Research during the past decade shows that social class or socioeconomic status (SES) is related to satisfaction and stability in romantic unions, the quality of parent-child relationships, and a range of developmental outcomes for adults and children. This review focuses on evidence regarding potential mechanisms proposed to account for these associations. Research findings reported during the past decade demonstrate support for an interactionist model of the relationship between SES and family life, which incorporates assumptions from both the social causation and social selection perspectives. The review concludes with recommendations for future research on SES, family processes and individual development in terms of important theoretical and methodological issues yet to be addressed.

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Socioeconomic Status, Family Processes, and Individual Development.

1. On Romanization 2. Roman power and the Gauls 3. The civilising ethos 4. Mapping cultural change 5. Urbanising the Gauls 6. The culture of the countryside 7. Consuming Rome 8. Keeping faith? 9. Being Roman in Gaul.

Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. By G. Woolf. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1998/2000. Pp. xv + 296, figs 20. Price: £40.00 (bound); £15.95 (paper). ISBN 0 521 414456 (bound); 0 521 789826 (paper).

Objectives—This report shows trends and group differences in current marital status, with a focus on first marriages among women and men aged 15–44 years in the United States. Trends and group differences in the timing and duration of first marriages are also discussed. These data are based on the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). National estimates of probabilities of first marriage by age and probabilities of separation and divorce for women and men’s first marriages are presented by a variety of demographic characteristics. Data are compared with similar measures for 1982, 1995, and 2002. Methods—The analyses presented in this report are based on a nationally representative sample of 12,279 women and 10,403 men aged 15–44 years in the household population of the United States. The overall response rate for the 2006–2010 NSFG was 77%—78% for women and 75% for men. Results—The percentage of women who were currently cohabiting (living with a man in a sexual relationship) rose from 3.0% in 1982 to 11% in 2006– 2010; it was higher in some groups, including Hispanic groups, and the less educated. In 2006–2010, women and men married for the first time at older ages than in previous years. The median age at first marriage was 25.8 for women and 28.3 for men. Premarital cohabitation contributed to the delay in first marriage for both women and men.

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First marriages in the United States: data from the 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth.

References to the second demographic transition (SDT) have increased dramatically in the past two decades. The SDT predicts unilinear change toward very low fertility and a diversity of union and family types. The primary driver of these changes is a powerful, inevitable, and irreversible shift in attitudes and norms in the direction of greater individual freedom and self-actualization. First, we describe the origin of this framework and its evolution over time. Second, we review the empirical fit of the framework to major changes in demographic and family behavior in the United States, the West, and beyond. As has been the case for other unilinear, developmental theories of demographic or family change, the SDT failed to predict many contemporary patterns of change and difference. Finally, we review previous critiques and identify fundamental weaknesses of this perspective, and we provide brief comparisons to selected alternative approaches.

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The Second Demographic Transition Theory: A Review and Appraisal

Etude de la production litteraire en termes relationnels, en construisant le champ litteraire, c'est-a-dire l'espace des prises de position litteraires qui sont possibles dans une periode donnee et dans une societe donnee. Les prises de position naissent de la rencontre entre les habitus d'agents particuliers et leur position, dans un champ de positions, defini par la distribution d'une forme specifique de capital. Ce capital litteraire (ou artistique, ou philosophique) fonctionne a l'interieur d'une "economie" dont la logique est inverse de l'economie plus large de la societe. L'"interet dans le desinteret" se comprend dans l'examen des relations structurales entre le champ de la production litteraire et celui des rapports de classes. De nombreux effets, a l'interieur du champ litteraire, naissent des homologies entre les positions a l'interieur des deux champs. Analyse du cas particulier du champ litteraire a la fin du XIX s. en France.

The field of cultural production, or: the economic world reversed in Sociologie empirique de la littérature et des arts.

