The United States population is older and more diverse than ever before. Older Immigrant and minorities have been found to suffer from health care disparities. The National Institute of Health (2002) has identified discrimination as one of the factors that contributes to health disparities among immigrants and minority populations. The purpose ofthis qualitative phenomenological study was to explore older Iranian immigrants perceptions/experiences of discrimination in their encounter with the American health care system. In depth interviews were conducted with 15 Iranians who had immigrated to the United States after the age of 50. The following major themes emerged from the study: 1)American doctors dont discriminate, 2) class discrimination in American and Iranian health care system and 3) treating the illness and not the whole person. In general the participants reported that they did not perceive/experience discrimination in their encounterwith the American health care system. In fact majority of the participants reported highly positive impressions of American health care providers. Some participants claimed that language barriers may have protected them from recognizing possible discriminations, while others reported that this absence of perceived discrimination may be a function of American providers perception of a patient as an illness and not a whole person.

The percentage of young adults living in the parental home has increased over the past decade (FP-12-22) . Using 2011 data from the American Community Survey, this profile compares coresiding young adults with their non-coresiding counterparts on key factors associated with a successful transition to adulthood. These factors include school enrollment, employment, wages, parenthood, and marriage.

This paper looks at leveraging DDI to enable semantic linking of social science data to other data and related resources on the Web and is organized into five use cases: (1) Linking related publications; (2) Linking people and organizations; (3) Linking geography; (4) Linking related studies; (5) Linking to licenses.

This research investigates truancy in Washington State framed as an issue of youth rights. Washington's Becca Bill requires schools to track and address students with multiple unexcused absences, using court as a last resort. The study uses mixed methods to explore the variation in truancy and petitions at the school level. It focuses on the experience of truancy up to and including the truancy petition. Count modeling using data on students with unexcused absences from school years 2003-2004 through 2006-2007 examines truancy at the school level. A survey of principals provides information for assessing the role of school environment. A latent class analysis on the survey results forms the basis for a predictive model to determine what changes schools could make to reduce absenteeism. A photography project with youth in two alternative schools, and interviews with parents and other adults who work with youth supplements the quantitative data. The study finds that intergenerational relations are important; that categories of youth rights conflict with each other, and that changes in school environment can affect truancy. It proposes that a model of youth rights other than the tradition of autonomous individuality is needed to reduce truancy while respecting youth rights to education and self-determination.

The Great Recession has coincided with a rise in co-residence among young adult children and their parents. Residing in the parental home is often an adaptive strategy during times of economic distress (Furstenberg, 2010; Settersten & Ray, 2010). Using data from the 1940-2000 U.S. decennial Censuses and the 2010 American Community Survey 1-year estimates, we present a historical view and consider the current marital status of young adult men and women (ages 18-24 and 25-34) living in the parental home. Note: This profile focuses on marital status differences in the percentages of young adults (YAs) living in a parents home. The estimates deviate from those cited in On the Road to Adulthood: Leaving the Parental Home (FP-11-02). The calculations presented in FP-11-02 include currently unmarried YAs living in a college dormitory as living in their parent(s) home, but does not include YAs who were child-in-laws to the household head. For this Profile, percentage of YAs 18-24/25-34 living with a parent = (number of YAs who are a child or child-in-law to the household head /by the total population 18 -24/25-34 years old) X 100.

The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historicalgeographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the regions economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worsters theorizations about hydraulic civilizations from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a hydraulic society on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today.

Asian Americans are often referred to as the model minority due to perceptions of their high income and educational attainment; yet relatively little is known about their economic assimilation experience. The purpose of this study is to determine economic assimilation ofChinese immigrants over time. This research follows a cohort of Chinese immigrants from 1994 to 2011 and compares their earnings performance with natives that have similar educational attainment. Multiple regression analysis is used to analyze data from the Current Population Survey. Results show that, although the cohort of Chinese immigrants initially has earnings substantially lower than the natives, it is only about 10 years before they reach income parity. By 2011, Chinese immigrants earnings exceed natives earnings by about 4 percent. The study concludes that despite the language and adjustment challenges, Chinese immigrants do show rapid economic assimilation in the United States.

