Search

Study Objectives: Insomnia is influenced by psychosocial and environment factors. This study aims to examine the differential of insomnia symptoms between rural-to-urban migrants and non-migrants in China. Design: A cross-sectional study. Setting: Ten townships throughout China. Patients or Participants: One hundred and ninety-seven Chinese adults aged 18 to 64 years, with an oversample of migrants. Measurements and Results: Professional interviewers and community doctors used a questionnaire to collect information on migration, insomnia symptoms, and other variables. Multivariable binomial logistic regression models were used to examine the relations between migration status and presence of at least one insomnia symptom, while adjusting for age, sex, education, income, number of chronic medical conditions, depression, and other covariates. The numbers of permanent urban residents, rural non-migrants, and rural-to-urban migrants in the study were 93 (47%), 47 (24%), and 57 (29%), respectively. The probability of reporting at least one of the five insomnia symptoms measured was 40% for permanent urban residents, 62% for rural non-migrants, and 68% for migrants (P = 0.001). Using permanent urban residents as the reference group, the multiply-adjusted odd ratios of having at least one insomnia symptom were 3.00 (95% CI: 1.36 – 6.62) for migrants and 1.86 (95% CI: 0.73 – 4.74) for rural non-migrants. The adjusted odd ratio for insomnia symptoms predicted from each additional chronic medical condition was 1.71 (95% CI: 1.13 – 2.60). 2 Conclusions: Compared to permanent urban residents, rural-to-urban migrants in China have higher prevalence of insomnia symptoms. The number of chronic medical conditions reported is also independently related to sleep disturbance. Key words: migration status, insomnia, China

This paper studies the effect of remittances sent home by South African Black labor migrants on children’s schooling. We use cross-sectional data from the 1993-1994 Integrated Household Survey and panel data from 2002 and 2003 South African Labor Force Survey. We find that both labor migration and the likelihood of sending remittances home are much more prevalent among Blacks than among other racial groups, and thus restrict our study of the impact of migration and remittances on children’s education to Blacks. Receipt of remittances substantially increases the likelihood that children are in school, through three pathways: increased household educational spending, reduced child labor, and mitigation of the negative effect of parental absence due to out-migration. Also, remittances sharply differentiate labor migrant households. Children in households without remittances are disadvantaged compared to recipient households, and in some respect are even worse-off than their counterparts in nonmigrant households, primarily due to the deleterious effect of parental out-migration with no economic compensation. Sensitivity tests using fixed-effect and random-effect modeling show that the effect of labor migration and remittances is robust to unobserved heterogeneity and relatively consistent across subsamples and independent samples over time, although the negative effect of living in households with out-migrants but no remittances is substantially by 2002-2003, due at least in part to relaxed migration policies after the breakdown of apartheid. The paper also assesses the social consequences of remittances. We find that remittances help reduce intra-familial gender inequalities as well as inter-familial SES inequalities in schooling.

We investigated how university students select between alternative spellings of phonemes in written production by asking them to spell nonwords whose final consonants have extended spellings (e.g., ‹ff› for /f/) and simpler spellings (e.g., ‹f› for /f/). Participants' choices of spellings for the final consonant were influenced by whether they used one letter or more than one letter to spell the preceding vowel. Specifically, participants tended to use extended consonant spellings when they spelled the vowel with one letter and simple consonant spellings when they spelled the vowel with more than one letter. This held true whether the vowel was phonologically short or long. The findings pose problems for models of the spelling process according to which people use different spellings of a phoneme in accordance with the frequency of the phoneme-to-grapheme links in the vocabulary as a whole but in which the choices are not influenced by context. The findings also pose problems for models according to which phonological context but not graphic context can influence the choice among spelling options. Models that behave in this manner, including the best-developed computational model of the spelling process to date, need to be modified so as to take graphic context into account.

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (M age = 6 years 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately 2 years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children's tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.

Two experiments with one hundred and fourteen 3- to 5-year-old children examined whether children understand that a printed word represents a specific spoken word and that it differs in this way from a drawing. When an experimenter read a word to children and then a puppet used a different but related label for it, such as "dog" for the word ‹puppy›, children often stated the puppet's label was incorrect. In an analogous task with drawings, children were more likely to state that the puppet was correct in using an alternative label. The results suggest that even young children who cannot yet read have some understanding that a written word stands for a specific linguistic unit in a way that a drawing does not.

In industrialized nations sibship size generally depresses educational attainment—the larger the number of siblings, the lower the educational attainment, presumably because of the reduction of family resources (both material and intellectual) available to each child. However, this association is much less consistent in developing nations, and there is some evidence of substantial change over time. In this paper, we study the effect of number of siblings on educational attainment in China, a nation that has experienced sharp vacillations between policies designed to promote equality (between urban and rural residents and between men and women) and policies designed to promote economic development. The implementation of these policies in the educational arena has alternately reduced and increased competition for educational resources and, we show, has correspondingly reduced and increased the effect of the number of children in a family on their educational attainment.

