An exploration of childhood antecedents of female adult malaise in two British birth cohorts: Combining Bayesian model averaging and recursive partitioning

We use information from two prospective British birth cohort studies to explore the antecedents of adult malaise, an indicator of incipient depression. These studies include a wealth of information on childhood circumstances, behaviour, test scores and family background, measured several times during childhood. We are concerned both with incorporating model uncertainty and using a person-centred approach. We explore associations in both cohorts using two separate approaches: Bayesian model averaging (BMA) and recursive trees. The first approach permits us to assess model uncertainty, necessary because many childhood antecedents are highly correlated. BMA also aims to produce more robust results for extrapolation to other data sets through averaging over the range of plausible models. The second approach is concerned with partitioning the sample, through a series of binary splits, into groups of people who are as alike as possible. One advantage is that the approach is person-centred in that it retains real groups of respondents. We compare and contrast the insights obtained from the two approaches and use the results from each to inform the other and thus refine our understanding further. Moreover, we explore the claimed added robustness for extrapolation by using a split-sample for the 1970 cohort. The consistency of results across methods and cohorts is discussed throughout.well-being, cohort, Bayesian Model Averaging, recursive trees

Poor Relief in Sixteenth Century England

The amount of charitable provision administered by the monasteries of the later Middle Ages has long received the attention of historians exploring pre-industrial social-welfare systems. Most nineteenth-century commentators remained skeptical about the value of monastic poor relief: The charity distributed by the monks . . . was to a great extent unorganized and indiscriminate and did nearly as much to increase beggars as to relieve them. No systematic study of monastic charity was carried out, however, until Savine’s analysis in 1909. Using the national Church tax assessment of 1535, known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus (hereinafter Valor), Savine calculated that the average proportion of monastic national gross income spent on poor relief was c. 2.5 percent -- a figure that remained influential on historiography until as recently as 1998. Among those who revised this interpretation, Harvey outlined the provision of the sixteenth-century Westminster Abbey where the monks distributed the large sum of £400 per annum -- about 10 percent of the Abbey’s gross income -- in various forms of relief to the poorer inhabitants of Westminster and London.

Like high cholesterol, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you might think...

The prospect of population decline in Europe is commonly understood to be an important policy problem. Discussions and research typically focus on the level and the trend of demographic indicators. Can policies be designed which, by targeting the constrained optimisation of rational individuals, cause the indicators to change in the right direction? In this intervention, I argue that like a surrogate marker in medicine, a demographic indicator is not a meaningful endpoint: something that is a direct measure of health or, analogously, a healthy society. Treating population indicators as meaningful endpoints can, as history has shown, lead to great harm. In my view, it is this misconception that makes population decline a truly serious and terrifying problem. So yes, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you, or the people who pose this sort of question, might think

'Plus ça change'? The gendered legacies of mid-twentieth century conceptualisations of the form and function of the family

In the mid-twentieth century, modernisation theories and structural-functional theories depicted the western nuclear family – and its gendered division of labour – as the endpoint of social and economic development. While the limitations of both perspectives have been widely acknowledged – and intellectual histories suggest that theoretically things have moved on – the incremental nature of knowledge production means that previous conceptual frameworks and background assumptions have continued to influence the way sociologists understand and approach the study of families. Using the gendered welfare regimes literature and the empirical study of union stability as examples, I show how, despite important theoretical innovations such as the structural model of gender, notions of the family as a separate sphere and sex role models have not been entirely displaced. An incomplete paradigm shift has contributed to a lack of attention to men in families, and to a narrow conceptualisation of gender inequality

Demography’s theory and approach: (how) has the view from the margins changed?

Around the time that Population Studies celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996, Susan Greenhalgh published ‘An intellectual, institutional, and political history of twentieth-century demography’. Her contribution described a discipline that, when viewed from its margins, prompted scholars in other disciplines to ask the following questions: ‘Why is the field still wedded to many of the assumptions of mid-century modernization theory and why are there no critical … perspectives in the discipline?’ (Greenhalgh 1996, p. 27). Those questions still arise today. Similarly, Greenhalgh’s observation that ‘neither the global political economies of the 1970s, nor the postmodernisms and postcolonialities of the 1980s and 1990s, nor the feminisms of any decade have had much perceptible impact on the field’ (pp. 27–8), remains a fairly accurate depiction of research published in Population Studies and other demography journals. In this contribution, focusing predominantly on feminist research and insights, I discuss how little has changed since 1996 and explain why the continued lack of engagement concerns me. Demographers still often fail to appreciate the impossibility of atheoretical ‘just descriptive’ research. Our methods carry assumptions and so rely on (often) implicit theoretical frameworks. Not making frameworks explicit does not mean they do not exert an important influence. I end by proposing that the training of research students should be part of a strategy to effect change

A Study of Business Education Graduates of Morehead State University, 1967 and 1971

A thesis presented to the Business Education Graduate Committee at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters in Business Education by Sigle J. Cline on March 7, 1972