Suchergebnisse

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Dedication -- Note -- Prologue: Why I Do This -- Part One: Prehistory -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5 -- 6 -- 7 -- 8 -- Part Two: Newcastle -- 9 -- 10 -- 11 -- 12 -- 13 -- 14 -- 15 -- 16 -- Part Three: Northton -- 17 -- 18 -- 19 -- 20 -- 21 -- 22 -- 23 -- 24 -- 25 -- 26 -- 27 -- 28 -- 29 -- 30 -- 31 -- Part Four: Famous Athlete Youth Programs -- 32 -- 33 -- 34 -- 35 -- 36 -- 37 -- 38 -- 39 -- Part Five: Better Than You -- 40 -- 41 -- 42 -- 43 -- 44 -- 45 -- 46 -- 47 -- 48 -- 49 -- 50 -- 51 -- 52 -- 53 -- 54 -- 55 -- 56 -- 57 -- 58 -- Epilogue: Nine Years and Counting -- Acknowledgments -- Copyright Page

Hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and profound, It Takes a Worried Man is the true story of a young husband and father whose life is changed forever by his wife's breast cancer diagnosis. Following Brendan Halpin's cranky, irreverent and lustful thoughts through the diagnosis and treatment of his wife, Kirsten, It Takes a Worried Man is an unflinching and raw look at how cancer transforms a family. It's also the funniest book about cancer you'll ever read.

The optimal matching (OM) algorithm is widely used for sequence analysis in sociology. It has a natural interpretation for discrete-time sequences but is also widely used for life-history data, which are continuous in time. Life-history data are arguably better dealt with in terms of episodes rather than as strings of time-unit observations, and in this article, the author examines whether the OM algorithm is unsuitable for such sequences. A modified version of the algorithm is proposed, weighting OM's elementary operations inversely with episode length. In the general case, the modified algorithm produces pairwise distances much lower than the standard algorithm, the more the sequences are composed of long spells in the same state. However, where all the sequences in a data set consist of few long spells, and there is low variability in the number of spells, the modified algorithm generates an overall pattern of distances that is not very different from standard OM.

Has the massive transformation of the class structure over the twentieth century changed the consequences of class? In particular, does the fact that the salariat has taken over from the manual working classes as the largest category mean that the implications of membership of the salariat for one's life chances is no longer the same? This paper takes retrospective life-history data from the British Household Panel Study and models patterns of change in the structure of work-life mobility between the ages of 25 and 35 for individuals born between 1900 and 1959. The purpose is to seek evidence of broad changes in the consequences of class, through the middle and late 20th century, using an extremely valuable data resource. The evidence suggests that there is cross-cohort change in the patterns of work-life mobility, both in terms of traditional class categories and in terms of the relationship between class and more general employment status categories, but more strongly in the latter case. In general, the pattern is one of declining immobility, including declining salariat retentiveness. The paper concludes with a consideration of what the data mean, and what this particular bounded analysis has to say about the question of change in the consequences of class.

Simulation has a long and checkered history in areas of substantive interest to sociology, from before Forrester's model of overpopulation to up-to-the-minute approaches based on complexity theory or distributed artificial intelligence. Although in some respects it has failed to live up to its inflated promise, it offers nonetheless a very useful paradigm. Moreover, advancing simulation technology offers some advantages, particularly the modelling of macro-micro links too complex to deal with linguistically or mathematically. This article briefly reviews the history of simulation in sociology and goes on to consider in more detail specific areas such as system dynamics, cellular automata, iterated game theory, distributed artificial intelligence, neural networks, multilevel simulation, simulation of social networks and organizations, and policy-oriented tax-benefit microsimulation. It concludes with a consideration of the role of statistics in simulation and the very good potential for expanded use of simulation in sociology.

Longitudinal data is often difficult to use, and continuous histories collected in a panel are a particularly unfriendly case. This paper reports an exercise to re-organise the British Household Panel Study's work-life history data into a format more convenient for analysis. The British Household Panel Study collects extensive labour market history information from its respondents, both during the panel period and retrospectively from labour market entry. That this information is of necessity stored in multiple locations, and of varying levels of detail, has made use somewhat inconvenient. This paper describes an exercise to bring the labour market information together in a more convenient format. It also considers some of the problems of retrospective and panel longitudinal data, and discusses issues of recall error and measurement error. The data files described are available through the UK Data Archive. Longitudinal Data, Work-Life Histories, Recall Bias, Measurement Error.

