Family characteristics and intra-familial relationships for example, family structure, communication within families, and an adolescents perception of parental control are foremost among the factors that influence an adolescents sexual behaviors. Some family characteristics influence African American teens differently from the way they do teens of other racial or ethnic groups. In addition, the effects of these characteristics often differ by gender within the African American teen population. Although many family characteristics and their influences cannot be altered, a clear understanding of these influences on adolescent sexual behaviors can inform interventions to meet the needs of African American teens. This issue brief uses findings from research literature published between the late 1970s and the early 21st century to examine the relationship between family influences and the sexual behavior of African American adolescents (Leigh and Andrews 2002).

Since 1965, the US has seen increasingly large numbers of immigrants crossing its borders. Indeed, more immigrants are arriving now than at any point in the past; the 1990's saw more immigrants enter the US than any previous decade (INS 1999). A disturbing corollary to the recent explosion in immigration is the corresponding decline of immigrant wages relative to the wages of natives. A cursory glance at the literature strongly suggests the changing national origin of immigrants as the main cause of this relative wage decline. As a prime example, Mexican immigrants now outnumber any other national group while having one of the biggest relative wage gaps, with Mexican immigrant males earning on average some 50% less than native males (Ruggles and Sobek, 1997).

The years between 1910 and 1920 witnessed the first wave of the "Great Migration" of African Americans to the North. This article uses new census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series project to study self-selection Patterns in African American migration during this important decade. The results indicate that, contrary to contemporary accounts, migration rates rose at least as much among the literate as among the illiterate (and perhaps more), and migration increased more for married African Americans than for the unmarried.

The economic history of African American workers since 1940 has been marked by alternating episodes of progress and stagnation. Sharp gains in relative incomes during the 1940s were followed by little change in this measure in the 1950s. Renewed progress from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was followed by a new period of stagnation and even decline in relative pay in the 1980s and early 1990s. The important episodes of progress were to a great degree driven by changes on the demand side of the labor market: rapid growth in labor demand—especially for blue-collar workers—during WorldWar II and the effect of new antidiscrimination policies on the demand for black labor after 1965 (Donohue and Heckman 1991; Jaynes andWilliams 1989: 294–96).

This paper posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with persons of the same race. If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbors of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighborhood social capital connections, and the more likely he is to engage in activities which require it. The paper tests this idea using an indicator of individual social capital never previously studied: whether the person uses a carpool to get to work. We identify exogenous variation in adult neighborhood racial makeup arising from the racial makeup of the state in which the person was born in the year that he was born, and relate this exogenous portion of adult neighborhood racial composition to individual carpooling propensity using a TSLS approach. The results from this analysis, and from robustness tests which focus on neighborhoods with virtually identical racial distributions, show evidence of strong cross-racial relational difficulties, but interestingly, only for particular pairs of racial groups.

Internal colonialism & dual labor market theories are used to interpret race, gender, & educational class distributions of occupational prestige. By treating occupational prestige as the dependent variable, the author shows race & gender matters & demonstrates the interaction effect of educational achievement. The study uses data from a weighted 1% randomly selected sample of all high school graduates & higher of the Census Bureau Integrated Public Use Microdata (N = 140,847,881). Analysis of variance shows that each race & gender group means are statistically significant on the Duncan Socioeconomic Index. The author argues that these differences result in likely race, gender, & educational class conflicts.

Using 1990 census data, I examine variations in interracial marriage with non-Latino Whites among native- and foreign-born African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. I further classify Latinos by race and national origin and Asian Americans by national origin. For each minority group, the native-born are much more likely to marry non-Latino Whites than the foreign-born. Interracial marriage with non-Latino Whites differ significantly by minority group: Latino Whites are most likely to marry non-Latino Whites, followed by Asian Americans, Latino non-Whites, and then African Americans. This suggests that race relations are no longer simply White and non-White. Skin tone of non-Whites plays a significant role in variations in intermarriage. Fair skinned minorities are most likely to marry Whites than darker skinned minorities. Skin tone, however, does not explain why persons of one Asian or Latino group have higher levels of intermarriage than those of another Asian or Latino group. To understand Latino and Asian American diversity, we need to take into account cultural differences in countries of origin as well as their divergent experiences in American society.

The U.S. iron and steel industry adopted new technologies during the 1865-1880 period and grew dramatically. In such contexts various models predict an increase in earnings inequality because of variation in worker skills or ability to adapt to an uncertain environment. Evidence here from an 1880 survey of manufacturing firms shows that earnings inequality rose in the iron and steel producing industries more than in other industries during this period. Industry and technological sources are surveyed here to see why and the paper presents a case that uncertainty rather than skill-bias is the simplest description.

am going to propose that we dispense with culture as an explanation for intergroup disparity and get on with doing a serious investigation of the persistence of gaps between nations or between racial or ethnic groups. The basis in evidence for cultural determinism is so shallow--largely a string of anecdotes--that the continuity and persuasiveness of these arguments must be better understood as a matter of racial ideology than serious analysis. Culture becomes a refuge for shabby research. Cultural variations do not explain economic differences between groups.