation in the unmeasured factors across processes. We find that these heterogeneity components are strongly and positively related across the outcomes. Women who are more likely to cohabit, marry, or become pregnant while unmarried are also more likely to do each of the others. Although black and white women differ in the likelihood of these behaviors, the interrelations of the behaviors are quite similar across groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the high rates of employment of mothers, a large and increasing number of preschool children receive regular care from someone else. This article develops and tests hypotheses about the choice of child care arrangements for younger and older preschool children, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women. We argue that appropriate care depends on the age of the child. It includes care by the mother or a paid provider in the child's home for children aged 0-2 and mother care and nursery school or center care for those 3-5. We estimate models of the mother's employment and choice of child care separately for younger and older preschoolers. Our results show that need for care, presence of substitutes for the mother, financial resources, and preferences all affect both full-time care by the mother and the type of child care chosen by working women, although they affect these two decisions in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on married women's labor force participation relates characteristics of individual women to their probability of labor force participation. Some studies relate characteristics of geographic areas to average labor force participation rates in those areas, although these aggregate level analyses are usually gross tests of ideas about individual-level processes. Here we take a quintessentially sociological perspective and seek to understand how characteristics of geographic areas structure the relationship between properties of individual women and their probabilities of labor force participation. Our analysis has two steps. In step one, we fit individual-level probit models of married women's probability of labor force participation. A separate model is fitted in each of 409 areas using 1970 Census data, and the relationship between individual characteristics and labor force participation is found to vary substantially across areas. In step two, we attempt to explain areal variation in the effects of women's children on their labor force participation. We hypothesize that the effect of children on their mothers' labor force participation is a function of the cost and availability of childcare , and of the "convenience" of jobs for working mothers in the places where the mothers live. Measures of childcare cost, childcare availability and job convenience are developed. Weighted least squares analyses of probit coefficients from the first stage are, in general, very consistent with our findings, and suggest that the approach taken in this paper is likely to be a fruitful one for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines determinants of timing of marriage for young women by modeling the transition from the single to the married state by age. This approach, combined with a large longitudinal data set, allows us to disaggregate the analysis into fine age groupings and to include situational and attitudinal factors in our model. We find that those characteristics of a young woman's parental family that reflect the availability of parental resources tend to decrease the chances of a marriage during the early teens. Chances of marrying appear to decrease with increases in the availability and attractiveness of alternatives to the wife role and in the costs of assuming it. We discuss these results from the perspective of the societal and parental normative pressures which affect timing of marriage for young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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