"Using data from the 1911 Irish Census, and adopting a Weberian focus, this paper investigates the separate explanatory power of class and status in the stratification of outcomes. We find that both class and status have independent explanatory power in terms of the geographical residential patterns of various occupations, including accountants, in early twentieth-century Dublin, Ireland. We also demonstrate the usefulness of considering the experience of accountants in a comparative context." (author's abstract)

This report examines structural change in employment and the development of servicesector jobs in Germany and Britain between 1993 and 2002. During this period the British labour market was buoyant, while the employment situation in Germany can only be described as dismal. There is much political interest in the potential for creating new jobs in the service sector. But these developments raise a number of controversial issues when this involves the potential expansion of low-skill, low-wage service jobs, especially in a country such as Germany which has traditionally enjoyed a high-skill, high-wage equilibrium. The project was designed to compare the characteristics of service employment, using comparable longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis covered the different patterns of growth in service occupations and industries in the two countries and the quality of these jobs in terms of wages and working hours. We were interested in finding out what kind of jobs had been growing and what kinds of people have been taking them up. In particular, we were interested in tracking transition patterns between non-employment and employment, as well as in examining how far, and for whom, service employment is precarious. ; In der vorliegenden Untersuchung werden der Strukturwandel in der Beschäftigung und die Entstehung von Arbeitsplätzen im Dienstleistungsbereich in Deutschland und Großbritannien in den Jahren 1993 bis 2002 analysiert. In diesem Zeitraum erholte sich der britische Arbeitsmarkt beträchtlich, wohingegen die Beschäftigungssituation in Deutschland nur als trostlos bezeichnet werden kann. Es gibt ein großes politisches Interesse an dem Potential für neue Arbeitsplätze im Dienstleistungsbereich. Doch führen diese Entwicklungen auch zu Kontroversen hinsichtlich einer möglichen Ausweitung von niedrig qualifizierten und niedrig bezahlten Tätigkeiten, vor allem in einem Land wie Deutschland, das lange Zeit ein Gleichgewicht von hoch qualifizierten Tätigkeiten bei hohen Löhnen hatte. Die Untersuchung war angelegt auf einen Vergleich charakteristischer Merkmale der Dienstleistungsbeschäftigung; dazu wurden vergleichbare Längsschnittdaten des British Household Panel und des deutschen Sozioökonomischen Panel genutzt. Die Analyse untersuchte die unterschiedlichen Wachstumsmuster von Dienstleistungstätigkeiten und Dienstleistungsbranchen in beiden Ländern und die Qualität dieser Tätigkeiten hinsichtlich Entlohnung und Arbeitszeitregelungen. Es sollte herausgefunden werden, welche Arten von Tätigkeiten zunahmen und wer sie annahm. Insbesondere ging es darum, Übergangsmuster von Nichtbeschäftigung in Beschäftigung nachzuvollziehen und dabei zu untersuchen, inwiefern und für welche Personen sich die Beschäftigung im Dienstleistungsbereich als prekär erweist.

"This report examines structural change in employment and the development of servicesector jobs in Germany and Britain between 1993 and 2002. During this period the British labour market was buoyant, while the employment situation in Germany can only be described as dismal. There is much political interest in the potential for creating new jobs in the service sector. But these developments raise a number of controversial issues when this involves the potential expansion of low-skill, low-wage service jobs, especially in a country such as Germany which has traditionally enjoyed a high-skill, high-wage equilibrium. The project was designed to compare the characteristics of service employment, using comparable longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis covered the different patterns of growth in service occupations and industries in the two countries and the quality of these jobs in terms of wages and working hours. We were interested in finding out what kind of jobs had been growing and what kinds of people have been taking them up. In particular, we were interested in tracking transition patterns between non-employment and employment, as well as in examining how far, and for whom, service employment is precarious." (author's abstract)

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables and Figures -- Contributors -- Chapter One. Introduction: Social Stratification, Welfare Regimes, and Access to Home Ownership -- Chapter Two. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in West Germany -- Chapter Three. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in France -- Chapter Four. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Belgium -- Chapter Five. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in the Netherlands -- Chapter Six. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Denmark -- Chapter Seven. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Norway -- Chapter Eight. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Italy -- Chapter Nine. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Spain -- Chapter Ten. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Britain -- Chapter Eleven. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Ireland -- Chapter Twelve. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in the United States -- Chapter Thirteen. Home Ownership and Social Inequality in Israel -- Chapter Fourteen. Summary and Conclusions -- Index