Casey Borch

Many studies on the fertility differential by religion have considered both Catholics and Protestants to be equally homogenous groups. Contrary to these studies, we contend that Protestant fertility must be studied in the context of heterogeneous groups. Specifically, conservative Protestantism, with its beliefs about artificial birth control mirroring Catholic teaching, should be examined separately from other Protestant traditions. Using data from the General Social Survey we find that conservative Protestants and Catholics had about the same level of fertility, while mainline Protestants have a fertility rate that is significantly lower than that of Catholics. We also examine the changes in these differences over time.

School systems in the United States are increasingly integrating computers into the classroom. Yet, we know little about the factors that determine successful adoption, use, and attitudes toward the computers. The City Council of Birmingham, Alabama is the first in the United States to provide One Laptop Per Child XO laptops to all students in first-fifth grades in the Birmingham City School System. The purpose of this study is to present the survey results examining factors that are related to XO laptop usage and attitudes among fourth- and fifth-grade students in Birmingham City schools. The results indicate that factors vary depending upon the type of use or attitudes being examined. Teachers' use of the XO laptop in the classroom is a primary factor that is related to the frequency of XO activity use and students' attitudes toward the XOs, while teachers' ability is related to the hours of XO usage in school. These results highlight the importance of having well-trained teachers who embrace using the XO laptop in the classroom in order to facilitate positive attitudes toward technology and its use among students.

This study examines the earnings of African immigrants across three waves of U.S. Census data (1980, 1990, and 2000). The authors find that the U.S. labor market favors White male immigrants, followed by Black male and White female immigrants, and finally Black women. The authors also find that male immigrants earned more per hour than female immigrants regardless of race. Considering change over time, this study finds that the earnings gap between Black and White male immigrants is growing larger over time, the positive association between foreign work experience and earnings is attenuated over time, and for women, the positive effect of earning a college degree on earnings is growing stronger over time. These findings confirm many of the conclusions reached by other race and gender scholars; however, the authors extend this work by focusing on male and female African immigrants, who are largely under-represented in the literature, and by examining change over time.

In this article, we test whether or not positive/negative sanctioning increases religious behavior. Using data from the 1998 congregational module of the General Social Survey we find that, net of other predictors, immediate positive sanctions (receiving help from the congregation) and immediate negative sanctions (receiving criticism from the congregation) significantly increase the amount of money given by respondents to religious organizations. Our results also indicate that sanctions promised in the future (belief in Heaven and belief in Hell) have little to no effect on religious giving. Furthermore, we find that immediate positive and negative sanctions as well as future negative sanctions predict greater participation in religious organizations, while future positive sanctions show no such effects. The results are discussed in the context of the emerging trend of waning religious involvement in the contemporary United States.

Using growth curve modeling techniques, this research investigates whether military spending improved or worsened the economic well-being of citizens

Whereas much theoretical and empirical work concerning exchange networks examines the payoffs to actors in particular positions, a much smaller body of work focuses on exchange patterns (i.e., who exchanges with whom). The problem we address in this paper is that the existing methods to predict patterns of exchange are limited by computational cost to relatively small networks. We develop a computationally efficient method for locating and predicting patterns of exchange. The theory on which we draw argues that each actor’s resistance to unfavorable offers is based on relative position within the exchange network. Using experimental data we first show that the order of exchanges does affect payoffs as the network structure changes over time. We then attempt to predict the ordering of exchanges for a number of networks using three existing methods and one new method derived from our theory. As a test of the predicted orderings, we compare each method’s predictions for six exchange networks against experimental results. In general, the results suggest that our more parsimonious method performs quite well relative to the more computationally complex prediction methods.