This paper examines the extent to which developmental idealism has been disseminated in Malawi. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values about development and the relationships between development and family structures and behavior. Developmental idealism states that attributes of...

This study proposes new ways of comparing discourses on population and argues that these discourses concern both management of the reproduction of human bodies on a massive scale, and competition at global and local levels for resources and/or an improved position in global and local...

<DIV>Until the 1940s, social life in Taiwan was generally organized through the family—marriages were arranged by parents, for example, and senior males held authority. In the following years, as Taiwan evolved rapidly from an agrarian to an industrialized society, individual decisions became less...</div>

<DIV><DIV><DIV><P>In an era when half of marriages end in divorce, cohabitation has become more commonplace and those who do get married are doing so at an older age. So why do people marry when they do? And why do some couples choose to cohabit? A team of expert family sociologists examines these timely...</p></div></div></div>

This paper examines methods of decomposing a difference in levels between groups for a dependent variable such as income. Applied to regression equations, this technique estimates the contribution to the difference from divergent characteristics and divergent rates of converting characteristics...

A recognized problem in mounting longitudinal surveys concerns the costs and difficulties in maintaining response rates over time. This article details the techniques used to minimize response loss in a longitudinal study which maintained an 89% response rate over five interviews covering a...

Problems of maintaining respondent rapport in surveys are exacerbated when respondents are asked to participate repeatedly over time or when several members of a family are interviewed. This article details the techniques used to maintain respondent rapport in a longitudinal study involving six...

Survey methods have been criticized for producing unreliable, invalid data and for failing to provide contextual information to test complex causal hypotheses. We discuss a technique that combines survey and ethnographic methods at every stage of the data collection process to overcome these...