The legacy of 350 years of apartheid practice and 50 years of concerted apartheid policy has been to create racial differences in socioeconomic position larger than in any other nation in the world. Whites, who constitute 11 percent of the population, enjoy levels of education, occupational status, and income similar to and in many respects superior to those of the industrially-developed nations of Europe and the British diaspora. Within the White population, however, there is a sharp distinction between the one-third of English origin and the two-thirds of Afrikaner origin. Despite apartheid policies explicitly designed to improve the lot of Afrikaners at the expense of non-Whites, the historical difference between the two groups continues to be seen in socioeconomic differences at the end of the 20th century. Still, the disadvantages of Afrikaners are modest compared to those of non-Whites, particularly Coloureds and Blacks, who bear the brunt of apartheid policies. Ethnic penalties are especially large for people with lower levels of education. For those with less than a tertiary education, there appears to be an occupational floor under Whites and an occupational ceiling over non-Whites. For the small minority of Blacks and Coloureds with tertiary education, the likelihood of being employed and the kinds of jobs available differ relatively little from the opportunities of Asians and White; but for the vast majority lacking tertiary education the ethnic penalty is very large, particularly for Blacks. Most are unable even to find work, with about 40 percent of Black men and more than half of Black women unemployed; and those who are employed are relegated largely to semiand unskilled jobs. Although tertiary education minimizes racial differences in occupational opportunities, it has little effect on racial differences in income, which are large even among the well educated and even among those working in similar occupations.

Surveys in China conventionally sample from local area residential registers, which until recently have been of sufficient accuracy to function as de facto population registers. Due to a combination of large scale internal migration and massive replacement of housing in urban areas, a large fraction of the population currently does not live where registered. Individuals not living where registered are thus ineligible for inclusion in conventionally generated samples. Surveys whose samples depend on access to residential registers are inherently based on an under-enumeration of the population, as well as on a biased representation of the population due to exclusion of unregistered local residents. We report conclusions from, and observations related to, a pilot study designed to test the feasibility and effectiveness of a sampling method that does not depend on residential registers. In the pilot we (1) purposively selected small areas; (2) enumerated the small areas; (3) randomly sampled individuals from the enumeration lists; and (4) interviewed sampled individuals. This approach substantially reduced the underenumeration problem. As implemented, however, its point of departure required previously selected small areas. We describe an extension designed to achieve full coverage of the population of China through sampling of small areas as the penultimate stage of a multi-stage design.

Using data from a 1996 national probability sample of Chinese men, the effect of family background on occupational mobility in contemporary China is analyzed, with particular attention to the rural-urban institutional divide. China has an unusually high degree of mobility into agriculture and also, apparently, unusual “openness” in the urban population. Both patterns are explained by China’s distinctive household registration system, which simultaneously fails to protect peasants from downward mobility and permits only the best educated rural men to attain urban residential status, resulting in severe sample selection bias in previous studies restricted to the de jure urban population.

Using data from a 1996 national probability sample of Chinese men, the effect of family background on occupational mobility in contemporary China is analyzed, with particular attention to the rural-urban institutional divide. China has an unusually high degree of mobility into agriculture and also, apparently, unusual “openness” in the urban population. Both patterns are explained by China’s distinctive population registration system, which simultaneously fails to protect peasants from downward mobility and permits only the best educated rural men to attain urban residential status, resulting in severe sample selection bias in previous studies restricted to the de jure urban population. New light is shed on the relationships between the socialist state and social fluidity and between inequality and mobility.

Racial differences in child mortality in South Africa are studied using household-level data from 1987-89 and 1998. Piecewise exponential regression models are estimated to explore the determinants of observed racial disparities in children's survival chances. We conclude that inequalities in the personal and household resources of South Africa’s four main racial groups substantially account for racial differences in child survival rates, and that the 1994 dismantling of the apartheid system will not eradicate the racial disparity in child mortality unless persisting and dramatic racial inequities in basic levels of living are radically reduced.

Using data from Szelenyi and Treiman’s 1993 six-nation survey of Social Stratification in Eastern Europe, we find that the transformation from socialism substantially restored precommunist property relations in the five Eastern European countries studied here (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). Continuity between the pre- and postcommunist period with respect to property ownership can be attributed (1) to property holdings remaining intact throughout the communist period; (2) to the restitution of property to the original owners or their heirs in the post-communist period; and (3) to the achievement of highstatus occupations during the communist period which facilitated the acquisition of property during that period. Business ownership in post-communist Eastern Europe is linked directly to pre-communist property holding only in Hungary and Bulgaria, although there are indications that pre-communist property holdings exerted an indirect effect on post-communist business ownership by enhancing the odds of attaining elite occupations during the communist period.

