Claiming Fatherhood: Race and the Dynamics of Paternal Involvement among Unmarried Men

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the black family was nearing "complete breakdown" due to high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In subsequent decades, nonmarital childbearing rose dramatically for all racial groups and unwed fathers were often portrayed as being absent from their children's lives. The authors examine contemporary nonmarital father involvement using quantitative evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with 150 unmarried fathers. The authors find that father involvement drops sharply after parents' relationships end, especially when they enter subsequent relationships and have children with new partners. These declines are less dramatic for African American fathers, suggesting that fathers' roles outside of conjugal relationships may be more strongly institutionalized in the black community. The challenges Moynihan described among black families some forty years ago now extend to a significant minority of all American children.     

The dilemmas of citizenship: Limitations on canadian legal rights

Since the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian courts have been burdened with a disproportionate number of cases concerned with issues arising from the newly introduced legal rights. However, the transition from the Canadian crime-control model to the American-style due-process model is far from complete. The rights of the accused are consistently deemed to be secondary to the aim of reinforcing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Canadians' legal rights will in fact remain limited as long as judges continue to decide cases on the basis of harm done to the justice system, rather than individuals and groups. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a joint session of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association, Leamed Societies Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario; June 7, 1993. I thank attending colleagues for their useful feedback. I am also grateful for the comments of Piers Beime.     

Locus of peer influence: Social crowd and best friend

This study examined the relative influence of the best friends and social crowds of older adolescents on cigarette smoking. The data were examined to determine if there were differences in influence as a function of sex, conformity, or the mutuality of the friendship. This study used a longitudinal design that enabled the separation of the effects of peer influence from those of selective association. The results showed that social crowds differed in mean level of cigarette smoking, with burnouts smoking the most and jock/preps smoking the least. The majority of best friendships were homogeneous for social crowd. Best friend influence predicted change in cigarette smoking over a one-year period, while social crowd influence appeared to be minimal. Conformity was positively related to susceptibility to peer influence, although mutuality of the friendship and sex of the subject were not.This research was supported by NIH grant HD18425 awarded to Kathryn Urberg.Obtained Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Educational Psychology. A developmental psychologist, her major area of interest is adolescent social development.     

Canada's voluntary ARET program: Limited success despite industry cosponsorship

The Accelerated Reduction/Elimination of Toxins (ARET) Challenge was a voluntary program initiated in 1994 by the Government of Canada. Unlike the U.S. 33/50 Program, ARET involved industry partners in negotiation and cosponsorship of the program, with the intention that early involvement would yield stronger commitment to voluntary reductions. We review the program's self‐reported success in delivering emissions reductions. For 17 ARET substances that were also covered by Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory, we employ treatment effects regressions to control for self‐selection bias. We find evidence that ARET accelerated emission reductions in five cases, slowed reductions in two cases, and had no discernible effect in ten cases. Industry cosponsorship apparently did not have the intended effect and instead resulted in program features such as data confidentiality that significantly undermined the program's credibility. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management