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14 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE FAMILY STUDIES, Autumn 1998, Vol. 29, N° 3
00.14.1 - HOUSEKNECHT, Sharon K; ABDEL AAL, Mohamed.
Forms of economic security and the family.
This work stresses differences between two forms of economic security. One is formal and is provided by coverage through public programs. The other is informal and the family is its major source. Our primary concern is with the processes involved in the transformation of the family economic security system and family culture and social structures. To this end, we test the influence of two major hypotheses, one emphasizing the importance of economic independence that is associated with industrial employment and coverage by formal economic security programs and the other the importance of space or geographical mobility. Data were gathered in Egypt through personal interviews with 3,214 respondents systematically selected from five communities representing different regions of the country, as well as from Census reports. The results indicate that the dynamics of family transformation are complex. Migration was not relevant for family economic interdependence, but formal coverage was. Formal coverage was not directly relevant for family social structure, but migration was. Both had effects on family culture. Industrial employment impacted all of these various dimensions of family life.
English - pp. 429-449.
S. K. Houseknecht, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, U.S.A.
(EGYPT, SOCIAL SECURITY, FAMILY BUDGET, SOCIAL POLICY, EMPLOYMENT, GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY.)
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00.14.2 - AYCAN, Zeynep; KANUNGO, Rabindra, N.
Impact of acculturation on socialization beliefs and behavioral occurrences among Indo-Canadian immigrants.
The acculturation process and its impact on socialization beliefs of first and second generation Indo-Canadians were examined using a sample of 558 respondents from 105 families. A questionnaire was designed and administered in a semi-structured interview format. The study reports validity and reliability of the two measures: acculturation attitudes based on Berry's (1984) model, and socialization beliefs. Integration was the overwhelming preference for both parents and children, followed by separation for parents, and assimilation for children. Three dimensions of socialization beliefs were identified. The first dimension, "parental guidance in children's social life", was positively related to integration; the second dimension, "parental control over children's social and moral life" was positively associated with separation; and the third dimension "children's autonomy without parental involvement" was positively correlated with assimilation. Integration was associated with fewer behavioral and disciplinary problems of children. Children of parents who preferred assimilation, and children who favoured separation faced disciplinary and behavioral problems more often.
English - pp. 451-467.
Z. Aycan, Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada.
(CANADA, INDIA, IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANT ASSIMILA-TION, ACCULTURATION, SOCIALIZATION, YOUTH.)
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Family life among El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans: A comparative study.
A qualitative study was conducted with El Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan families to ascertain family life changes after resettlement in Canada. Comparisons between the participants' homeland and Canada and between the female and male participants are discussed. In total, 44 participants were interviewed; the demographic information indicated that the majority of the participants were married with children. Women had less education than men with the latter usually working as accountants and teachers.
Within the interviews, the participants were asked about their family life in their homeland and family life changes since resettlement including alterations in parenting, spousal relationships and family life in general. Family life in their homelands emphasizes traditonal roles of women and men; restrictions are placed on women's behavior while a double standard exists for the men. Since resettlement the men, in particular, note undesirable changes among the women. The latter desire an opportunity for education, employment and a less restricted life. Simultaneously, the children are losing their Spanish fluency and some exhibit disinterest in their heritage. Emotional and physical abuse is not uncommon and family disintegration has occurred in some cases. Understanding family life among diverse groups such as those described here adds to the growing knowledge base of family life in a cross-cultural context.
English - pp. 469-479.
J. C. Kulig, School of Nursing, Regional Centre for Health, Promotion and Community Studies, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta, T1K 3M4, Canada.
(CANADA, CENTRAL AMERICA, IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, SOCIAL CHANGE, FAMILY LIFE, PLACE OF ORIGIN.)
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00.14.4 - LABOV, Teresa; JACOBS, Jerry A.
Preserving multiple ancestry: Intermarriage and mixed births in Hawaii.
Most studies of intermarriage and mixed births rely on census and vital statistics data that allocate individuals among a set of mutually exclusive categories. This practice of assigning each individual to a single ethnic group unfortunately erases history twice for persons of multiple ancestry: it suppresses the mixed parentage of the children and it suppresses the fact that many parents were themselves of mixed parentage. We provide a simple method for incorporating estimates of the effect of mixed ancestry in analyses of mixed births and mixed marriages. We offer estimates of the actual rate of mixed births and mixed marriages in Hawaii by taking into account mixed racial and ethnic ancestry. Our estimates show that the rate of social and biological mixing in Hawaii has increased even faster than official data indicate. We develop the hypothesis that the presence of a sizeable group of individuals with mixed ancestry creates a momentum toward further mixing of the population, and show that our results are consistent with this hypothesis.
