Partnership Instability and Child Well-being

We use data from three waves of the Fragile Families Study (N = 2,111) to examine the prevalence and effects of mothers’ partnership changes between birth and age 3 on children’s behavior. We find that children born to unmarried and minority parents experience significantly more partnership changes than children born to parents who are married or White. Each transition is associated with a modest increase in behavioral problems, but a significant number of children experience three or more transitions. The effects of instability do not depend on the mothers’ relationship status or race/ethnicity with one exception: instability has a stronger effect on aggression among Hispanic children. The association between instability and behavior is mediated by maternal stress and lower quality mothering.

Young Children’s Behavioral Problems in Married and Cohabiting Families

We use data from the Fragile Families Study (N = 1,370) to examine child behavioral problems among children born to cohabiting and married parents who remain together until the child is age 3. The primary objective of the analysis is to determine how much of the difference in child outcomes at age 3 can be accounted for by differences in family economic resources, parental relationship quality, and parental health. We also investigate whether parents’ marriage after the child’s birth improves child outcomes. Results show that children born to married versus cohabiting parents have fewer reported behavioral problems at age three, and that differences in parental economic, interpersonal, and health resources can account for between 30% to 50% of the differences in child outcomes at age 3. Marriage following a cohabiting birth, however, is not associated with fewer child behavioral problems.

Scalable distributed event detection for Twitter

Social media streams, such as Twitter, have shown themselves to be useful sources of real-time information about what is happening in the world. Automatic detection and tracking of events identified in these streams have a variety of real-world applications, e.g. identifying and automatically reporting road accidents for emergency services. However, to be useful, events need to be identified within the stream with a very low latency. This is challenging due to the high volume of posts within these social streams. In this paper, we propose a novel event detection approach that can both effectively detect events within social streams like Twitter and can scale to thousands of posts every second. Through experimentation on a large Twitter dataset, we show that our approach can process the equivalent to the full Twitter Firehose stream, while maintaining event detection accuracy and outperforming an alternative distributed event detection system

The Effects of Welfare and Child Support Policies on the Timing and Incidence of Marriage Following a Nonmarital Birth

Researchers and policy makers have long been concerned that government policies may influence individual behavior in unintended ways. In particular, they worry that by providing mothers with an income that is independent of marriage, welfare and child support policies may discourage marriage and increase union dissolution. Economic theory is clear with respect to the marriage disincentives of welfare for single mothers (Becker 1981), but it is ambiguous with respect to child support. Whereas stronger enforcement reduces the costs of single motherhood for women, making marriage less attractive, it increases the costs for fathers, making marriage more attractive. Which effect dominates is an empirical question. Although empirical studies vary with respect to effect size and methods, the evidence compiled during the 1980s and early 1990s indicates that welfare generosity during this period had a small negative effect on marriage among mothers (Moffitt 1998) whereas strong child support enforcement reduced single motherhood by reducing nonmarital childbearing.

Partnership Instability and Child Wellbeing during the Transition to Elementary School

Data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,957) are used to examine partnership instability and children’s wellbeing during the transition to elementary school. We find that coresidential transitions are related to externalizing, attention, and social problems. Mothers’ mental health and use of harsh parenting partially mediate the associations between coresidential transitions and child outcomes at age five. The impact of coresidential transitions on externalizing, attention, and social problems is stronger for boys than girls. Also, non-coresidential transitions predict externalizing and attention problems for White children but not for Hispanic children. Finally, the association between coresidential transitions and verbal ability is stronger for children with highly educated mothers than for children of less educated mothers.

The Parthenon, September 11, 2015

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, October 30, 2015

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2015 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published four days a week. There is no issue on Mondays, physical issues are printed on Tuesdays and Fridays, and online issues only are published on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, August 28, 2015

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, November 6, 2015

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, was published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly on Thursdays during the summer. Due to budgetary constraints, beginning with the 2015 Fall semester, the newspaper is only published four days a week. There is no issue on Mondays, physical issues are printed on Tuesdays and Fridays, and online issues only are published on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, September 18, 2015

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content