Christine A. Bachrach

Bio: Christine A. Bachrach is an academic researcher from University of Maryland, College Park. The author has contributed to research in topics: Population & National Survey of Family Growth. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 54 publications receiving 3262 citations. Previous affiliations of Christine A. Bachrach include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention & National Institutes of Health.

The Science of Self-report : Implications for Research and Practice

Abstract: Contents: Preface. Part I: J.S. Turkkan, General Issues in Self-Report. W. Baldwin, Information No One Else Knows: The Value of Self-Report. D.M. Bersoff, D.N. Bersoff, Ethical Issues in the Collection of Self-Report Data. Part II: J.B. Jobe, Cognitive Processes in Self-Report. R. Tourangeau, Remembering What Happened: Memory Errors and Survey Reports. N.M. Bradburn, Temporal Representation and Event Dating. G. Menon, E.A. Yorkston, The Use of Memory and Contextual Cues in the Formation of Behavioral Frequency Judgments. J.F. Kihlstrom, E. Eich, D. Sandbrand, B.A. Tobias, Emotion and Memory: Implications for Self-Report. Part III: C.A. Bachrach, Self-Reporting Sensitive Events and Characteristics. N.C. Schaeffer, Asking Questions About Threatening Topics: A Selective Overview. H.G. Miller, J.N. Gribble, L.C. Mazade, S.M. Rogers, C.F. Turner, The Association Between Self-Reports of Abortion and Breast Cancer Risk: Fact or Artifact. Part IV: V.S. Cain, Special Issues on Self-Report. D.S. Massey, When Surveys Fail: An Alternative for Data Collection. J. Blair, Assessing Protocols for Child Interviews. J.C. Anthony, Y.D. Neumark, M.L. Van Etten, Do I Do What I Say? A Perspective on Self-Report Methods in Drug Dependence Epidemiology. Part V: J.S. Turkkan, Self-Report of Distant Memories. E.F. Loftus, Suggestion, Imagination, and the Transformation of Reality. L.M. Williams, J.A. Siegel, J.J. Pomeroy, Validity of Women's Self-Reports of Documented Child Sexual Abuse. Part VI: H.S. Kurtzman, Self-Reporting of Health Behaviors and Psychiatric Symptoms. R.C. Kessler, H-U. Wittchen, J. Abelson, S. Zhao, Methodological Issues in Assessing Psychiatric Disorders With Self-Reports. C.S. Rand, "I Took the Medicine Like You Told Me, Doctor": Self-Report of Adherence With Medical Regimes. S. Shiffman, Real-Time Self-Report of Momentary States in the Natural Environment: Computerized Ecological Momentary Assessment. Part VII: A.A. Stone, Self-Reporting of Physical Symptoms. J.W. Pennebaker, Psychological Factors Influencing the Reporting of Physical Symptoms. F.J. Keefe, Self-Report of Pain: Issues and Opportunities. A.J. Barsky, The Validity of Bodily Symptoms in Medical Outpatients.

The ties that bind : perspectives on marriage and cohabitation

Abstract: "The Ties That Bind"was organized to review and assess the scientific evidence about the causes of trends in marriage and other forms of intimate unions. The contributors address these two questions: What do we know about the factors that influence the formation of marriages and other intimate unions, the timing of union formation, and the forms that unions take? What factors explain the dramatic changes in union formation we have observed over recent decades? Edited by Linda J. Waite. Co-edited by Christine Bachrach, Michelle Hindin, Elizabeth Thomson, and Arland Thornton.

Intended pregnancies and unintended pregnancies: distinct categories or opposite ends of a continuum?

Abstract: This article examines the entity of intended and unintended pregnancy. Results provided a strong evidence of bias. The reason for this bias may be due to an increased pressure for women to give a socially desirable response. This problem suggested three potential courses of action such as: a combination of traditional cross-sectional studies with intendedness and wantedness values improvement of retrospective measurements and development of model predictors of reporting bias. With regards to the affective dimension the positive and negative extremes may not be located on the same continuum; that is positive and negative feelings coexist hence producing ambivalence. Consequently researchers should continue their efforts to expand approaches to these concepts and improve the ways of measuring them in future studies.

A Cognitive–Social Model of Fertility Intentions

Abstract: We examine the use and value of fertility intentions against the backdrop of theory and research in the cognitive and social sciences. First, we draw on recent brain and cognition research to contextualize fertility intentions within a broader set of conscious and unconscious mechanisms that contribute to mental function. Next, we integrate this research with social theory. Our conceptualizations suggest that people do not necessarily have fertility intentions; they form them only when prompted by specific situations. Intention formation draws on the current situation and on schemas of childbearing and parenthood learned through previous experience, imbued by affect, and organized by self-representation. Using this conceptualization, we review apparently discordant knowledge about the value of fertility intentions in predicting fertility. Our analysis extends and deepens existing explanations for the weak predictive validity of fertility intentions at the individual level and provides a social-cognitive explanation for why intentions predict as well as they do. When focusing on the predictive power of intentions at the aggregate level, our conceptualizations lead us to focus on how social structures frustrate or facilitate intentions and how the structural environment contributes to the formation of reported intentions in the first place. Our analysis suggests that existing measures of fertility intentions are useful but to varying extents and in many cases despite their failure to capture what they seek to measure.

