Life's a Balancing Act: How Men and Women Experience the Work-Home Interface across the Life Course.

As women, and particularly mothers, have increased their labor force participation in the last half-century, and as the expectation for men to spend more time in childcare and housework has increased, more men and women now must combine role responsibilities in the work and home domains than ever before. Using quantitative and qualitative data, this dissertation takes a sociological approach to understanding the variation in experiences at the work-home interface that have arisen in this time of substantial social change. In assessing how taking on work-home roles can influence individual outcomes, I show that it is important to consider both within- and between-gender differences at the work-home interface, and highlight the utility of applying a life course perspective to work-family research. The first empirical chapter uses two waves of a national sample of working adults to document how transitions in family roles are related to perceptions of work spilling over into home, and home spilling over into work, and how these associations differ by gender. This chapter provides evidence that taking on dual work-home role responsibilities can produce both role strain and role enhancement, laying the groundwork for future studies of how strain and enhancement might combine rather than compete. The second empirical chapter uses data from qualitative interviews with medical trainees to show how competing devotions to work, family, and personal lives shape the way important career decisions are made. The third empirical chapter uses nationally-representative and longitudinal data to document the association between working, parenting, and long-term health trajectories. Taken together, these studies suggest that social policy agendas should consider the ways in which work and home domains are linked, as well as focus on important turning points across the life course. Policy efforts to mitigate gender inequality in the labor force would do well to continue to push for gender-neutral work-family policies, as it is clear that conflict at the work-home interface is not a solely female experience, and that both men and women navigate and seek solutions for complex work-home dilemmas across the life course.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113444/1/linkathy_1.pd

Decompositions of Triangle-Dense Graphs

High triangle density -- the graph property stating that a constant fraction of two-hop paths belong to a triangle -- is a common signature of social networks. This paper studies triangle-dense graphs from a structural perspective. We prove constructively that significant portions of a triangle-dense graph are contained in a disjoint union of dense, radius 2 subgraphs. This result quantifies the extent to which triangle-dense graphs resemble unions of cliques. We also show that our algorithm recovers planted clusterings in approximation-stable k-median instances.Comment: 20 pages. Version 1->2: Minor edits. 2->3: Strengthened {\S}3.5, removed appendi

DETERMINANTS OF UNSAFE HAMBURGER COOKING BEHAVIOR

We used a national hamburger preparation survey to estimate a simultaneous equation model of food safety knowledge, attitudes, and hamburger cooking behavior. The results suggest that food safety risk perceptions, palatability attributes, and food safety knowledge play important roles in determining food preparation behavior.Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

CONSUMER FOOD SAFETY BEHAVIOR: A CASE STUDY IN HAMBURGER COOKING AND ORDERING

More Americans are eating hamburgers more well-done than in the past, according to national surveys. This change reduced the risk of E. coli O157:H7 infection by an estimated 4.6 percent and reduced associated medical costs and productivity losses by an estimated $7.4 million annually. In a 1996 survey, respondents who were more concerned about the risk of foodborne illness cooked and ordered hamburgers more well-done than those who were less concerned. However, respondents who strongly preferred hamburgers less well-done cooked and ordered them that way, even after accounting for their concern about the risk of illness.hamburger doneness, ground beef, food safety, food safety education, E. coli O157:H7, consumer behavior, survey, risk, foodborne illness, risk perceptions, palatability, information, microbial pathogens, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

In-situ observation of evolving microstructural damage and associated effective electro-mechanical properties of PZT during bipolar electrical fatigue

We investigate the fatigue behavior of bulk polycrystalline lead zirconate titanate (PZT) during bipolar electric field cycling. We characterize the frequency- and cycle-dependent degradation in both the effective electro-mechanical properties (specifically, the electrical hysteresis and the macroscopic viscoelastic stiffness and damping measured by Broadband Electromechanical Spectroscopy, BES) and the microstructural damage evolution (quantified via scanning electron microscopy). The BES setup enables the mechanical characterization while performing electrical cycling so as to measure the evolving viscoelasticity without remounting the sample; particularly measuring the viscoelastic damping allows us to gain insight into the ferroelectric domain wall activity across the full electric hysteresis and over the full range of cycles. A clear dependence on the electric cycling frequency is observed in the rates of degradation of all measured properties including an up to 10% increase in dynamic compliance and a 70% decrease in electric displacement magnitude. We quantify the evolving micro-crack density across wide ranges of numbers of cycles and compare with changes in the effective compliance. Interestingly, the observed strong degradation in the ferroelectric hysteresis is contrasted by relatively mild changes in the effective viscoelastic moduli, while samples clearly indicate increasing levels of micro-damage

Identification of contrastive and comparable school neighborhoods for childhood obesity and physical activity research

The neighborhood social and physical environments are considered significant factors contributing to children's inactive lifestyles, poor eating habits, and high levels of childhood obesity. Understanding of neighborhood environmental profiles is needed to facilitate community-based research and the development and implementation of community prevention and intervention programs. We sought to identify contrastive and comparable districts for childhood obesity and physical activity research studies. We have applied GIS technology to manipulate multiple data sources to generate objective and quantitative measures of school neighborhood-level characteristics for school-based studies. GIS technology integrated data from multiple sources (land use, traffic, crime, and census tract) and available social and built environment indicators theorized to be associated with childhood obesity and physical activity. We used network analysis and geoprocessing tools within a GIS environment to integrate these data and to generate objective social and physical environment measures for school districts. We applied hierarchical cluster analysis to categorize school district groups according to their neighborhood characteristics. We tested the utility of the area characterizations by using them to select comparable and contrastive schools for two specific studies. RESULTS: We generated school neighborhood-level social and built environment indicators for all 412 Chicago public elementary school districts. The combination of GIS and cluster analysis allowed us to identify eight school neighborhoods that were contrastive and comparable on parameters of interest (land use and safety) for a childhood obesity and physical activity study. CONCLUSION: The combination of GIS and cluster analysis makes it possible to objectively characterize urban neighborhoods and to select comparable and/or contrasting neighborhoods for community-based health studies