世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

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. …

A Treatise on the Family

Perceived discrimination has been studied with regard to its impact on several types of health effects. This meta-analysis provides a comprehensive account of the relationships between multiple forms of perceived discrimination and both mental and physical health outcomes. In addition, this meta-analysis examines potential mechanisms by which perceiving discrimination may affect health, including through psychological and physiological stress responses and health behaviors. Analysis of 134 samples suggests that when weighting each study's contribution by sample size, perceived discrimination has a significant negative effect on both mental and physical health. Perceived discrimination also produces significantly heightened stress responses and is related to participation in unhealthy and nonparticipation in healthy behaviors. These findings suggest potential pathways linking perceived discrimination to negative health outcomes.

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Perceived discrimination and health: a meta-analytic review.

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

This paper provides a review and critique of empirical research on perceived discrimination and health. The patterns of racial disparities in health suggest that there are multiple ways by which racism can affect health. Perceived discrimination is one such pathway and the paper reviews the published research on discrimination and health that appeared in PubMed between 2005 and 2007. This recent research continues to document an inverse association between discrimination and health. This pattern is now evident in a wider range of contexts and for a broader array of outcomes. Advancing our understanding of the relationship between perceived discrimination and health will require more attention to situating discrimination within the context of other health-relevant aspects of racism, measuring it comprehensively and accurately, assessing its stressful dimensions, and identifying the mechanisms that link discrimination to health.

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Discrimination and racial disparities in health: evidence and needed research

Correlated data are very common in the social sciences. Most common applications include longitudinal and hierarchically organized (or clustered) data. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) are a convenient and general approach to the analysis of several kinds of correlated data. The main advantage of GEE resides in the unbiased estimation of population-averaged regression coefficients despite possible misspecification of the correlation structure. This article aims to provide a concise, nonstatistical introduction to GEE. To illustrate the method, an analysis of selectivity effects in the Swiss Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on the Oldest Old is presented.

An Introduction to Generalized Estimating Equations and an Application to Assess Selectivity Effects in a Longitudinal Study on Very Old Individuals

Institutions contribute to maintaining social order and stability in society. At the same time, they restrain the freedom of individuals. Based on the theory of value structure and content (Schwartz, 1992), we hypothesized about the relations of people's trust in institutions to their value priorities. More precisely, we predicted and found that the level of trust in various institutions correlated positively with values that stress stability, protection, and preservation of traditional practices, and negatively with values that emphasize independent thought and action and favour change. In addition, we demonstrated that groups defined on the basis of religious affiliation or political orientation exhibited contrasting value priorities on the same bipolar dimension. Moreover, differences in value priorities accounted for the fact that religious individuals and right-wing supporters expressed more trust in institutions than non-religious individuals and left-wing supporters.

Conflicts among human values and trust in institutions

Equivalence of measurement across cultures is a prerequisite for the generalization of an instrument. The measurement equivalence of 10 value types derived from Schwartz's structural model of values and measured with the Schwartz Value Survey questionnaire is evaluated in 21 countries. Based on previous research by Schwartz and colleagues, the measurement equivalence of the 10 value types is tested separately using nested multigroup confirmatory factor analyses. Results indicate that it is possible for most value types to reach acceptable levels of configural and metric equivalence; only the dimension of Hedonism is rejected at these two levels of equivalence. Four value types (Benevolence, Conformity, Self-Direction, and Universalism) also show factor variance equivalence. The hypotheses of scalar and reliability equivalence are rejected for all value types. Indications are also given of the number of items to be included for measuring the value types at the different levels of equivalence.

Measurement Equivalence Of 10 Value Types From The Schwartz Value Survey Across 21 Countries

There are many systematic reviews on social capital (SC) and various health outcomes, but each of these reviews shows one piece of the larger SC and health puzzle. The aim of this research was to systematically review systematic reviews on SC and health, in order to provide an overview of existing evidence and to identify strategies for future research. Nine databases were searched for key words that could fall under the broad umbrella of SC and health outcomes. We screened 4941 titles and abstracts and read 187 reviews before retaining 20 of them. A critical appraisal of each review was conducted. The reviews show there is good evidence to suggest that SC predicts better mental and physical health, and indicators of SC are protective against mortality. At the same time, many reviews also found numerous non-significant and negative relationships that are important to consider. It was unclear whether SC interventions for health were really improving SC, or other aspects of the social environment. Overall, this research shows that evidence on how various aspects of SC affect different health outcomes for different actors remains unclear. Intergroup and lifecourse perspectives could help clarify this link. Future research could benefit from conceptualizing the link between SC and health in a what, who, where, when, why and how framework.

https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_12FA66BAB009.P001/REF.pdf

Social capital and health: A systematic review of systematic reviews.

A questionnaire study using the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was conducted in 35 countries (N=6791 students) The basic assumption was that human rights can be studied as social representations following the model of Doise, Clemence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi (1993) The existence of a shared meaning system concerning the 30 articles in different countries was demonstrated Individual attitudes toward the whole set of rights were proven to be highly consistent However, individuals differed systematically in beliefs about their own and the government's efficacy in having human rights respected An individual-level and a pancultural analysis (Kenny & La Voie, 1985; Leung & Bond, 1989) converged in the definition of four groups of respondents: advocates (most favorable responses towards human rights), sceptics (less favorable responses), personalists (high personal involvement and scepticism about governmental efficacy) and governmentalists (low personal involvement and strong belief in governmental efficacy) Analyses of anchoring started either from assessing individual positionings or from maximizing between-country differences Individual-level analyses show that positionings are anchored in value choices as well as in perception and experience of social conflicts Pancultural analyses confirm the importance of national context concerning the attitudes of scepticism or advocacy, personalism and governmentalism Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Dario Spini

Papers

An Introduction to Generalized Estimating Equations and an Application to Assess Selectivity Effects in a Longitudinal Study on Very Old Individuals

Conflicts among human values and trust in institutions

Measurement Equivalence Of 10 Value Types From The Schwartz Value Survey Across 21 Countries

Social capital and health: A systematic review of systematic reviews.

Human rights studied as social representations in a cross-national context