English - pp. 481-502.
T. Labov and J. A. Jacobs, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6299, U.S.A.
(UNITED STATES, ETHNIC ORIGIN, MIXED MARRIAGE, MISCEGENATION, DATA COLLECTION.)
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00.14.5 - WISENSALE, Steven K.; KHODAIR, Amany A.
The two-child family: The Egyptian model of family planning.
In 1994 President Hosni Mubarek of Egypt received the United Nations Population Award for both his national and international leadership on population issues. Despite decades of disappointments in addressing a rising birth rate and a maldistributed population, Egypt chose collaboration over coercion and embarked on an aggressive educational program in the early 1980s that set as its goal a "two-child-family" by 2015. To accomplish its goal, the Information, Education and Communication Center of the State Information Service has employed five techniques. These include the mass media, interpersonal communication, the enter-educate method, training of personnel, and research. As a result, between 1985 and 1994 the percentage of families using contraceptives more than doubled and the birth rate dropped from 39.8 per thousand to 27.5 per thousand.
Other nations can learn at least four important lessons from the Egyptian experience in family planning: (1) patience and persistence matter; (2) religious factions should be included in both the policy making and planning process, (3) a balance needs to be struck between the centralization of goal setting and the decentralization of program implementation; and (4) traditional family planning theory that states that economic development determines the fertility rate can be reversed. That is, instead of economic development determining the fertility rate, Egyptian policy makers believe that control of the latter produces the former.
English - pp. 503-516.
S. K. Wisensale, School of Family Studies, University of Connecticut, U-58, Storrs, CT 06269-2958, U.S.A.
(EGYPT, FAMILY PLANNING POLICY, PROGRAMME EVALUATION, FAMILY SIZE.)
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00.14.6 - KPOSOWA, Augustine J.
The impact of race on divorce in the United States.
Using data from the June 1985 Current Population Survey, a study was done to examine the effect of race on divorce in the United States, controlling for various risk factors noted in previous research. Life table and Cox proportional hazards models were specified. The risk factors controlled included age at first marriage, marriage cohort, marital status at first birth, age at first birth, presence of children, place of residence, family income, housing type, labor force status, and education. The results of the analysis confirm the existence of the hypothesized relationships. With regard to race evidence was found to suggest that divorce probabilities are higher among African Americans than Whites. African American women were 1.8 times as likely to divorce as their white counterparts. Contrary to some past research reports, however, it was observed that the variables that predict divorce among African Americans are the same that do so for Whites. Moreover, the difference between African Americans and whites with regard to divorce risks was not as strong as some previous studies had reported. Analysis showed that women with higher levels of education (college or graduate degrees) were significantly more likely to divorce than their counterparts with only high school education. The results also reinforce the findings reported in many prior studies that divorce rates in the United States rose consistently in the 1970s and early 1980s. Cohort analysis by age and year of marriage show that the probabilities of divorce in the first 5 to 10 years of marriage have increased, especially for the recently married.
English - pp. 529-548.
A. J. Kposowa, Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0419, U.S.A.
(UNITED STATES, DIVORCE RATE, RACES, COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.)
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14 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE FAMILY STUDIES, Winter 1999, Vol. 30, N° 1
Men, marriage, and ideal family size in francophone Africa.
Sub-Saharan African marriage analyses typically ignore the fact that many monogamous men may intend to become polygynous in the future. Analyses using data from the Niger, Burkina Faso, and Senegal Demographic and Health Surveys illustrate that 1) currently monogamous men can be divided into two distinct marriage groups based on their future marriage intentions, and 2) future marriage intentions may be associated with reported ideal family size desires. Hence researchers need to consider sub-Saharan African men's unique roles and relationships in the development of survey questions for men, and in the planning of family planning program initiatives targeted to men.
English - pp. 17-34.
I. Speizer, Department of International Health and Development, Tulane University Medical Center, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiane 70112-2737, U.S.A.
(AFRICA SOUTH OF SAHARA, MEN, MARRIAGE, POLYGAMY, FAMILY SIZE, DESIRED FAMILY SIZE.)
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00.14.8 - HEATON, Tim; HIRSCHL, Tom A.
The trajectory of family change in Nigeria.