Understanding U.S. Fertility: Continuity and change in the National Survey of Family Growth, 1988-1995

Abstract: About 50 studies based on the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and a telephone reinterview conducted with the same women two years later provide continuing information about the fertility and health of American women. Among the findings of these studies are that black women have almost twice as many pregnancies as do white women (5.1 vs. 2.8), with nearly all of the difference being unintended pregnancies. Unwanted births increased between 1982 and 1988, particularly among less-educated, poor and minority women. This increase in the proportion of unwanted births may have prompted the increase in female sterilization among these groups. Concern with the AIDS epidemic led to increases in condom use between 1982 and 1990, especially among the partners of teenagers and college-educated women. Rates of teenage pregnancy were fairly stable during the period 1980-1988, as increases in the proportion of teenagers having intercourse were offset by increases in condom use. Rates of infertility did not change significantly in the 1980s, but because of delayed childbearing and the aging of the baby-boom cohort, the number of older childless women increased substantially. The 1995 NSFG was redesigned in a number of ways in order to answer a new generation of questions about fertility and women's health in the United States.

The Benefits of Being Present: Mindfulness and Its Role in Psychological Well-Being

Abstract: Mindfulness is an attribute of consciousness long believed to promote well-being. This research provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the role of mindfulness in psychological well-being. The development and psychometric properties of the dispositional Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) are described. Correlational, quasi-experimental, and laboratory studies then show that the MAAS measures a unique quality of consciousness that is related to a variety of well-being constructs, that differentiates mindfulness practitioners from others, and that is associated with enhanced selfawareness. An experience-sampling study shows that both dispositional and state mindfulness predict self-regulated behavior and positive emotional states. Finally, a clinical intervention study with cancer patients demonstrates that increases in mindfulness over time relate to declines in mood disturbance and stress. Many philosophical, spiritual, and psychological traditions emphasize the importance of the quality of consciousness for the maintenance and enhancement of well-being (Wilber, 2000). Despite this, it is easy to overlook the importance of consciousness in human well-being because almost everyone exercises its primary capacities, that is, attention and awareness. Indeed, the relation between qualities of consciousness and well-being has received little empirical attention. One attribute of consciousness that has been much-discussed in relation to well-being is mindfulness. The concept of mindfulness has roots in Buddhist and other contemplative traditions where conscious attention and awareness are actively cultivated. It is most commonly defined as the state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present. For example, Nyanaponika Thera (1972) called mindfulness “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception” (p. 5). Hanh (1976) similarly defined mindfulness as “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” (p. 11). Recent research has shown that the enhancement of mindfulness through training facilitates a variety of well-being outcomes (e.g., Kabat-Zinn, 1990). To date, however, there has been little work examining this attribute as a naturally occurring characteristic. Recognizing that most everyone has the capacity to attend and to be aware, we nonetheless assume (a) that individuals differ in their propensity or willingness to be aware and to sustain attention to what is occurring in the present and (b) that this mindful capacity varies within persons, because it can be sharpened or dulled by a variety of factors. The intent of the present research is to reliably identify these inter- and intrapersonal variations in mindfulness, establish their relations to other relevant psychological constructs, and demonstrate their importance to a variety of forms of psychological well-being.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

Ecological Momentary Assessment

Abstract: Assessment in clinical psychology typically relies on global retrospective self-reports collected at research or clinic visits, which are limited by recall bias and are not well suited to address how behavior changes over time and across contexts. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of subjects’ current behaviors and experiences in real time, in subjects’ natural environments. EMA aims to minimize recall bias, maximize ecological validity, and allow study of microprocesses that influence behavior in real-world contexts. EMA studies assess particular events in subjects’ lives or assess subjects at periodic intervals, often by random time sampling, using technologies ranging from written diaries and telephones to electronic diaries and physiological sensors. We discuss the rationale for EMA, EMA designs, methodological and practical issues, and comparisons of EMA and recall data. EMA holds unique promise to advance the science and practice of clinical psychology by shedding ligh...

Sensitive questions in surveys.

Abstract: Psychologists have worried about the distortions introduced into standardized personality measures by social desirability bias. Survey researchers have had similar concerns about the accuracy of survey reports about such topics as illicit drug use, abortion, and sexual behavior. The article reviews the research done by survey methodologists on reporting errors in surveys on sensitive topics, noting parallels and differences from the psychological literature on social desirability. The findings from the survey studies suggest that misreporting about sensitive topics is quite common and that it is largely situational. The extent of misreporting depends on whether the respondent has anything embarrassing to report and on design features of the survey. The survey evidence also indicates that misreporting on sensitive topics is a more or less motivated process in which respondents edit the information they report to avoid embarrassing themselves in the presence of an interviewer or to avoid repercussions from third parties.