To achieve sustainability, the utilitarian tendency toward “the greatest good for the greatest number” must be tempered by a concern for justice. Infrastructure intended to serve the public good frequently has environmental justice implications, meaning the infrastructure often plays a role in inducing or advancing demographic processes of concern: Persistent poverty or segregation, gentrification, wealth or white flight, and community gating. Sub/urban drinking water supplies in North Carolina, USA, have regularly been secured by constructing dams to impound drinking water supply reservoirs. Though intended to serve the public good, these reservoirs appear to implicate one or more demographic processes of concern. We used higher resolution, publicly available US Census data and an area-weighted GIS analysis to explore whether 66 sub/urban drinking water supply reservoirs in North Carolina have induced gentrification in lakeside communities. Our principal findings include: (1) The ratio of white people to non-white people was significantly higher in communities within 0.5 mile of reservoirs’ shorelines than in more distant communities; and (2) even as North Carolina overall became less white from 1990 to 2010, the ratio of white people to non-white people within the 0.5 mile areas increased relative to the overall ratio in the State. These tendencies are consistent with the proposition that our sample of North Carolina sub/urban drinking water supply reservoirs have induced racial gentrification in the past and are continuing to have a gentrifying or community gating effect. These tendencies raise environmental justice and social sustainability concerns that should, at a minimum, be taken into account in planning and building new North Carolina drinking water supply reservoirs.

This paper estimates the political and economic effects of the 19th century disenfranchisement of black citizens in the U.S. South. Using adjacent county-pairs that straddle state boundaries, I examine theeffect of voting restrictions on political competition, public goods, and factor markets. I find that poll taxes and literacy tests each lowered overall electoral turnout by 8-22% and increased the Democratic vote share in elections by 1-7%. Employing newly collected data on schooling inputs, I show that disenfranchisement reduced the teacher-child ratio in black schools by 10-23%, with no significanteffects on white teacher-child ratios. I develop a model of suffrage restriction and redistribution in a 2-factor economy with migration and agricultural production to generate sufficient statistics for welfare analysis of the incidence of black disenfranchisement. Consistent with the model, disenfranchised counties experienced a 3.5% increase in farm values per acre, despite a 4% fall in the black population. The estimated factor market responses suggest that black labor bore a collective loss from disenfranchisement equivalent to at least 15% of annual income, with landowners experiencing a 12% gain.

The Ray Marshall Center is beginning work with the Texas Early Learning Council and University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston to identify and evaluate education programs and services in Texas for children under the age of 13. The project has four objectives: 1. To understand and estimate the number of children under age 13 who will be eligible for early childhood education programs and services and before and after school-age care programs and services in the near term (2012-2015). 2. To understand and document the current supply across the state of Texas of formal providers of early childhood education programs and services as well as school-age care for children under the age of 13 based on data from federal, state and local agencies and service providers. 3. To conduct a gap analysis based on objectives #1 and #2. 4. To generate a final, comprehensive state of Texas needs assessment analyzing Texas’ early childhood education and school-age care system; and provides recommendations for meeting identified gaps in programs and services and quality and recommendations for conducting periodic needs assessment.

Numerous assimilation analysts have argued that Asian American groups are on their way to full integration into the “core society,” by which they mean white middle-class society. While some Asian Americans today trace family histories back to nineteenth-century immigrants, most have a more recent immigration background. Today whites and others still apply numerous elements of an old anti-Asian framing to Asian Americans. For example, one savvy higher education journalist recently noted that numerous articles in college newspapers have used Asian Americans as the point of humor, but their portrayals usually feed the “model minority” myth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants and their children—mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino—suffered extremely blatant and institutionalized racism. Assessing the adaptation of Asian immigrants and their children, Nazli Kibria distinguishes between an “ethnic American” model and a “racial minority” model of assimilation.

