Teenagers' perception of agreement over family expenditures,employment, and family life

Teenagers' perspective of disagreement over family finances and related factors were investigated. Involvement of teenagers in employment and percentage of earnings kept for personal use were examined. Reasons for employment affected disagreement over finances, whereas family income had no important effect on disagreement over finances in multivariate analysis. Disagreement over finances was important in explaining variation in satisfaction with money management in the family and in satisfaction with family life. Results have implication for reducing stress in family life and for contributing to theory on family resource management and adolescent development.This study is part of an interregional Agricultural Experiment Station Research Project NC-128 Quality of Life as Affected by Area of Residence. Cooperating states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas.Received Ph.D. from Purdue University. Research interests include family economics.Received B.S. from Cornell. Research interests include consumer and family economics.     

Truth-telling,dominant strategies,and iterative Groves mechanisms

Public Choice - This essay demonstrates that if an organization uses a price-decomposition algorithm to solve a decentralized resource allocation problem, in which rewards are those of a Groves...     

Sexually active but not pregnant: A comparison of teens who risk and teens who plan

Previous studies have compared contraceptive users with nonusers, and pregnant teens with nonpregnant ones. This paper reports the findings of a study of a sample of 119 women aged 21 and under who visited the Young Adult Clinic at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City during 1981. All of these women had been sexually active for a year or longer, but had never been pregnant. The expectation that such a sample would include mainly consistent users of contraception was unwarranted; within this special population were found young women who had never used contraception or who had only been sporadic users, as well as the consistent users. Moreover, there are many more similarities than differences among these groups, and their stated motivations for not becoming pregnant are the same. The consistent contraceptors were more likely to live with their mothers, to have mothers who worked, to indicate that their parents would help them have an abortion, and to indicate they would have an abortion should they become pregnant. The similarities between these young women are very important for programs, which often rely heavily on stated motivation or even on a clinic visit as evidence that a young woman intends to use a birth control method. There is nothing here to support this simple view. Instead the notion is substantiated that many adolescents may lack cognitive consistency on this subject or may lack the future orientation to be effective contraceptive users.     

Environmental gas displacement: three accidental deaths in the workplace

The authors describe three accidental deaths resulting from occupational hazards involving environmental gas alterations. One involved the displacement of oxygen caused by leakage of liquid nitrogen during the installation of a magnetic resonance imaging system. Two involved elevated environmental carbon dioxide concentrations: dry ice sublimation in a walk-in refrigerator in a research laboratory, and activation of a carbon dioxide fire alarm-extinguisher system by a woman locked in a bank vault. The autopsy findings, scene investigations, and certifications of these deaths, as related to the mechanisms of death, are discussed.     

Research in Context: Measuring Value Change

Abramson and Inglehart find a significant trend toward postmaterialist values in Western Europe, which they argue is largely driven by the gradual processes of generational replacement. Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin argue that this trend is a methodological artifact of the wording of Inglehart's four-item measure of materialist/ postmaterialist values. They claim that because this battery does not include a question about unemployment, in periods of high unemployment respondents tend to choose postmaterialist goals. The long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe, they argue, results from rising levels of unemployment during the past two decades. Abramson and Inglehart point out that increases in inflation have a short-term impact on decreasing postmaterialism, but maintain that the positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism is spurious. As this analysis shows, Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin find a positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism by building a model that has little theoretical justification and that is not robust to changes in specification. As this analysis demonstrates, unemployment is actually linked with support for materialist goals, and the trend toward post-materialism is robust in the face of alternative time frames, models, and specifications. The weight of the evidence demonstrates that the long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe is driven by generational replacement.