Religious Heterogamy, Marital Quality, and Paternal Engagement

Using data from a nationally representative sample of married fathers of school-aged children, we examined the association between religious heterogamy of parents and fathers’ involvement in children’s lives. We further examined whether that association is mediated by marital quality and father–child religious discord. Results showed that greater religious heterogamy is associated with less interaction and more relational distance between fathers and children. Results also suggested that fathers’ reports of marital happiness play an important role in mediating the association between religious heterogamy and paternal engagement. We concluded that religious fathers are more involved in their children’s lives insofar as their wives are equally religious and they are in happy marriages

Marital Investments and Community Involvement: A Test of Coser’s Greedy Marriage Thesis

It is customary to test Coser’s greedy marriage thesis by comparing marital status groups. We propose a new approach that uses the marital dyad as the unit of analysis and examine whether investments in the marital relationship discourage community involvement through formal volunteering. Data from a U.S. national sample of 1,368 married couples revealed mixed support for the proposed relationship. Consistent with the greedy marriage thesis, wives’ soulmate view of marriage was negatively associated with their own and their husbands’ reports of volunteering. Although these associations were attenuated by religious service attendance, wives’ soulmate view had a more dampening effect than husbands’ soulmate view on their own and their husbands’ volunteering. However, the time couples spend alone together was positively associated with husbands’ reports of volunteering, which counters the greedy marriage thesis. These findings suggest that the greedy nature of marriage is, in part, determined by its participants—how they define and manage their marriage

Bonding Alone: Familism, Religion, and Secular Civic Participation

This study examines the influence of familism, religion, and their interaction on participation in secular voluntary associations. We develop an insularity theory to explain how familism and religion encourage Americans to avoid secular civic participation. Using data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study finds that familism reduces participation in secular organizations. Moreover, religion moderates the effect of familism: specifically, religious involvement tends to increase the negative effect of familism on secular civic participation. Although religious involvement in and of itself fosters secular civic participation, strong familism tends to dampen positive impacts of religious involvement. For familistic individuals, religious congregations appear to reinforce their insularity within their immediate social circle and family

Synchrotron X-ray study of polycrystalline wurtzite Zn1-xMgxO (0 <= x <= 0.15): Evolution of crystal structure and polarization

The effect of Mg-substitution on the crystal structure of wurtzite ZnO is presented based on synchrotron X-ray diffraction studies of polycrystalline Zn1-xMgxO (0 <= x <= 0.15). Increase in Mg concentration results in pronounced c-axis compression of the hexagonal lattice, and in diminution of the off-center cation displacement within each tetrahedral ZnO4 unit. Going from ZnO to Zn0.85Mg0.15O, significant changes in the ionic polarization are observed (-5.6 to -4.8 uC/cm2), despite only subtle increments in the cell volume (~0.03 %) and the ab-area dimension (~0.1 %). The optical properties of the samples have also been characterized and the band gap changes from 3.24 eV (ZnO) to 3.35 eV (Zn0.85Mg0.15O).Comment: 9 Pages, Word + PDF, 3 Figures, 1 Tabl

Tying Knots With Communities: Youth Involvement in Scouting and Civic Engagement in Adulthood

Using data from a nationally representative sample of American adult males (N = 2,512), this study examines (a) whether duration of membership in the Boy Scouts of America is associated with adult civic engagement and (b) whether five characteristics of positive youth development (confidence, competence, connection, character, and caring) account for the relationship between duration of Scouting membership and adult civic engagement. The results from structural equation modeling indicate that duration of participation in Scouting is positively associated with four indicators of civic engagement: community involvement, community volunteering, community activism, and environmental activism. Among the five positive characteristics, confidence and competence were found to fully mediate the effects of Scouting on all four types of civic engagement, whereas the other three only to partly mediate the effects

A Logical Model and Data Placement Strategies for MEMS Storage Devices

MEMS storage devices are new non-volatile secondary storages that have outstanding advantages over magnetic disks. MEMS storage devices, however, are much different from magnetic disks in the structure and access characteristics. They have thousands of heads called probe tips and provide the following two major access facilities: (1) flexibility: freely selecting a set of probe tips for accessing data, (2) parallelism: simultaneously reading and writing data with the set of probe tips selected. Due to these characteristics, it is nontrivial to find data placements that fully utilize the capability of MEMS storage devices. In this paper, we propose a simple logical model called the Region-Sector (RS) model that abstracts major characteristics affecting data retrieval performance, such as flexibility and parallelism, from the physical MEMS storage model. We also suggest heuristic data placement strategies based on the RS model and derive new data placements for relational data and two-dimensional spatial data by using those strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed data placements improve the data retrieval performance by up to 4.0 times for relational data and by up to 4.8 times for two-dimensional spatial data of approximately 320 Mbytes compared with those of existing data placements. Further, these improvements are expected to be more marked as the database size grows.Comment: 37 page