Nation-Level Gender Inequality and Couples' Income Arrangements.

Using data from the 2012 International Social Survey Program (n = 8,269), this study investigated how couples integrate and manage their income across 20 countries with varying degrees of gender inequality. Couples were more likely to report that one person managed the shared pot of money in countries with high gender inequality compared with couples in more gender equal countries. This pattern was not moderated by within-couple earnings equality. We found a cohabitation-marriage gap in income arrangements that is largest where national-level gender equality is high. In more gender equal contexts, married couples were more likely to pool and manage their money together, whereas a larger proportion of married couples assigned one money manager in countries with less gender equality. Cohabiting couples were more likely to keep some money separate than to take-up a pooled, jointly managed approach in more gender equal countries. Findings demonstrate the need to consider both management and pooling dimensions of couples' treatment of money to understand the influence of contextual factors on couples' income arrangements.

The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information.

The scholarly knowledge ecosystem presents an outstanding exemplar of the challenges of understanding, improving, and governing information ecosystems at scale. This article draws upon significant reports on aspects of the ecosystem to characterize the most important research challenges and promising potential approaches. The focus of this review article is the fundamental scientific research challenges related to developing a better understanding of the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. Across a range of disciplines, we identify reports that are conceived broadly, published recently, and written collectively. We extract the critical research questions, summarize these using quantitative text analysis, and use this quantitative analysis to inform a qualitative synthesis. Three broad themes emerge from this analysis: the need for multi-sectoral cooperation and coordination, for mixed methods analysis at multiple levels, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Further, we draw attention to an emerging consensus that scientific research in this area should by a set of core human values.

Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States.

In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records-marriage certificates and applications-gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.

The Coming Divorce Decline.

This paper analyzes U.S. divorce trends over the last decade, and considers their implications for future divorce rates. Modeling women's odds of divorce from 2008 to 2017 using marital events data from the American Community Survey, I find falling divorce rates, with or without adjustment for demographic covariates. Age specific divorce rates show that the trend is driven by younger women, which is consistent with longer term trends showing uniquely high divorce rates among people born in the Baby Boom period. Finally, I analyze the characteristics of newly-married women and estimate the trend in their likelihood of divorcing based on the divorce models. The results show falling divorce risks for more recent marriages. The accumulated evidence thus points toward continued decline in divorce rates. The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past.

Extended kin and children's behavioral functioning: Family structure and parental immigrant status.

Using the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS), this paper examines the association between the presence of co-resident extended kin and children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors. The paper demonstrates the differential role of extended kin by family structure, as well as across parental immigrant status - specifically, nativity and documentation status. Children in the sample were found to be disadvantaged in extended family households, especially with regard to internalizing behaviors. This disadvantageous association was found mostly among married-parent extended family households, whereas there was no association between the presence of extended kin and behavior problems in children from single-parent families. This pattern emerged more clearly among children of documented immigrants, compared to those with native-born parents and those whose parents were unauthorized immigrants. These findings suggest a need to modify previous theories on extended family living arrangements; they also provide policy implications for immigrant families.

Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008-2011.

Recession may increase divorce through a stress mechanism, or reduce divorce by exacerbating cost barriers or strengthening family bonds. After establishing an individual-level model predicting U.S. women's divorce, the paper tests period effects, and whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce using the 2008-2011 American Community Survey. Results show a downward spike in the divorce rate after 2008, almost recovering to the expected level by 2011, which suggests a negative recession effect. On the other hand, state foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce with individual controls, although this effect is not significant when state fixed effects are introduced. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. Future research will have to determine why national divorce odds fell during the recession while state-level economic indicators were not strongly associated with divorce. Exploratory analysis which shows unemployment decreasing divorce odds for those with college degrees, while foreclosures have the opposite effect, provides one possible avenue for such research.

Children's gender and parents' color preferences.

Gender differences in color preferences have been found in adults and children, but they remain unexplained. This study asks whether the gendered social environment in adulthood affects parents' color preferences. The analysis used the gender of children to represent one aspect of the gendered social environment. Because having male versus female children in the U.S. is generally randomly distributed, it provides something of a natural experiment, offering evidence about the social construction of gender in adulthood. The participants were 749 adults with children who responded to an online survey invitation, asking "What's your favorite color?" Men were more likely to prefer blue, while women were more likely to prefer red, purple, and pink, consistent with long-standing U.S. patterns. The effect of having only sons was to widen the existing gender differences between men and women, increasing the odds that men prefer blue while reducing the odds that women do; and a marginally significant effect showed women having higher odds of preferring pink when they have sons only. The results suggest that, in addition to any genetic, biological or child-socialization effects shaping adults' tendency to segregate their color preferences by gender, the gender context of adulthood matters as well.

Mobility for care workers: job changes and wages for nurse aides.

The long-term care industry in the United States faces serious recruitment and retention problems among nurse aides. At the same time, these low-wage workers may feel trapped in poorly-paid jobs from which they would do well to leave. Despite this tension, not enough is known about how workers fare when they leave (or stay in) such care work. Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the years 1996-2003, we examine the relationship between different job and occupational mobility patterns and wage outcomes for nurse aides, focusing on which job transitions offer better opportunities to earn higher wages and on whether job transition patterns differ by race. Our results confirm high turnover among nurse aides, with 73 percent of the sample working in occupations other than nurse aide at some point during the survey time frame. About half of respondents that transition out of nurse aide work move into higher-paying occupations, although the percentage of transitions to higher paying occupations drops to 35 percent when nurse aides that become RNs are excluded. Among black workers especially, wage penalties for moving into other jobs in the low-wage labor market appear to be rather small, likely a factor in high turnover among nurse aides. The findings illustrate the importance of occupation-specific mobility trajectories and their outcomes for different groups of workers, and for understanding the constrained decisions these workers make.

Headed towards Equality? Housework Change in Comparative Perspective.

This paper examined gendered housework in the larger context of comparative social change, asking specifically whether cross-national differences in domestic labor patterns converge over time. Our analysis of data from 13 countries (N =11,065) from the 1994 and 2002 International Social Survey Program (ISSP), confirmed that social context matters in shaping couples' division of labor at home, but also showed that context affects patterns of change. Our results suggested that, compared to the most egalitarian countries, the shift in housework patterns was greatest among the most traditional countries. This provides support for the thesis of cultural convergence, but the evidence did not suggest that such convergence will lead to complete equality in the foreseeable future.

Disability among internationally adopted children in the United States.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to estimate disability rates for internationally adopted children in the United States. METHODS: We conducted an analysis of restricted-access data from the complete long form of Census 2000 for internationally adopted children aged 5 to 15 in 2000, estimating disability rates by country of origin, controlling for gender, age at adoption, current age, and parental characteristics. RESULTS: Internationally adopted children have disability rates similar to those adopted domestically (11.7% vs 12.2%, respectively) and more than twice the rate for all children in that age range (5.8%). The adjusted odds of disability relative to domestic adoptees range from one half or less (China and Korea) to twice as large or more (Romania, Bulgaria, other Eastern Europe, and other Western Europe). CONCLUSIONS: The population of internationally adopted children is relatively small and diverse, posing challenges for researchers who hope to reach generalizable conclusions. Nevertheless, health, education, and social service professionals, as well as adoptive and prospective adoptive parents, should be aware of the risk for disabilities among internationally adopted children to devote the resources necessary to addressing them.