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R Schoen

Publications and source records attributed to R Schoen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1985

A life table analysis of the labor force participation of U.S. nurses, 1949 to 1980.

Data from seven inventories of registered nurses by the American Nurses' Association and the 1980 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses are analyzed in a life table format to examine changes in nurse labor force participation. The results show a substantial increase in the labor force participation of nurses, as a nurse aged 20 could be expected to spend 28.5 years in the labor force in 1949 and 34.1 years in the labor force in 1980. Much of that rise seems attributable to increasing full-time employment. There is a positive relationship between participation in the nursing labor force and a nurse's highest level of educational preparation, but that relationship is not a simple one. Nurses with a master's or higher degree are very active in the labor force, while diploma nurses are much less likely to be employed. At the same time, nurses with baccalaureate degrees have relatively low rates of labor force participation, but associate degree nurses have rates rivaling the most highly educated.

Actuarial Analysis↗
PubMed1985

Marriage and divorce in twentieth century American cohorts.

Marital status life tables have provided a basis for describing the marriage, divorce, and mortality experience of U.S. cohorts born 1888-1950. In brief, marriage occurred earlier and became more universal from the earliest cohorts to those of the late 1930s. More recent cohorts show declines in the proportion ever marrying and increases in the mean age at marriage. Period data for 1980 and cumulative cohort data by age suggest the likelihood of a continuing retreat from first marriage. Divorce has been rising steadily, with the latest cohorts indicating that 46 percent of male marriages and 42 percent of female marriages will end in divorce. Period data for males in 1980 raise the possibility that levels of divorce may have reached a peak, but cumulative cohort data by age show no such pattern. The present results are consistent with the view that a fundamental change in the traditional concept of marriage is underway. Traditional marriage involved the husband providing the wife with economic support and protection in return for her companionship and maternal services. Strong social pressures urged men and women to marry, and made the coveted services married persons provided each other difficult to obtain elsewhere. Recent economic changes have undermined the social and economic forces that maintained the institution of marriage. The U.S. economy has grown to include a large service sector in its labor force, and that growth has produced a dramatic increase in female labor force opportunities (Oppenheimer, 1970). The resultant large scale participation of women in economic activity blurs the traditional division of labor by sex, and goes to the very heart of the traditional marriage "bargain." At the same time, economic changes have weakened family ties by encouraging lower fertility, stressing achieved as opposed to ascribed characteristics, and fostering geographical mobility (Goode, 1970). The "marital union" of the past may be giving way to the "marital partnership" of the future, which will accommodate informal as well as formal marriages, less dependence between spouses, greater egalitarianism, lower fertility, and higher levels of divorce.

Actuarial Analysis↗
PubMed1984

Cohort marriage and divorce in five Western countries.

An analysis of cohort trends in family formation and dissolution in five Western countries during the twentieth century is presented. The countries concerned are the United States, England and Wales, Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland. "To obtain the indicators of family formation and dissolution used in this study, male and female cohort marital status life tables were constructed in each of the five countries for single year cohorts born between the years 1888 and 1945." Consideration is also given to the impact of changes in mortality. Data are from official sources. This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the 1983 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (see Population Index, Vol. 49, No. 3, Fall 1983, pp. 384-5).

Americas↗
PubMed1983

Measuring the tightness of a marriage squeeze.

The "marriage squeeze," or the effect on marriage of an imbalance between the numbers of males and females, has been seen as having a great influence on contemporary marriage behavior. Nonetheless, the literature does not contain a clear definition of exactly what a marriage squeeze is and contains few quantitative estimates of its impact on marriage. The present article provides a precise definition of the marriage squeeze in equation (2), and applies it to measure both artificially produced marriage squeezes in two-sex nuptiality stable populations and the experience of the United States during the period 1950-1990. The marriage squeeze is shown to be capable of producing significant changes in both the level and distribution of marriage, and it appears to be having such an impact in some contemporary Third World societies. For developed countries in general and for the United States in particular, the marriage squeeze exerts little influence on the level of marriage but has a considerable effect on the distribution of marriages. The U.S. age-sex composition of the year 1978, compared to that of the year 1951, is shown to imply a 0.54 year decrease in the male mean age at marriage and a 0.53 year increase in the female mean age at marriage, as well as an 18 percent reduction in the variance of the male ages at marriage and a 33 percent increase in the variance of the female ages. The social and economic implications of such changes have yet to be fully explored.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1982

A remark on minimal hypercones.