We propose the rise of crack cocaine markets as an explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomes beginning in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure to date the arrival of crack markets in cities and states, we show that large increases in murder and incarceration rates occur after these dates. Black high school graduation rates also decline, and we estimate that the emergence of crack markets accounts for between 40 and 73 percent of the fall in black male high school graduation rates. We argue that the primary mechanism is reduced educational investments in response to decreased returns to schooling,

In many database applications, ranking queries may reference both text and numeric attributes, where the ranking functions are based on both semantic distances/similarities for text attributes and numeric distances for numeric attributes. In this paper, we propose a new method for evaluating such type of ranking queries over a relational database. By statistics and training, this method builds a mechanism that combines the semantic and numeric distances, and the mechanism can be used to balance the effects of text attributes and numeric attributes on matching a given query and tuples in database search. The basic idea of the method is to create an index based on WordNet to expand the tuple words semantically for text attributes and on the information of numeric attributes. The candidate results for a query are retrieved by the index and a simple SQL selection statement, and then top-N answers are obtained. The results of extensive experiments indicate that the performance of this new strategy is efficient and effective.

In 2010, there were over 101,000 more adult immigrant women than immigrant men entering in the United States with a legal immigration status or adjusting their status while in the U.S. to become lawful permanent residents.[1] In this fact sheet, we discuss the policies that that govern whether, and how, women may enter the country or adjust their status once here as well as those that shape what immigrant womens lives are like once here.Historically, immigration laws regarding women were based in the law of coverture, which was derived from English common law. Under this law, a wife had no legal identity of her own; it was derived from her husband. Immigration law traditionally viewed womens immigration status as derivative of her husbands status. Thankfully, we have moved beyond those days. However, there are still ways in which immigrant womens status as women shapes how policies relate to them.Currently, the Immigration and Naturalization Act governs who can and cannot immigrate legally to this country. Based on this act, the primary means of entry into the country are through family sponsorship, employment, or if one is an asylees or refugee. While the act does not specify different requirements for men and women, women tend to be more numerous in the family-related categories. [2]

The Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative (MHDC) is a partnership of nine institutions striving to connect history of medicine collections in an open access digital environment. This distinguished group of institutions possesses a wealth of physicians’ papers, correspondence, institutional records, books, and images integral to understanding the history and social context of western medicine. These collections have been geographically and technologically isolated from one another, which has presented significant obstacles for researchers in the study of the medical humanities. Digitally linking collections across institutions will increase efficiency in discovery and expand access to under-utilized materials. The proposed planning project will build on the Medical Heritage Library, funded by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to create a partnership model for engaging scholars in a multi-institutional collaboration.

We document a within-month mortality cycle where deaths decline before the first day of the month and spike after the first. This cycle is present across a wide variety of causes and demographic groups. A similar cycle exists for a range of economic activities, suggesting the mortality cycle may be due to short-term variation in levels of economic activity. We provide evidence that the within-month activity cycle is generated by liquidity. Our results suggest a causal pathway whereby liquidity problems reduce activity, which in turn reduces mortality. These relationships may help explain the procyclical nature of mortality.

The existing literature on the relationship between the share of elderly in a community and the support for local public education has led to mixed results to date. One potential reason behind this is that the share of elderly in a community is endogenous, and it is very difficult to disentangle the effects of individuals aging in place from that of dynamic Tiebout sorting. The point of this paper is to carefully document the degree to which aging in place has occurred in the American suburbs, and to estimate the degree to which it has influenced school finance once the initial settlers of these suburbs were no longer the parents of school-aged children. We hand-match data from the 1950 and 1960 Censuses of Population and Housing to more recent data to link postwar suburban development to later school finance. Using a novel method for identifying the causal effects of aging in place, we find that the percentage of elderly adults in a school district is negatively related to the level of support for public schooling, and that this is particularly true for school districts in metropolitan areas where the school-aged population is more heavily nonwhite relative to the elderly population.