Legal socialization effects on democratization

As is the case with all our joint publications, this article represents a genuine research collaboration between the authors, with equal contributions. Therefore, neither is first or second author. This article uses data from a collaborative project that grew out of the Law and Society Associations Working Group on Orientations toward Law and Normative Ordering‘. Ellen S. Cohn, lames L. Gibson, Susan O. White, Joseph Sanders, Joan McCord, and Felice Levine were responsible for the development and implementation of the research design. Funding for the project was provided by the (US) National Science Foundation (SE 13237 and SIR 11403). Our European collaborators include Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven (France), Grazyna Skapska, Iwona Jakubowska-Branicka, and Maria Barucka-Arctowa (Poland), Andras Sajo (Hungary), Rosemary Barberet (Spain), and Stefka Naoumova (Bulgaria). Pam Moore, Kris Guffey, Marika Litras, Julie Nadeau, John Kraft, and Kimberly Smirles provided valuable research assistance

Predicting children's externalizing symptoms from dyadic and triadic measures of family systems

textAccording to Family Systems Theory, the whole family system is greater than the sum of its parts. The purpose of this study is to investigate this claim by examining marital, parent-child, and triadic (mother-father-child) interactions as simultaneous predictors of children's externalizing symptoms. Longitudinal data from 108 families were used to investigate three hypotheses: 1) parents' negative responses to their toddlers' negative emotions will predict their children's later externalizing symptoms, 2) marital negativity will relate to both mothers and fathers displaying more negative patterns of emotional socialization, and 3) competitive coparenting -- assessed in triadic family interactions during toddlerhood (age 24 months) -- will predict children's later externalizing symptoms at age 7, after accounting for the effects of significant dyadic family interactions (specifically, mothers' and fathers' emotional socialization assessed at 24 months). Results demonstrated spillover from marital negativity to mothers’ negative emotion socialization. Competitive coparenting predicted children's later emotion socialization after controlling for infant temperament, family income, child gender, and dyadic predictors of children's externalizing symptoms; mothers' negative emotional socialization also remained a significant predictor. This study emphasizes the importance of examining the family holistically and has important implications for designing more effective whole-family interventions to reduce the development of children’s externalizing symptoms.Human Development and Family Science

The Evolution of Secularization: Cultural Transmission, Religion and Fertility Theory, Simulations and Evidence

This study presents an evolutionary process of secularization that integrates a theoretical model, simulations, and an empirical estimation that employs data from 32 countries (included in the International Social Survey Program: Religion II – ISSP, 1998). Following Bisin and Verdier (2000, 2001a), it is assumed that cultural/social norms are transmitted from one generation to the next one via two venues: (i) direct socialization – across generations, by parents; and (ii) oblique socialization – within generations, by the community and cultural environment. This paper focuses on the transmission of religious norms and in particular on the 'religious taste for children'. The theoretical framework describes the setting and the process leading to secularization of the population; the simulations give more insight into the process; and 'secularization regressions' estimate the effects of the various explanatory variables on secularization (that is measured by rare mass-attendance and by rare-prayer), lending support to corollaries derived from the theory and simulations. The main conclusions/findings are that (i) direct religious socialization efforts of one generation have a negative effect on secularization within the next generation; (ii) oblique socialization by the community has a parabolic effect on secularization; and (iii) the two types of socialization are complements in 'producing' religiosity of the next generation.cultural transmission, religion, fertility, secularization, ISSP

Disability and the socialization of accounting professionals

This paper investigates the professional socialization of disabled accountants and their employment within the UK accounting industry by examining the oral history accounts of 12 disabled accountants. Applying the literatures concerned with the professional socialisation of accountants and the sociology of disability, this study draws attention to institutionalized practices within the field of accounting that serve to exclude or marginalize disabled accountants. Our narrators provide evidence of how aspects of professional socialization, such as the image and appearance of staff, the discourse of the client, the rigidity of accounting practice and importance of temporal commitment, impact on the employment of disabled accountants. Moreover, our narrators' accounts suggest that accounting employers and professional bodies are unsupportive, inflexible, and display little understanding of the needs of their disabled employees and members