Let M be a minimal hypersurface in the sphere. It is shown that if the cone over M is a stable critical point for the area functional, then M admits a conformally equivalent metric with positive scalar curvature. This gives both topological and geometric restrictions on such hypersurfaces M.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1981

The harmonic mean as the basis of a realistic two-sex marriage model.

The "two-sex problem" is one of attempting to preserve the essential character of male and female rates of marriage (or birth), since the expression of those rates is influenced both by the age-sex composition of the population and the underlying age-sex schedule of preferences. The present paper focuses on marriage and advances a theoretically based, realistic, and conceptually simple solution. In the continuous case, where exact male and female ages are used, equation (11) provides a mathematical relationship which equates the sum of the male and female marriage propensities of the observed population with that of the model. When discrete age intervals are used, the two-sex consistency condition is given by equation (14) which equates observed and model population rates calculated using the harmonic means of the number of persons in the relevant male and female age groups. The harmonic mean consistency condition is shown to be fully sensitive to the competitive nature of the "marriage market." When compared with alternative approaches to the two-sex problem in the context of data for Sweden, 1961-64, the simple harmonic mean method yields results fairly similar to those of the other methods. None of the two-sex methods do particularly well at predicting the actual distribution of marriages, however. The likely reason is that the underlying marriage preferences changed, a circumstance which emphasizes the importance of carefully conceptualizing how observed behavior can be decomposed into the effects produced by age-sex composition and those produced by the underlying preferences.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Calculating life tables by estimating Chiang's a from observed rates.

A simple, accurate method of life table construction is advanced based upon a new way to estimate Chiang's nax (the average number of years lived in the x to x + n age interval by those dying in the interval). The estimate for nax leads immediately to an expression for lx+n (the survivors to age x + n) in terms of lx and the known mortality rates for the interval x to x+n and the two adjacent intervals. The complete solution for the basic life table is given. The proposed method and five other easily applied methods are then compared against the standard provided by the U.S. life tables for 1969-1971. The results attest to the excellent performance and high degree of accuracy of the proposed method. Finally, extensions of the method to multiple decrement and associated single decrement life tables are briefly described.

Humans↗
PubMed1977

A two-sex nuptiality-mortality life table.

The "problem of the sexes" has been one of trying to reconcile inconsistent male and female demographic rates. The present paper deals with that question in the context of a two-sex nuptiality-mortality life table. A "rectangular" population, with equal numbers of persons in each age-sex group, is introduced as a standard, and a standardization relationship expressed in equation (9) relates changes in rectangular population rates to changes in age-sex composition. The standardization relationship is shown to satisfy a number of desirable properties and produce a realistic two-sex model. The standardization approach is then applied to data from Sweden for 1973, and the results and their implications are discussed. In particular, it is seen that the total number of marriages in a two-sex population neither is nor should be bounded by the total numbers of marriages in the associated male and female one-sex nuptiality-mortality tables.

Female↗
PubMed1975

California's experience with non-adversary divorce.

California's Family Law Act of 1969, effective January 1, 1970, instituted non-adversary proceedings for divorce, suggested a more equal division of community property and reduced the minimum waiting time for a final divorce decree. A rapid increase in the number of divorces granted in California followed. Analysis revealed that the 1969 Law did not lead to any real increase in marital dissolution among Californians or produce any significant changes in the characteristics of the population filing for divorce. What was seen were certain modifications in behavior on the part of divorcing persons to take advantage of the Law's new provisions.

California↗
PubMed1975

Constructing increment-decrement life tables.

A life table model which can recognize increments (or entrants) as well as decrements has proven to be of considerable value in the analysis of marital status patterns, labor force participation patterns, and other areas of substantive interest. Nonetheless, relatively little work has been done on the methodology of increment-decrement (or combined) life tables. The present paper reviews the general, recursive solution of Schoen and Nelson (1974), develops explicit solutions for three cases of particular interest, and compares alternative approaches to the construction of increment-decrement tables.

Adult↗