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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment, Aliya Hamid Rao Jun 2017

Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment, Aliya Hamid Rao

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This article uses data from more than 50 in‐depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men's unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that wives of unemployed men do two types of emotion work—self‐focused and other‐focused—and both are aimed toward facilitating husbands' success in the emotionally arduous white‐collar job‐search process. This article extends research on emotion work by suggesting that participants perceive wives' emotion work as a resource with potential economic benefits in the form of unemployed men's reemployment. The findings furthermore suggest …


Love, Money, And Parental Goods: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Xu, Lixin Colin Xu May 2017

Love, Money, And Parental Goods: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Xu, Lixin Colin Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

While parental matchmaking has been widespread throughout history and across countries, we know little about the relationship between parental matchmaking and marriage outcomes. Does parental involvement in matchmaking help ensure their needs are better taken care of by married children? This paper finds supportive evidence using a survey of Chinese couples. In particular, parental involvement in matchmaking is associated with having a more submissive wife, a greater number of children, a higher likelihood of having any male children, and a stronger belief of the husband in providing old age support to his parents. These benefits, however, are achieved at the …


Late-Life Widowhood In Developing Southeast Asia: Comparative Perspectives From Myanmar, Thailand, And Vietnam, Bussarawan Puk Teerawichitchainan, John Knodel Apr 2017

Late-Life Widowhood In Developing Southeast Asia: Comparative Perspectives From Myanmar, Thailand, And Vietnam, Bussarawan Puk Teerawichitchainan, John Knodel

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We analyze recent aging surveys to examine the prevalence and correlates of widowhood among elderly in Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam and investigate how widowhood is associated with intergenerational support and old-age wellbeing. Widowhood is often associated with depressive symptoms, elevated mortality risk, and social-relationship changes. How one fares after spousal loss is nevertheless contingent on individual-level attributes, dyadic characteristics, and macro-social conditions. Thus, consequences likely vary across contexts. Most studies are conducted in western developed countries. Few existing Asia-focused research is primarily based on developed East Asia or China. Little is empirically known about the situation in non-western developing countries. …


What Does Successful Aging Mean? Lay Perception Of Successful Aging Among Elderly Singaporeans, Qiushi Feng, Paulin Tay Straughan Mar 2017

What Does Successful Aging Mean? Lay Perception Of Successful Aging Among Elderly Singaporeans, Qiushi Feng, Paulin Tay Straughan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Objectives: We explore the culturally specific meaning of successful aging in Singapore, an ethnically diverse city-state in Asia. We aim to investigate lay perceptions of successful aging among the elderly individuals in Singapore and further examine variations of these perceptions. Methods: We applied a mixed-method research design. Firstly, we conducted qualitative interviews with 49 elderly respondents, generating 12 main subjective components of successful aging. Next, we did a national survey with a sample of 1,540 local residents aged 50 to 69 years, in which respondents were asked to evaluate the importance of each subjective component of successful aging. We used …


Child's Gender, Parental Monetary Investments And Care Of Elderly Parents In China, Christine Ho Mar 2017

Child's Gender, Parental Monetary Investments And Care Of Elderly Parents In China, Christine Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

Son biased investments are common in many Asian countries where sons are customarily responsible for providing old age support to parents. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, I find that parents invested nearly twice more in sons than in daughters in terms of college education spending and marriage gifts value. Conversely, parents received relatively higher marginal returns to investment from daughters than from sons in terms of living proximity, monetary and in-kind transfers, and help with instrumental activities of daily living. Family fixed effects models as well as an instrumental variable strategy are employed to control …