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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Sociology Of The Family Textbook, Amy E. Traver May 2022

Sociology Of The Family Textbook, Amy E. Traver

Open Educational Resources

This OER textbook provides students with a brief introduction to: the perspective, methods, and theories that constitute the sociology of the family; research on patterns and processes of dating/mating, cohabitation/marriage, parenting. divorce/remarriage, and family stressors/strengths in the United States. It was created through the integration of various OER texts, including OpenStax, Sociology Wikibooks, and many more. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 license.


Premarital Fertility And Marital Timing In Malawi, Michelle Poulin, Kathleen Beegle, Hongwei Xu Jan 2021

Premarital Fertility And Marital Timing In Malawi, Michelle Poulin, Kathleen Beegle, Hongwei Xu

Publications and Research

In Malawi, Africa, the median age at first marriage is among the lowest on the continent and adolescent fertility rates are among the highest. Using high-frequency panel data from the country designed to follow single women and men into marriage, we examine the extent to which premarital fertility is associated with the timing of marriage. Two notable findings emerge. First, premarital fertility typically leads to a more rapid transition into marriage, compared to those not having had a premarital conception or birth, with controls. The effect is as strong for men as it is for women. Second, among women with …


A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough Oct 2020

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …


Impacts Of Mental Health First Aid On Mental Health Literacy And Stigma, Junseon Hwang Sep 2020

Impacts Of Mental Health First Aid On Mental Health Literacy And Stigma, Junseon Hwang

Student Theses

Mental Health First Aid has been developed to train the general public to give initial support to those in mental health crisis and development. The effectiveness of Mental Health First Aid has been questioned due to its relatively short history of the course. Mental Health First Aid was recently widely-disseminated in New York City as part of the ThriveNYC initiative. While most studies were supportive of the training, there has been no study that specifically examines New York residents. We recruited 328 New York residents who self-reported whether or not they have participated in Mental Health First Aid via Amazon …


Education And Marriage Decisions Of Japanese Women And The Role Of The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Linda N. Edwards, Takuya Hasebe, Tadashi Sakai Jul 2019

Education And Marriage Decisions Of Japanese Women And The Role Of The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Linda N. Edwards, Takuya Hasebe, Tadashi Sakai

Publications and Research

The Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1985 aimed to reduce gender discrimination in the labor market, especially for career-oriented jobs. This paper investigates whether this act had an unanticipated effect on women's marriage decisions. Using micro data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, we model women's interrelated decisions on university education and whether to marry, focusing on whether women have married by age 32. Our results show a negative relationship between university education and marriage that is much greater for post-EEOA cohorts of women than for pre-EEOA cohorts, consistent with our hypothesis that the enhanced career opportunities …


Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough Jan 2018

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …


Introduction: For Better Or For Worse? Relational Landscapes In The Time Of Same-Sex Marriage, Michael W. Yarbrough Jan 2018

Introduction: For Better Or For Worse? Relational Landscapes In The Time Of Same-Sex Marriage, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

As same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in a rapidly growing list of countries, the time has come to assess what this means for families and relationships on the ground. Many scholars have already begun to examine how marriage is helping some same-sex couples, but in this introduction I call for a broader and more critical research agenda. In particular, I argue that same-sex marriage crystallizes a key tension surrounding families and relationships in many contemporary societies. On the one hand, strict family norms are relaxing in many places, allowing more people to form more diverse types of caring …


The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona May 2017

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.


South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough Jan 2016

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …


Education And Marriage Decisions Of Japanese Women And The Role Of The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Linda N. Edwards, Takuya Hasebe, Tadashi Sakai Sep 2015

Education And Marriage Decisions Of Japanese Women And The Role Of The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Linda N. Edwards, Takuya Hasebe, Tadashi Sakai

Economics Working Papers

Prompted by concordant upward trends in both the university advancement rate and the unmarried rate for Japanese women, this paper investigates whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA), which was passed in 1985, affected women's marriage decisions either directly or via their decisions to pursue university education. To this end, we estimate a model that treats education and marriage decisions as jointly determined using longitudinal data for Japanese women. We find little evidence that the passage of EEOA increased the proportion of women who advance to university, but strong support for the proposition that it increased the deterrent effect of …


When Wives Migrate And Leave Husbands Behind: A Jamaican Marriage Pattern, Elaine B. Douglas-Harrison Oct 2014

When Wives Migrate And Leave Husbands Behind: A Jamaican Marriage Pattern, Elaine B. Douglas-Harrison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For over a hundred years Jamaicans have been migrating to make the proverbial `better life' for themselves and their families. In the early 20th century husbands migrated, leaving wives behind. As economies of the United States and Canada have become more service-oriented, wives migrate leaving husbands behind. The experiences of Jamaican immigrant women are documented in Caribbean migration studies, but the marriages of Jamaican legally-married immigrant wives and their husbands left behind in Jamaica are so far unstudied. The main research question of this study is what maintains these transnational marriages over time, sometimes for decades, when spouses see each …


Recruit, Recruit, Recruit: Organizing Benefits For Employees With Unmarried Families, Polly Thistlethwaite Jan 2001

Recruit, Recruit, Recruit: Organizing Benefits For Employees With Unmarried Families, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This article argues that librarians should work to adopt domestic partner benefits for employees in unmarried same- and opposite-sex couples given the inequities in compensation manifest in their absence. It provides new information about the domestic partner practices of Tier 1 and Tier 2 institutions based on a spring/fall 2000 telephone survey. The article includes an outline of actions to institute domestic partner benefits in university settings.