Using data from Szelenyi and Treiman’s 1993 six-nation survey of Social Stratification in Eastern Europe, we replicate and extend Walder, Li, and Treiman’s (2000) paper showing different paths into the Chinese urban elite for professionals and cadres. For each of six formerly communist nations (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia), we find effects quite similar to those shown by Walder, Li, and Treiman for China: education is a more important determinant of recruitment to professional positions than to cadre positions and communist party membership is a more important determinant of recruitment to cadre than to professional positions. Unlike patterns of elite recruitment in China, however, we find virtually no detectable differences in patterns of elite recruitment over time, contrary to the conventional wisdom of students of Eastern European communism.

The Chinese household registration system (hukou), which divides the population into “agricultural” and “non-agricultural” sectors, may be the most important determinant of differential privilege in state socialist China, determining access to good jobs, education for one’s children, housing, and health care, and (formally, although no longer in practice) even the right to move to a city. Hukou mobility, with its attendant consequences for life chances, is difficult to accomplish. Using data from a 1996 national probability sample, we show that education and communist party membership are the main determinants of such mobility.

We carry out an analysis of societal variations in the process of educational attainment using a multilevel modeling strategy to assess how societal modernization, educational expansion, educational inequality, a world-wide secular trend toward greater equality of opportunity, and communist educational policies affect the dependence of educational attainment on parental status and the gender gap in educational attainment. Using data from 31 societies we define five-year school cohorts ranging from 1890-94 to 1980-84, and carry out our analysis based on the 304 "contexts" (created by crossing cohort by country) for which we have adequate data. We develop arguments as to why educational reproduction should be reduced by educational expansion but reinforced by educational inequality and as to why the level of education should increase and the gender gap diminish with societal modernization and over time, and we pose several claims regarding the impact of communism on equality of educational opportunity. Our hypotheses are generally confirmed.

The Chinese household registration system (hukou) may be the most important determinant of differential privilege in state socialist China. Urban registrants are entitled to the best jobs, education, housing, and health care -- all of which are unavailable to those with rural registration. Thus, transforming one's hukou status from rural to urban is a central aspect of upward mobility. But given that hukou status is essentially ascribed at birth, how do rural hukou holders affect this change to urban status? Using data from a 1996 national probability sample, we found that education, communist party membership, and military service are the main determinants of rural-to-urban status changes.

In China, as in other nations, reading skills depend mainly on the level of education attained. But reading skills in China depend on other factors as well: the quality of schooling; the cultural capital of the family of origin–parental education, of course, but also such measures of cultural capital as the number of books in the household and the reading behavior of parents; gender; and the extent to which literacy is used over the life course. I exploit data from a 1996 national probability sample of Chinese Adults (N=6,090) that includes information on literacy (the number of characters identified from a list of 10 characters), measures of family cultural capital, and the usual socioeconomic data on both respondents and their families of origin, to study the determinants of the number of characters recognized. My analysis includes three components: (1) An overall assessment of the determinants of literacy in the adult population of China In addition to years of schooling, a number of factors positively affect literacy: father’s years of schooling; the “cultural capital” of parents, manifest in their reading behavior; urban residence at age 14; and male gender. Further, the effect of father’s education is entirely mediated by the effect of family cultural capital. (2) The effect of occupational experience on literacy. Net of education, those with non-manual jobs gain in literacy over the life course whereas the literacy of those with manual jobs declines. The fact that the two trends go in opposite directions suggests an age as opposed to period interpretation of the results. (3) An assessment of the effect of the Cultural Revolution on literacy. Net of years of schooling, those educated during the Cultural Revolution (especially the first years) are less literate than those educated before or after the Cultural Revolution, and the effect of the Cultural Revolution is larger in magnitude than the effect of an additional year of schooling.

BACKGROUND:Informed consent requires that individuals understand the nature of the study, risks and benefits of participation. Individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) have cognitive and adaptive impairments that may affect their ability to provide informed consent. New treatments and clinical trials for fragile X syndrome, the most commonly known inherited cause of ID, necessitate the development of methods to improve the informed consent process. The goal of this study was to compare the efficacy of a digital decision support tool with that of standard practice for informed consent and to examine whether the tool can improve decisional capacity for higher functioning individuals. METHODS:Participants (N = 89; mean age = 21.2 years) were allocated to the experimental group (consenting information provided via the digital decision support tool), or the comparison group (information provided via standard practice). Participants were assessed on four aspects of decisional capacity (Understanding, Appreciating, Reasoning, and Expressing a choice). We used regression analyses to test the impact of the tool on each outcome, repeating the analyses on the higher functioning subsample. RESULTS:No differences existed in any domain of decisional capacity for the sample in full. However, participants in the higher IQ subsample who used the tool scored better on Understanding after adjustment (β = 0.25, p = 0.04), but not on Appreciating or Reasoning. No differences by experimental group existed in the decision to join the hypothetical trial for the full sample or higher functioning subsample. CONCLUSIONS:A decision support tool shows promise for individuals with fragile X syndrome with higher cognitive abilities. Future studies should examine the level of cognitive ability needed for sufficient understanding, whether these findings can be translated to other clinical populations, and the impact of the tool in larger trials and on trial retention.