Using data from the 1990 Demographic and Health Survey at Nigeria, this study examines ethnic differences in demographic characteristics of the family. Age differences are used to assess inter-ethnic differences in the rate of change. Age patterns suggest fundamental change including delayed marriage, lower rates of polygamy, shorter delays in the interval between birth and the resumption of sexual intercourse, growing acceptability of contraceptive use, a less fateful approach to family size, and a decline in ideal family size. These changes are notably absent in one major group, however. The Hausa, who are the dominant group in Northern Nigeria, appear relatively immune from forces sweeping the remainder of the country. Structural changes such as educational expansion and urbanization which influence family change are also not evident among the Hausa. These differences imply growing ethnic and regional cleavage in P. country that is already deeply divided.
English - pp. 35-55.
T. Heaton, Center for Studies of the Family, 934 SWKT, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, U.S.A.
(NIGERIA, FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY, ETHNIC GROUPS.)
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Consensual unions in two Costa Rican communities: An analysis using focus group methodology.
This study uses focus groups to explore the nature of consensual unions and the relationship between union type and fertility in Costa Rica. Participants, both men and women, were drawn from two communities, La Cruz in the province of Guanacaste, and Cahuita, in the province of Limón. I hypothesize that women's status, reflecting gender differences in power distribution, is an important determinant of the type of union chosen. Women with a weaker "bargaining position" in their relationships with men (reflected in their socio-economic status, children from previous unions, age, etc.)
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are more likely to enter consensual than legal unions, which offer less legal and financial protection. The weaker "bargaining position" of women in consensual unions in turn is likely to affect the "marital relationship" so that women in consensual unions may have less say in fertility decisions than their partners.
The results show that while most respondents state that there are no differences between union types in terms of family obligations and responsibilities, women are nevertheless aware that consensual unions may end up providing them with little legal or financial support, and that they and their children risk being left on their own. The greater instability of the consensual union influences fertility in that women appear to use children to create a securer bond within such unions. Further work in this area would benefit from more research into the cultural context within which decisions regarding union formation are made and the constraints on union choice.
English - pp. 57-77.
K. Glaser, Age Concern Institute of Gerontology, King's College London, Cornwall House Annexe, Waterloo Road, London SEI 8WA, U.K.
(COSTA RICA, CONSENSUAL UNION, MARRIAGE, DIFFERENTIAL FERTILITY, WOMEN'S STATUS.)
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Comment on coding marital status in Latin America.
Although the value of information on marital status is often questioned seriously, this note assumes that it is valuable and comments on its rather distinctive but confusing nature in Latin American censuses. Latin American censuses often list "consensual union" as a marital status. This is confusing however, because one has to wonder what this means and how one is supposed to use the information in comparative studies. It would seem that "consensual union" is at once too inclusive and too limiting a term. Although one might consider consensual union theoretically to be a type of trial marriage, censuses and surveys also use the tern-n for unions that might better be termed customary marriage, common-law marriage or childless cohabitation. Curiously perhaps, the term "consensual union,' is usually not used to denote stable, child-producing "visiting unions" in which the partners do not share a common residence. Rather, people in visiting unions are usually called "single" although they are clearly in a stable sexual relationship. ShoulddifFerentkindsofunionsideally be allocated separate and more accurate labels?
English - pp. 79-93.
S. De Vos, Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 4412 Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1393, U.S.A.
(LATIN AMERICA, CENSUSES, METHODOLOGY, CODING, MARITAL STATUS, CONSENSUAL UNION.)
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Household structure, satisfaction and distress in India and the United States: A comparative cultural examination.
In this research, we examine the different relationships between household structure, household safisfaction and distress in samples from the United States and India. Results show that while marriage is consistently the strongest predictor of well-being in the United States, marriage is less important for Indian well-being in comparison to socioeconomic variables such as education and income. Children have the effect of decreasing home satisfaction for United States women, while increasing home satisfaction for Indian women. Finally, while work is a significant posifive predictor for home satisfaction in India for men, it does not predict Indian men's distress. Alternatively, while work does not affect Indian women's household satisfaction, it does significantly decrease their levels of distress. These results are interpreted in light of the cultural and social differences between countries in the cultural construction of the meaning of love and intimacy, along with the differing nature of gender roles within the family.
English - pp. 135-152.
J. Sastry, Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, U.S.A.
(UNITED STATES, INDIA, HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS, SEX DIFFERENTIALS, CULTURE.)
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