This review examines and synthesizes recent research on pathways to parenthood. We begin by providing basic information about patterns, differentials, and trends and discussing adoption and new reproductive technologies. We next turn to several areas of inquiry that became particularly prominent in the last decade: the continued "decoupling" of marriage and childbearing, the parental relationship context of nonmarital childbearing, family structure stability, multiple partner fertility, and racial and ethnic variation in childbearing patterns. We then consider the implications of this body of scholarship and identify avenues for future research. Throughout, we highlight racial/ethnic and social class variation in childbearing patterns. Key Words: cohabitation, demography, family structure, inequality, parenthood, U.S. families. How a family forms and who forms it are fundamental issues in family research. As attested by a large body of academic work and by ongoing debates in the media, political forums, and popular culture, the answers to these questions matter. Moreover, the study of who becomes a parent, when, why, and in what context adds to our understanding of a range of topic domains - social change, economic advantage and disadvantage, and demographic trends, among others. This article focuses on fertility and childbearing patterns, the contexts in which parenthood occurs, and the implications of these patterns. We review research from 1999 through 2009 and synthesize the major contributions of this body of work, focusing largely on studies appearing in peer-reviewed journals from a variety of social science disciplines. Our research began using the Social Sciences Citation Index, a database including 1,700 peer-reviewed journals in roughly 50 disciplines. We also performed targeted, hands-on searches of several interdisciplinary journals, including Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Demography. It is essential to keep in mind the familial backdrop of changes that informs recent research on childbearing (Cherlin, 2010). These include the increasing age at marriage, high levels of marital dissolution, the growing prevalence of cohabitation, and rising proportions of births taking place outside of marriage, to name but a few. It is against this backdrop that the research synthesized here should be contextualized. What emerges is a clear, if complex, picture: Although a baby born today is more likely to be born to a mother-father married couple than to any other family type, he or she has many contemporaries who are born to single mothers, same-sex parents, unmarried cohabiting parents, or who live with adoptive parents. This review is divided into two main sections. The first section provides an overview of contemporary childbearing patterns, reviewing basic descriptive findings about childbearing trends and patterns, the timing of childbearing, childlessness, adoption, and new reproductive technologies. The second section identifies and discusses several major research questions that form key areas of recent and emerging scholarship about childbearing and the ramifications of the parental context in which childbearing occurs. We conclude by summarizing the implications of the research reviewed and identifying directions for future inquiry. BASIC FACTS ON CHILDBEARING PATTERNS TRENDS AND DIFFERENTIALS In 2007, just over 4.3 million babies were born in the United States, bringing the birthrate to population replacement level for the second time since 1971 (B. E. Hamilton, Martin, & Ventura, 2009). Of all births occurring in 2007, the majority were to married couples - a little more than 60%. In 1970, this figure stood at a substantially higher 89.3%. This change is accounted for in part by the rising share of births to unmarried women or couples, from 10.7% in 1970 to 39.7% in 2006 (B. E. Hamilton et al.; Ventura & Bachrach, 2000). …

Diversity in Pathways to Parenthood: Patterns, Implications, and Emerging Research Directions

Archaeological looting correlates with a number of problems, including the destruction of stratigraphic data and the damage and loss of artifacts. Looting is also understood to generate revenue, but systematic analysis of this issue is challenged by its opacity: how can we study the economic effects of archaeological looting when the practice is rarely directly observable? To address this problem, we estimate the market value of archaeological sites where artifacts have been previously excavated and documented, using a machine-learning approach. The first step uses 41,587 sales of objects from 33 firms to train an algorithm to predict the distribution channel, lot packaging, and estimated sale price of objects based on their observable characteristics. The second step uses the trained algorithm to estimate the value of sites in which a large number of artifacts have been legally excavated and documented. We make an out-of-sample prediction on two Syrian sites, Tell Bi’a and Dura Europos.

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A Site-Level Market Model of the Antiquities Trade

In this methods-building article, I show how attention to long-term continuities in female enslavement patterns helps us understand the emergence of the Black Atlantic. Slavery, I argue, is one form of human parasitism. I extend Orlando Patterson’s theory of human parasitism to examine the phenomenon of parasitic intertwining, wherein the forced labor of women became integral to broader social projects including household functioning, elite status maintenance, and population expansion. The thousand-year period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade was once described as a rupture in European slavery, with serfdom gradually supplanting slavery. The mass capture, transport, and enslavement of women, however, continued even as male slaves and ex-slaves gained significant status changes. The entrenchment of women in zonal slave trades generated both a potent cultural logic and a structural blueprint for the transatlantic trade.

Long-range continuities in comparative and historical sociology: The case of parasitism and women’s enslavement

Technologies of containment and storage change the materiality and ontology of archaeological artefacts. This article looks at the relationship between ISO shipping containers and the assemblages o...

Fiona Greenland

Papers

Diversity in Pathways to Parenthood: Patterns, Implications, and Emerging Research Directions

A Site-Level Market Model of the Antiquities Trade

Long-range continuities in comparative and historical sociology: The case of parasitism and women’s enslavement

Free ports and steel containers: The corpora delicti of artefact trafficking

Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy