How Does Texting Affect Our Lives Essay

I found myself when writing essays writing how text. I use a lot of shortcuts when writing; Instead of me writing the word† you† I would write â€Å"u†. This affects the way I write tremendously at times. It’s the new technology that’s doing this. My mother has witnessed more than one group of e-mailers go spiraling down into a full blown argument fueled by their thumbs of quickly expressed words of stupidity, when a simple phone call or physical meeting would have resulted in a much more civilized result. People have taken a lot of shortcuts in life through texting. Some can’t live without it. Texting ruins our ability to concentrate on one thing at a time? For example, a personal gripe of mine has to do with people texting while I am trying to tell them something, causing them to look up and say, â€Å"wait, huh? â€Å", and it is all too common. What happens when the ability to drive is hindered? Just ask the parents of one of our graduating seniors last year, who lost his life while texting and driving in his vehicle; unfortunately incidents such as these are not isolated. This is why it is illegal to drive while texting. Talking on the phone while driving is one thing, at least you are looking straight head.

How far did America achieveprosperity in the 1920s? Essay

The 1920s was a time of great change in the USA’s economic situation. After the First World War, America experienced an economic boom, which led to the state of society changing by vast differences. These differences were also apparent in the way that the change effected different people in different situations. The number of people living below the bread line in 1928 increased to an estimated forty-two percent of the American population, however this was during the same period that the number of Americans owning cars was around one car to every five people. Therefore, there is great controversy over to what extent the USA achieved prosperity in the 1920s. Prosperity is a word that is used to describe affluence and wealth within a country. Estimating the rate at which a country experiences prosperity during a period would reveal hoe rich and well off that country was at the time. Many factors contribute and deduct from the prosperity of America during this period, as it is therefore difficult to say how far the current wealth of the country spread within all areas of society. Factors that would state that America’s prosperity spread throughout the nation during the 1920s include the new industries and new industrial methods of the time, mass marketing of new products and the motorcar industry. However, contradicting these areas of American industry include the farming situation at the time, overpopulation of the country, USA’s black population, new immigrants to the country and people involved in old industries. During the 1920s, new industries and new methods of production spread through American manufacturing. It was able to exploit it’s vast natural resources of raw materials to produce steel, chemicals, glass and machinery. These products then became the foundation for secondary industries- or consumer goods. Telephones, radios, vacume cleaners, and washing machines were mass-produced and therefore more people could afford them. Such an example shows hoe America was developing well as an industrial nation, and reveals how the people of the country were now able to buy consumer goods, which before were they were unable to afford. Within this same period, big industries were developing advertising and marketing techniques. Advertising companies were a resultant factor, and came about as groups developed their ideas of propaganda developed during World War One and applied them to industry. This aspect of American society is further evidence for how the USA was favouring the consumer aspect of living in the early twentieth century. Perhaps the most significant contribution to showing how all areas of America succeeded in achieving prosperity in the 1920s is the motor car industry. In 1900, only four thousand cars were built. By 1929, four million, eight hundred thousand were made- indeed it was believed that a Ford Model- T was completed every ten seconds. By 1928, the industry was America’s most successful, and employed hundred of thousands employees directly, and yet more indirectly. The car had vast impacts on the rest of American industry. The businesses supplying raw materials required to make a car also prospered at a similar rate. More glass, rubber and steel were required; boosting these areas of industry. Furthermore, increased amounts of petrol were required, and more people found employment- building miles of roads across the country to cater for the increased amount of traffic. The car industry also stimulated the housing industry. It meant that more people were able to buy homes away from the cities in the suburbs, and commute on a daily basis into town. This factor, I feel was the most important cause to America’s successful spread of prosperity in the 1920s. Apposed to these views, numerous factors exist which show evidence against the notion of America’s wealth in the 1920s being nationwide, and influencing every area of society. A clear example of an industry, and therefore it’s people, which did not benefit from this time is farming. The average farm income fell from twenty- two billion dollars in 1919, to thirteen billion dollars in 1928. This was largely due to the European market. During the war, American has shipped millions of tons off grain to Europe. However, the war also bankrupted Europe, meaning few people could afford American goods. Furthermore, the Republican tax on American goods was still in place, resulting in Europe sill unable to afford American produce. From 1900 to 1920, while farms were doing quite well, more and more land was being farmed. Improved machinery, especially combine harvesters and improved fertilisers made US agriculture extremely efficient. The result was that by 1920 it was producing surpluses of wheat, which nobody wanted. Farming communities were devastated as farms struggled to sell wheat, even at extremely low prices. The extent of this hardship is shown when it is realised around half of all Americans lived in rural areas. Mostly working on farms or in businesses that sold goods to farms. Therefore, this problem directly affected millions of people. As the farm income fell, the situation of many rural communities was desperate. It is clear when looking at the effects American prosperity had on it’s Black and new immigrant populations that current American wealth did not reach all areas of people. The black population was badly hit. They held the tradition of holding the least skilled jobs in rural areas. As they lost their jobs on the farms, three quarters of a million of them became unemployed. The majority of farming families remained very poor throughout the 1920s, meaning that they did not see the technological advances of the time- including electricity, cars and radios. New immigrant to the country at this time did not receive the great welcome of a liberated country they had all hoped. They faced discrimination in the work place, and took whatever work they could- partly because they were generally uneducated as other workers. A large number worked in the construction industry where, at the time, there was a big boom. However, despite this increase in the industries size, the average was only rose by four percent in the 1920s, because the immigrants were a source of cheap labour, and more work was becoming mechanised- resulting the lack of need for labourers. The unemployment rate within new immigrants rose throughout the decade. Older industries were undergoing modernisation. Some industries such as steel, for which there was a boom, benefited from general expansion. However, in others, particularly the raw materials industries- cotton, coal, tin and copper- were suffering. There was an overproduction in these industries, prices dropped and wages fell. From looking at this evidence, it is clear that the prosperity and affluence of the USA in the 1920 was highly apparent. However, it is also clear that it did not reach all areas of society. Therefore, it is justified to say that prosperity during this period was partial- as not everyone was buying cars, radios and other consumer goods. It is vital to remember that during a boom period, it is difficult to spread the wealth of the country evenly- due to the determination for personal gain, not for equality.

Risk Analysis - Information Security and Infrastructure protection Assignment

Risk Analysis - Information Security and Infrastructure protection - Assignment Example To protect the organization’s information assets and mission from threats related to organizations mission, the organization has to perform without partiality the risk management role. Bearing in mind the weight the risk assessment bears in the development of the organization, the organization should keep a lot more attention to it than leave it as just the function of the information technology department. The essence of close monitoring and attention is by the fact that the main goal for risk management process in an organization is to protect the ability of an organization to achieve their mission and protect the organization as a whole. Therefore, in a bid to achieve the organizations missions by the risk assessment, there are several goals in the risk management process. An improved secure information technology system used in the storage transmission and processing of the organizations information, and the risk management makes it possible for an organization to have a well-informed decision with risk management and to give the reason for budgeting for the same as part of the budget allocated for the information technology department. The target audience includes both the experienced and the non-experienced, non-technical and technical people, who get involved in the utility of the risk assessment process with the information technology systems. The people involved here include the owners of the mission who takes part in making the decisions on the information technology budget, and they comprise the senior management. Chief Officer in charge of information ensures that the risk assessment process is implemented and does spearhead maintenance of the systems security. In order to allow information technology system to operate, the designated approving authority personnel must approve and allow the system; hence, the fact makes him/her an integral part. The quality assurance personnel are among the audience; this is for the fact that these personnel

Answers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Answers - Essay Example a. a sprint by an Olympic runner b. a long, relaxing swim c. throwing a baseball d. weight training 4. The velocity of blood flow decreases when   a. Viscosity increases. b. Blood pressure increases. c. Vessel radius increases. d. Afterload increases. e. vasomotion decreases 5. The ability to see color is the due to a. rods b. cones c. rhodopsin d. Both A and C e. Both B and C 6. Stimuli produced by sound waves reach the brain following the pathway:   a. cochlear duct ? spiral organ ? ossicles ? oval window ? auditory canal ? tympanic membrane ? fibers of cochlear nerve b. auditory canal ? tympanic membrane ? oval window ? cochlear duct ? ossicles ? spiral organ ? fibers of cochlear nerve c. cochlear duct ? oval window ? auditory canal ? tympanic membrane ? ossicles ? spiral organ ? fibers of cochlear nerve d. tympanic membrane ? auditory canal ? ossicles ? oval window ? cochlear duct ? spiral organ ? fibers of cochlear nerve e. auditory canal ? tympanic membrane ? ossicles ? ova l window ? cochlear duct ? spiral organ ? fibers of cochlear nerve 7. Opening and closing of the heart valves is caused by   a. Breathing. b. Gravity. c. Valves contracting and relaxing. d. Osmotic gradients. e. Pressure gradients. 8. Rank the following steps in order (2 pts). ___4_ Myosin heads bind to actin forming a cross-bridge.

History of Oklahoma Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

History of Oklahoma - Research Paper Example The west side of state experienced extensive drought and winds to generate storms as the east side of the region experienced a tropical climate. Hunting and gathering was a perverse activity in the west side of the state. The people that lived on the eastern side of the state practiced farming since the climate was favorable. According to the evidence of anthropologists humanity exists in the region prior to 1500 A.D. Researchers find oldest form of Paleo cultures, clovis cultures and folsom. Indigenous people populate the area that symbolically represents a pan-shaped figure. The eastern side of Oklahoma represented the Caddoan Mississippian culture that practiced agrarian activities. Natives living in the area established their houses on mounds and Chiefdoms controlled different communities. The Caddoan Mississippian culture emerged from earlier culture in 1000 A. D. Geographical-location of Caddoan was on Woodland penetrating the Red River. Other communities believed to live in the eastern side of Oklahoma included Wichita people that survived on the Great Plains. The difference between Mississippian cultures and Wichita plains culture is that the latter practiced agrarian activities while the former practiced hunting and gathering. Farming activity appeared in the South Canadian Rivers at 900 AD. . Native Americans at this period that practiced farming grew different types of crops such as legumes. The people practiced fishing, hunting of rabbits, deer, and gathered mussels. Indigenous people constructed rectangular thatched dwellings mostly near the river basins. Apache groups appeared at around 1500 and collaborated with Wichita cultures. Archeologist evidence suggests that Kiowa-Apache culture were hunter and gatherers. The only difference between Wichita culture and Apache culture is that the latter used dogs in their hunting spree. Both cultures are similar in that they

Quantitative Research Proposal Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Quantitative Research Proposal - Coursework Example (Eslick, 2010) The survey will begin on the month of June when the students will be on Holidays to ensure that they carry out their visitation to the hospital regularly. There will be five nurses who will be at the reception whenever new patients are admitted to the hospital. A report shall be presented to the students every week in order to keep the records and analyze the information very well. The patients will be asked questions and be administered with questionnaires for full information recording. In the year 2009, a survey on â€Å"The diagnosis and treatment of STEMI in the emergency department† was developed and organized by the Clinical director in the Department of Emergency Medicine Joshua M. Kosowski, MD in Boston. The research and survey will be approved by the director Joshua M. whereby the survey will copy the procedures of the 2009 survey and information be tallied from the survey. All the students of the class will be administered in the same month of June and be approved to be attending the meetings at the hospital. Inferential statistics will be the best because they will give out the best required results that will be analyzed. With the independent values being patients in rural areas will not be sequential and the dependant values being patients in urban areas will be the continuous variables. The hospital is in the urban area making the information to be continuous. The null hypothesis confirms that the residence area of a STEMI patient is not correlated with the myocardial level of damage. Alternative analysis is the opposite of the null hypothesis (there is a correlation between the areas of residence of the patients and the level of myocardial) The presentation of the information samples will be presented by the Clinical director in the Department of Emergency Medicine Joshua M. Kosowski, MD. The samples in the survey will be the patients that suffer from the

Comparative study of Mergers and Acquisitions processes in France and Essay

Comparative study of Mergers and Acquisitions processes in France and in the United States - Essay Example Research results reveal that the M&A transactions are generally cheaper in France than in the US. According to Alkhafaji, by the above ruling it is meant that the financial assets that are used to execute the M&A transactions together with the duration that is required. The only situation that presents the US as being at par with France, as far as the number of person-days needed to execute M&A are concerned, is when there is seen to be a phase (9a) that portends the execution of the Dispute Without Formal Litigation. This is because the person-days are almost the same in France and US. As far as cost is concerned, M&A transactions in America are significantly of exorbitant cost than France. However, Phase 9(b) Dispute with Formal Litigation in France requires more asset input than in US. In this situation, the transaction cost in the US and in France remains equal. Similarly, economic pundits, such as Terrence, point out that there is a dearth of uniformity between the US and Franc e M&A as far as the results for step-time and satisfaction are concerned. The satisfaction for steps that begins with the exchanging of preliminary information during the drafting of ancillary documents is said to be also considerably the same between US and France. Sweet and Larsson observes that the France’s step (9b) Dispute with formal litigation also remains comparably the same to that of the US. However, it is pointed out that in the US, satisfaction remains higher as far as the Dispute without Formal Litigation is concerned.

Social change Assigment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Social change Assigment - Essay Example His idea has proven to be a replicable and long lasting means of delivering health related services and goods to Guatemalan and Ecuadorian villages. Using this process, he has encouraged entrepreneurship thus giving villagers the opportunity to develop economically, physically and socially. This model targets individuals in rural areas especially the women who have no other means of generating additional household income. This is through overpowering the traditional method of giving handouts to rural communities as they find means of fending for themselves, and not necessarily waiting for the next donation. So far Greg Van Kirk’s method has successfully sold water filters, energy-efficient light bulbs, wood burning stoves, eyeglasses and seed -growing techniques, in over one thousand villages in the rural areas at affordable prices; improving their health and economic status. Greg Van Kirk’s development is considered a social entrepreneurship because it is a new invention which has achieved large scale sustainable, and systemic social change. This invention has also first focused on social and ecological value creation while optimizing on financial value creation. Another reason for its classification as a social entrepreneurship is that it created innovation by finding a new product, and service, and a unique approach to a social problem. It also emulates the act of devotion to the poor and the weak and also stays on top in business innovation. Social entrepreneurship shares common traits and so do their organizations. Greg Van Kirk like most social entrepreneurs believes that all people have the capacity to contribute meaningfully to economic and social development. He has a driving passion as can be seen through his innovation. The zeal to monitor and measure impact, there are several articles showing researches done to determine the strategy, benefits and new

The Computer Vision Syndrome Essay Example for Free

The Computer Vision Syndrome Essay Close to 150 million people sit in front of a computer monitor each day. Many of them spend more than two hours at a time, focusing on screens as they complete work projects, blog, or just surf the web. If a significant portion of your day involves computer time, you may be at the risk of CVS-Computer Vision Syndrome too. What is Computer Vision Syndrome? According to the American Optometric Association, CVS is a set of symptoms that are all related to working with a computer. These symptoms can affect both the eyes and musculoskeletal parts of the body. Very simply, CVS occurs when an individual overburden the human eye by asking it to perform in prolonged situations that it was not designed to do. Studies have found that the majority of video display workers experience some eye or vision symptoms. A national survey of doctors of optometry found that more than 14% of their patients present with eye or vision-related symptoms resulting from this type of work. The most common symptoms are: †¢ Blurred Vision when looking into the distance †¢ Double Vision †¢ Stinging of the eyes †¢ Excessive tearing of the eyes †¢ Headaches †¢ Neck or shoulder pain. (Keep in the mind that these symptoms are generally experienced after prolonged periods of computer work or, over time, due to progressive eye strain associated with CVS). What Causes CVS? Unlike printed matter, a computer screen displays words and images through the use of pixels which are multi-dimensional and vary in contrast. The eye is always working extra hard to accommodate as it focuses and refocuses on the graded areas of these combined pixels. The eye lens must work harder to support the function of sight. Eventually, the eye tires and becomes lazy. This explains why vision blurs occur and why it is difficult to look away from the monitor and see distant objects clearly. One of the most significant environmental factors affecting work with displays is lighting. Bright lights in the peripheral field of view may cause discomfort glare. An acceptable lighting level may require a compromise between the amount of light needed to enhance VDT screen visibility and reduce reflections and glare and that needed to perform other office reading and work tasks. The brightness of the screen and the surrounding room should be balanced. For dark background screens this often requires using lower light levels. The brightness and contrast should be adjusted to provide balance with room lighting and maximum visibility. Stinging of the eyes and eye irritation can be caused by the dry atmosphere, and starring at the screen. It decreased number of blinking and increased rate of tear evaporation, which effect the dry eyes. The presence of even minor vision problems can often significantly affect the worker comfort and performance. Uncorrected farsightedness, astigmatism, and binocular vision (eye coordination and eye focusing) problems can be major contributing factors to VDT related eye stress. What can I do if I think I might be suffering from eye problems associated with CVS? At first you have to think about limiting the time you spend front of the computer. It is often unaccomplishable, but there are several other methods too: †¢ Seeing an ophthalmologist is a good first step in to determine whether you have a problem like Computer Vision Syndrome. †¢ Eyeglasses or contact lenses prescribed for general use may not be adequate for computer work. Special lens designs, lens power or lens tints or coatings may help to maximize visual abilities and comfort, and helps you minimize eye strain, and get optimal eye performance. †¢ You have to set up your computer’s place properly. The screen must have an optimal height and distance from your eyes. †¢ The colour of screen characters may also affect visibility. The colour of the characters can affect how the eyes focus on the screen. Monochrome, or single colour displays often provide more optimal images for word processing. Dark letters on a light background or invert could generally provide a more readable image than green, yellow-orange, blue or red characters. †¢ You may to set the proper contrast and brightness setting on your monitor too, to make it more viewable.

The ideal teacher Essay Example for Free

The ideal teacher Essay What characteristics should a teacher possess? What Makes a Good Teacher? Video – Effective Teacher †¢ An effective teacher can be seen in the following video: Introduction What does being a teacher mean? †¢ Having a vocation for the teaching profession. †¢ Being dedicated. †¢ Being surrounded by a large number of diverse students, each with their own baggage and unique character. Knowledge 1st Characteristic of an effective teacher †¢ Should be transmitted in a unique and fun manner. †¢ One should move from the known to the unknown. †¢ It is not how much one knows, but how much one can deliver. Knowledge Observation 1 †¢ At a particular Boys’ Area Secondary School, it was noticed that the boys had a low IQ. †¢ A highly motivated Maltese teacher used a practical example to help them learn. †¢ He compared the Maltese language to a cocktail. – The different drinks symbolized Italian, Arabic and English. †¢ As a result the children remembered the example more. Adaptation 2nd Characteristic of an effective teacher †¢ One should get to know one’s students to cater for them accordingly. †¢ Scaffolding activities accordingly, ensures maximum learning. â€Å"The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water  moulds itself to the pitcher† – Chinese Proverb Environment 3rd Characteristic of an effective teacher †¢ Creates a non-threatening and welcoming environment. Environment – Observation 1 †¢ A Maths lesson in a Boys’ Area Secondary School – The teacher greeted the students by the words ‘hurry up because you are wasting precious time’. – The students were not very friendly towards her and imitated her. – Whilst going out for recreation these students were heard echoing the teacher’s words to their peers who dawdled on their way out. Theory of Observational Learning †¢ The students’ picked up the  teacher’s habit and used it to their advantage. †¢ This can be applied to Albert Bandura’s theory of observational learning. Theory of Observational Learning †¢ Bandura established 4 steps – Attention – characteristics instilled within a person that will affect the way in which he is influenced. – Retention – the ability to remember what one sees and transforms it into visualizations or verbal expressions. – Reproduction – the ability to transform what one has retained into definite behaviour. – Motivation – one has to be given a reason or incentive to reproduce what he has observed and retained. Organisation Good Organisation 4th Characteristic of being an effective teacher †¢ Having good organisational skills. †¢ In order to keep the students focused, the explanation should be sequential to avoid confusion. †¢ The teacher should always follow a lesson plan. Bloom’s Taxonomy for Learning Domain †¢ The last two domains – Synthesis – Evaluation focus on the importance of having a lesson plan as a guidance for the lesson. Importance of a Lesson Plan †¢ A lesson plan is important – to make the lesson sequential. – to ensure the objectives devised were reached. – to assess whether students understood  or not. Conducting a Lesson †¢ The teacher starts off the lesson by correcting the home work, – the students participate and say their answers. †¢ Introduces the topic that will be tackled. †¢ The teacher may write down some notes on the whiteboard. †¢ Class work is given so as to make sure that the students understood the topic. Organisation – Observation 1 †¢ A particular maths teacher at a girl’s school, applied very good organisational skills in her lesson. †¢ She stated the aims of the lesson at the beginning of the lesson in a very clear way. †¢ She managed to do all the things she had  planned. †¢ On repeated observations, it was noted that she always had a well-planned lesson. †¢ Students were always motivated to learn. Organisation – Observation 2 †¢ Another class that was observed in the same school was a Maltese literacy class. – It aids students who find it difficult when it comes to reading and writing. †¢ She involved the students by asking them to continue reading from where she stopped and corrected them wherever they made a mistake. †¢ At the end, she gave them some pages to read at home. Classroom Layout 1 †¢ In the previous incidents mentioned, the desks were  neatly placed and organised in twos. – Students can help each other with any difficulties they might have. †¢ The teacher’s desk was facing the student’s desks. †¢ On some occasions, the teacher may still need to separate desks to avoid misbehaviour and interruptions before starting the lesson. Classroom Environment †¢ When students are already inside the classroom, the teacher should make his / her presence felt. †¢ On the contrary, when students change class, the teacher can alter the classroom layout to suit his/her approach to teaching. Disorganisation †¢ When the teacher is disorganized he/she will  not be able to deliver a well-balanced lesson. – This was noticed in an observation where the class only managed to read a small paragraph from a textbook throughout two whole double lessons. – The rest was random, out of point discussions. †¢ There was poor classroom management together with a lack of discipline. Observation Disorganisation †¢ During a Home-Economics practical session a disorganised teacher was observed. †¢ The teacher did not guide and assess the students. †¢ They ended up asking each other what to do next and did not learn any skills. Discipline Behaviourism †¢ Constant motivation is  compared to behaviourism – researched by B. F. Skinner. †¢ He called his research ‘The Operant Conditioning Theory’. †¢ Theory states that a particular behaviour can be increased by positive / negative reinforcements (praise / punishments). Bad Discipline Observation Ineffective Teacher †¢ Observation A particular teacher, instead of correcting the students in a gentle manner and explaining what was wrong, the teacher sent the students out of class together with their desk and chair. †¢ It was observed that most of the teachers reprimanded the students whenever they got something wrong. †¢ Students are demoralized and in consequence show no interest in learning. Albert Bandura †¢ Throughout our observations, one thing was particularly noticed. †¢ When a teacher scolds students, their actions turn out to be counterproductive as that same action is repeated by the students. †¢ This is backed up by the Social Cognitive Theory researched by Albert Bandura. †¢ The Bobo-Doll experiment – Children imitated what was seen both verbally and physically. Influential Teachers †¢ A teacher’s behaviour contributes to classroom management . Henry Adams once stated: â€Å"A teacher affects eternity; one can never tell  were the influence stops. † Good Discipline Observation – Effective Teacher 5th characteristic of being an effective teacher †¢ Keeps the same discipline methods with all students regardless of their gender, race, ability or religion. †¢ Positive reinforcement: praises students and corrects their mistakes. †¢ Greets the students. †¢ Prepares the things needed for the lesson beforehand and waits for the students to settle down. †¢ Goes around the students to check whether everyone is paying attention. †¢ Removes distracting materials such as any irrelevant writing on the board will be rubbed off. Communication of Ideas 6th Characteristic of being an effective teacher †¢ Ability to communicate ideas effectively. †¢ This is done through the use of a variety of resources. †¢ This is explained in Benjamin Bloom’s book – Taxonomy of Learning Domains. Resources Motivation †¢ A teacher should always motivate students in a fun way – that is what keeps them going; Albert Einstein once said: â€Å"It is the supreme art of a teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. † Observation †¢ During a science lesson, one of us observed one such characteristic, †¢ The science teacher used a variety of interesting  resources such as: – – – – PowerPoint presentations Worksheets Information handouts Textbooks †¢ These resources enabled students to be enthusiastic and motivated. Importance of Resources Something commonly observed: †¢ Very few teachers made use of resources, †¢ Most of them used the traditional resources; white board and textbooks, †¢ Students ended up bored and disinterested throughout the lesson. Edgar Dale †¢ In the 1960’s he put forward the theory: †¢ Students retain more information by what they â€Å"do† as opposed to what they â€Å"hear†, â€Å"see† or â€Å"observe†. †¢ He devised the ‘Cone of Experience. ’ †¢ â€Å"Learning by doing† is nowadays known as â€Å"experiential learning†. Cone of Experience Ineffective Resource 1 Textbooks †¢ By time, textbooks become outdated. This means that more money has to be forked out by the school and parents to update them. †¢ Textbooks should be used as a reference for studying, revising or even further notes. Ineffective Resource 2 Whiteboard †¢ Teachers still rely on such a sole type of pedagogy application, †¢ Disadvantage: The teacher may not write clear and big enough for the students to read, †¢ There can be cases of impairment; eyesight problems. Positive Environment  7th Characteristic of being an effective teacher †¢ The ability to create a positive classroom environment. †¢ A positive classroom environment is boosted further by using: – the appropriate type of humour – at the appropriate time. Humour †¢ Teachers should foster the praxis of using humour as it is an effective technique. – This removes any tension in the relationship between the teacher and the student. – This leads to a better performance in the students’ academic life. Negative Attitude †¢ Students will learn less if the teacher uses a negative attitude towards them. †¢ This includes factors such as  sarcasm. Sarcasm †¢ Sometimes teachers confuse good humor with sarcasm. – The use of sarcasm may harm the teacherstudent relationship since what some think as funny others may find to be offensive. – Sarcasm is humiliating for students. What makes a bad teacher? Video – Ineffective Teacher †¢ An ineffective teacher can be seen in the following video: Conclusion †¢ A teacher should be a life-long learner which is committed to the teaching profession striving to reach and teach’ students. Plato claimed that â€Å" The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life†.

Effect of Age on Self-Descriptions and Characteristics

Effect of Age on Self-Descriptions and Characteristics A small scale study involving two children aged 8 and 16 to recognise aspects of Rosenberg’s findings on how a child’s self-descriptions and characteristics change with age. Abstract This study examines the theory of Rosenberg (1989) that the characteristics of a child’s self-description changes with age. Namely, the researcher investigates how a child describes themselves changes with age as a result of experience, social interaction and knowledge. A primarily qualitative analysis with some quantitative analysis was carried out on two pre-existing semi structured interviews of two children a boy aged 16, and a girl aged 8. Using Rosenberg’s (1979) categorical analysis, in part the results showed that age does play a part in how a child’s self-description changes with age and an older child is more likely to focus on emotions and inner feelings when talking about themselves as opposed to a younger child who is more likely to focus of external behaviour and characteristics. Introduction This study aims to understand the relationship between how individual talks about themselves, and how these change with age thus creating their own identity. Identity is how a person views themselves and how others view that person. Initial work by Cooley and Mead ( 1902) found evidence that people build their own identity based on reactions of others towards them and that that children could not form a sense of self without feedback from others,† ( as cited in Meill Ding, p. 134 ) He referred to this as the â€Å"looking glass self†. Evidence was drawn from the â€Å"feral child case† whereby, a young boy was discovered living in the wild but had limited understanding of the world around him lacking in social skills due to minimal interaction with others. (Meill Ding, 2005) (Lewis, 1961) found evidence to support Cooley and Meads (1902) initial findings and theorised that a true sense of self happens over a period of time and changes dependant of a child’s age. The theories of Lewis (1961) consisted of two stages, the self as an object, (the categorical self) consisting of the characteristics that define an individual age, gender, name and the relationship that child has with others. The second stage (the existential self) refers to the self as a subject and this is gained as a result of personal development, experience and the social connections with others. (Maccoby, 1980) suggested that â€Å"building an identity and achieving self-awareness is a long term project† (as cited in Meill et al, p.131) and that children cannot form a true sense of oneself without feedback from others, therefore could not fully develop without the two aspects working together. Bannister and Agnew (1977) found that as children get older they become more accomplished at recognising themselves mentally from others, and additionally as they become older become better equipped at seeing themselves in a more distinctive way. Younger children have a tendency to depict and separate themselves by using physical characteristics and behaviours whereas older children rely more on mental characteristics and feelings. Following on from these ideas Rosenberg (1979) put forward his own theories. Rosenberg (1979) noted that as a child gets older they describe themselves with more internal qualities such as personal beliefs, feelings, emotions, attitudes, state of mind, wishes and insider facts and they were less likely to use character attributes to characterise themselves. The Younger children’s descriptions were more to do with interpersonal attributes such as external behaviours, descriptions and characteristic’s. Harter (1983) also found that the aspects that children talk about change with age. She reviewed interviews of children talking about themselves; she found that younger children tended to focus objective facts and external behaviour whereas, as the children got older the focus shifted to internal factors such as personal beliefs, feelings, emotions and attitudes. This study is aimed to demonstrate how a child perceives them self by self-description and how the characteristics they display change with age by using Rosenberg’s Categories of analysis. It is predicted that the differences between how Annie and Adam describe themselves should be significantly different with the younger child Annie, displaying more external characteristics and the older child Adam displaying more internal and personal characteristics within the meanings of the research question â€Å"who are you? (Meill et al 2005) Method Design The two children a boy aged 16 and a girl aged eight who were interviewed separately were asked to write up to 10 statements about themselves. One of the children, Annie the six year old girl was only able to write six so those six were just taken into account. The data was analysed for Rosenberg’s concept of Developmental Trend of Self Awareness and Rosenberg’s categories were applied to this data. Then the â€Å"Locus of Self Knowledge† was Considered and analysed and a theme on the â€Å"self† was identified using thematic analysis. Participants The participants (an eight year old girl and a sixteen year old boy) from Milton Keynes were provided by the Open University which obtained consent from the participants to use the interviews for research purposes. The study involved some quantitative analysis but it is primarily a qualitative study. The participants were interviewed separately by two different interviewers who were not previously known to the participants. Materials and apparatus The researcher an Open University psychology student, analysed the pre-existing material (the two semi structured interviews) comprising of a DVD. (The Open University, 2005 video band 3, self-concept interviews) and a transcript provided by the OU with the time taken with responses also recorded from beginning to end. The transcript provided the conversation between the interviewer and the child from start to end. Procedure Rosenberg’s categories were used in the analysis of the interviews referring to the DVD and transcripts noting the researchers own perception the themes of Rosenberg (1989) they were physical, the character, relationships and inner. These were identified on a category analysis form (see appendix 2 3) which were used to mark and record the different themes identified. The second part of the analysis involved the locus of knowledge and analysing the results separately then to conclude thematic analysis was applied to see if there were any reoccurring themes within the data. The interviewers examined the same subject theme of â€Å"who are you?† ( Miell et al, 2005) Ethical Issues The data collection complied with the BPS of code of ethics. Informed consent was obtained from the participant and their parents (for children under 16) The Interviewer made sure that the participants did not suffer from any physical or psychological harm as a result of their research. The children were fully briefed on the procedure and reminded of their right to withdraw at any time. The participants were debriefed at the end and thanked for their participation. No ethical issues were raised. Results Self-Description Table 1. A comparison of Annie and Adam‘s Categories of self-description (see appendix 1) The aim of this study was to see if the content of Annie (8) and Adam (16) interviews’ reflected a difference in the descriptions of one’s self (see table 1.) Adam as predicted, made 100 % more Inner statements compared to Annie, which supports Rosenberg’s theories that an older child would focus more on descriptions of Inner feelings than a younger child. It was also predicted that Annie (the younger child would have scored higher in the Physical category. 67% of her answers fell into the physical category compared to Adams 40 %. It was expected that as an older child the physical category would have had a lower score, but Adam enjoys the physical side of his life and is very active with sport etc. Surprisingly, Adam also scored 100 % higher than Annie in the Character category. According to Rosenberg’s theories, it was to be expected that the younger child Annie would have scored higher in this category. If the participant pool had been on a larger scale this may well have been the case. Locus of self-Knowledge Despite the difference in age and gender both children agreed, (when questioned who would know best, themselves or their respective mothers) that it would be their mothers who would know best. There was consistency in the way the questions were asked to both children but the answers were for different reasons. Adam showed displays of inner concepts in his answer that his mother probably would know best and gave emotional justifications for this â€Å"she always seemed to be in control of situations particularly his schooling.† He gave another example of this when he described his mother at parents evening and â€Å"how they could predict what the other was thinking.† (Theory of mind) Annie of the other hand laughs and gives a more simplistic explanation of her mother claiming she just â€Å"knows best† as if that is what was to be expected as she was the parent. However, how close a family is bonded or a sense of a more established sense of inner self could also explain both their reasoning in their answers. Themes Identified Two themes that were identified using thematic analysis were gender differences, although both sexes enjoyed football, it was viewed by both the participants as a traditionally male sport. The second theme that was identified was self-awareness of one’s self and both participants described how they thought they would be described by others. Discussion The aim of this study was to see if the content of Adam and Annie’s interviews reflected a difference in the descriptions of themselves, to identify the locus of knowledge and in addition any of themes. Adam said â€Å"when he’s older, he would like to be a leader, or something with power, and I’d been really strong as a leader.† (Referring to When he was football captain (25.33) which suggests that he still regards himself as developing and growing. This provides evidence for Harter (1983) theory that as a child gets older the focus shifts to more internal factors such as personal beliefs, feelings, emotions and attitudes. However Annie said â€Å"I love rabbits, guinea pigs and dogs† (3.36) which is a simple external statement and can be linked back to Rosenberg (1979) theory that Younger children were more likely to describe interpersonal attributes Although it appears that both children are able to express themselves Adam wrote ten â€Å"I am â€Å"statements whereas Annie only wrote six. This may suggest that a younger child may be more limited to expression of themselves. Both Annie and Adam acknowledge when asked â€Å"who would know best, themselves or their mothers? â€Å"That indeed, their mothers would probably know better than themselves and they both trust their respective parental judgement. This is referred to as the locus of knowledge. The two themes that were identified were gender and self-awareness. Adam refers to his passion about football (2.18) â€Å" if I am just walking with my friends and see a football match I will stop and watch it, if it’s on TV I’ll watch it, and I will stop what I am doing if someone asks me to play† He pinpoints when his passion started (2.57) when his† father first gave him his very own ball â€Å" There is a sense of pride in the way he speaks about his father giving him this ball , as if it is a male bonding between them. Annie has also identified that football is traditionally a male hobby. She refers to herself ( 11.24) As â€Å" being the same as Georgina because we are both tomboys and we love football â€Å" Even at six years old Annie has come to forma belief about the notion of masculiNIty and feminINity. Evidence from (Maccoby, 1980) suggested that â€Å"building an identity and achieving self-awareness is a long term project† (as cited in the early development of identity, p.131) and those children cannot form a true sense of oneself without feedback from others. The second theme that was identified was self-awareness. Annie identifies herself as being â€Å" a kind person, and if you got to know me you like me† ( 18.32) and Adam describes his interest in clothes and how his friends perceive him for working in the shop â€Å" they are always impressed with me â€Å" ( 8.53) These statements link to that of Lewis ( 1961) who found that â€Å" a true sense of self happens over a period of time and changes dependant of a child’s age Which consisted of two stages, the self as an object, (the categorical self) and the later second stage (the existential self) which was gained as a result of personal development. There are limitations when using discourse analysis as it is problematic when trying to evaluate the findings of research as the interpreter may not have correctly interpreted the meanings of the participants which raise the issue of intercoder reliability or another interpreter may have coded the answers differently. One of the problems that did arise within this study is validity as the comparison is it a not like for like comparison as Adam gave ten â€Å" I am â€Å" statements but Annie only gave six so there was a methodical flaw to begin. In order to improve on the methodology of this study, the participant number in each age group could be increased to take into consideration individual differences between children. Also it would be interesting to interview children from different cultures to see if that made a difference in the findings. This study shows partial support for Rosenberg (1979) findings as Adam (16) focussed on Inner feeling, Physical characteristics whereas Annie (6) focussed more on physical characteristics and relationships. It was to be expected that Adam would have scored higher than Annie in the relationship category although this study did not allow for individual and developmental differences, what had been learnt socially and the closeness of the individuals family unit. The younger child did use more self-descriptions than the older child in the relationship catagory which offers partial support Rosenberg’s findings. Conclusion To conclude, the findings show partial support for Rosenberg (1979) theories with evidence that self descriptions change in stages as a child matures with different aspects of identity being more significant at different ages and stages with the focus shifting from external characteristics of a younger child to the inner feelings and beliefs of an older child as a result of knowledge and experience. There is room for more research to be done in this area by using a larger participant pool and children from other cultures. References: Bannister, D. and Agnew, J. (1977) (as cited in The Open University, 2013, ED209, Tam 04 practical available from: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=345577section=1.2.1 (Accessed Feb 2014) Cooley, C.H Mead, G.H. (1902) as cited in Ding, S and Meill, D (2005) p.134. Ding, S Meill, D, (2005) â€Å" The early development of identity† in Ding, S and Littleton, K. (eds) Childrens Personal and Social Development, Oxford, Blackwell, The Open University. George, R., Oates, J. and Wood, C. (Eds) (2006) Methods and Skills Handbook, Milton Keynes, The Open University. Harter, S. (1983) as cited in Ding, S and Miell, D (2005) p.129 Lewis, M. (1961) as cited in Ding, S and Meill, D (2005) p.132. Maccoby, E. (1980) as cited in Ding, S and Meill, D (2005) p.130. Rosenberg (1979) (as cited in The Open University, 2013, ED209, Tma 04 practical available from: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=345577section=1.2.1 (Accessed Feb 2014) The Open University (2006) ED209 Child Development, Media Kit Part 2, Audio Band 3: Self Concept Interviews. Appendices: Appendix 1. A comparison of Annie and Adam’s categories of self-description. Appendix 2. Category Analysis form for Annie. Appendix 3 Category Analysis form for Adam.

Apollos Oracle at Delphi Essay -- ancient Greek beliefs and prophecies

The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi is shrouded in myth and mystery, but one thing is certain, their prophetic influence stretched far and wide and was detrimental in shaping Greece. Neither war nor boundary was determined without conferring the Delphic Oracle first. The Oracle of Apollo was held in high regard by the likes of "Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, and Diodorus" (Broad 10). The Trojan War and Theban War were in part responses to the Oracle's forecasts (Fontenrose 4). The Delphic Oracle shaped the decision of Spartans and consulted the "Greek states at the time of the Persian War" (Fontenrose 6). For well over a millennium, devotees would continue to seek the Delphic Oracle's counsel. The Greek legacy is riddled with her prophecies. Delphi, Greece's relative geographic location is in the center of Greece. According to Richard Haywood, its location could literally be the reason that the "Delphic Oracle was near the center of Greek life for centuries" (112). Delphi was inhabited as early as the Bronze Age. The Oracle's existence is believed to have appeared as early as the 8th century BCE (Scott 11). Several stories exist to explain the origins of Delphi. One myth says that Zeus released two eagles "from opposite ends of the world and they met at Delphi" signifying the geographic center of the earth (Scott 36). Another myth claims the word Delphi was obtained directly from a Greek word meaning "womb", indicating the birthplace of the world (Scott 36). However, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo written "between the late 7th century BCE and mid-sixth century BCE" tells the tale of Delphi's genesis in a different light. According to the Homeric tale, Apollo traveled throughout Greece in search of the perfect site for his temple. H... ...'s future, creating a blurred line between the real and fantastical. Fact and fiction continues to cohabitate in the daily debate and rituals of Modern Greece and it is quite possible that the Delphic Oracle is to praise and/or to blame. Works Cited Broad, William J. The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. Fontenrose, Joseph Eddy. The Delphic Oracle, Its Responses and Operations. Berkeley: U of California. Print. Haywood, Richard. "THE DELPHIC ORACLE." Archaeology 5.2 (1952): 110-18. JSTOR. Web. 25 May 2014. . Lehoux, Daryn. "Drugs and the Delphic Oracle." Classical World 101.1 (2007): 41-56. Web. Scott, Michael. Delphi a History of the Center of the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014. Print.

History of Tea in Japan and the Japanese Tea Ceremony Essay examples --

According to Brown, tea is classified among the most significant non-alcoholic beverage across the globe. It has gained fame as a result of its benefits. Tea is an inclusive aspect of the daily life of the Japanese individual attributable to its ceremonial and ritual characteristics. It has been treated as a cultural beverage and consumed in a refined atmosphere. Tea drinking in Japan has undergone refinement under the support of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. He was the regarded as the first ruler-patron of the tea ceremony. Since historical times, tea was incorporated as an element of an independent secular ceremony. Over the past 5,000 years, the Japan have consumed green tree which acts as a beverage and a medicine (121). This paper focuses on tea in Japan, with various subtopics and its relevance among the Zen. History of Tea According to De Bary, Keen, and Tanabe, the history of tea in Japan dates back to the early Heian period, after it was introduced by monks including Kukai and Saicho. In 815, Emperor Saga permitted the production of tea in several provinces of Japan. During this period, tea drinking was normally admired and adopted by two elite classes in Japan. First, the nobles at the emperor’s court who copied their Chinese counterparts. They commended the tea’s taste and the stylish methods of its preparation and service. Second, the monks, in Buddhist temples valued tea as a result of its medicinal value (388). Hara asserts that the Chinese were responsible for introducing tea in Japan, probably during the eighth century. In the early 7th century, Japanese monks travelled to China for educational purposes of studying Buddhism. The Chan School, which was referred to as Zen in Japan, incorporated extensive medit... ...es of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times through the Sixteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print. Deal, William E. Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. Ellington, Lucien. Japan. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print. Gleason, Carrie. The Biography of Tea. New York: Crabtree Publishing Company, 2007. Print. Hara, Yukihiko. Green Tea: Health Benefits and Applications. New York: CRC Press, 2001. Print. Kleiner, Fred. Gardner’s Art through the Ages: A Global History (13th ed). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2010. Print. Martin, Laura. Tea: The Drink that Changed the World. North Clarendon, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2007. Print. Varley, H.Paul, and Kumakura, Isao. Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. Print.

Compare the poems for childhood and parenting

Wordsworth present his views on childhood and parenting, in many ways such as language, structure and form. He portrays children as the epitome of innocence while he depicts adults as the essence of experience. His poems had set the foundations of childhood and parenting. The three main poems that show this are: The Idiot Boy, We are Seven and Anecdote for Fathers. Wordsworth uses The Idiot Boy to ask the reader two questions. The first regards the happenings of his imagination especially what happened at night and the second regards of his imaginative adventures. Wordsworth does this intentionally, to show that children use their imagination to keep themselves occupied, also he might have wanted to show that their imagination was one of the keys to a hopeful future or their personality. Wordsworth explores different states of mind of both the mother and the son. The mother is shown through the language used. She experiences a range of emotions: overconfidence, doubt, fear and anxiety. However, when we compare her to her son, who is mentally disabled he remains joyful, innocent, imaginative and closer to nature than even his mother he remains unperturbed. The rhyming scheme is first established after the 1st verse, abccb, it adds pace and suspense and it underpins a sense of comedy. Wordsworth doesn't only use this rhyming scheme to add a sense of comedy, but it is like a nursery rhyme, so it can be enjoyable and understandable to everyone. Wordsworth portrays the mother as someone who is caring, also someone Wordsworth would trust as she would protect her loved one. The language of the poem is very positive as Wordsworth uses words such as â€Å"glee† and â€Å"merry†. These adjectives give a sense of hope and respect towards Johnny. Therefore Wordsworth wants to portray children as a pure being, someone you must not tarnish with logic or even education, as they will learn their knowledge from the best teacher; imagination or nature. Another poem, where the readers see Wordsworth conveying his views on childhood and parenting is in We are Seven, this poem is slightly different compared to the other Wordsworth poems, as we see two perspectives on death, one by the little girl and another by the ignorant narrator who could be a father, at first until he is taught by the little girl. It is structured in four sections, Verses 1-3- are about the girl and her landscape, verses 4-9- are outlining her family background and her response to the narrator's enquiry. Verses 10-15 are a filling out of her enigmatic reply about her life and the death of her siblings. The stand-off between these two is polarised and entrenched positions. Wordsworth uses his language, to make the girl and the narrator take a different viewpoint on death, the girl's language is obviously taken from the mother and it is euphemistic: â€Å"released from her pain† and â€Å"[John] was forced to let go†. This conveys the pain the little girl had to suffer; she is trying to ease her pain and trying to make the reader suffer less. Wordsworth is showing that children are knowledgeable. However, she does not like the fact of death at all, as it saddens her. She still keeps the memory of her loved ones, which is only seen in children rather than adults. Wordsworth deceptively uses simple approach in language and form, the poet has suggested that we can share and accept the mystery of this young's girl view. Wordsworth makes this poem more like a nursery one with the use of internal rhyming such as â€Å"green† and â€Å"seen†. It is written in quatrains consisting of 3 lines of iambic tetrameter and a final line which is an iambic trimester, the mood is a sing-song. This makes the poem more towards the child and Wordsworth is trying to present her as a strong character. He portrays the narrator as a preacher, something Romantics hated. As he tries to force his religious teachings upon everyone, however the roles are swapped, the little girl is teaching him, that he must care about everyone but especially children, as they are all individuals, who should not be ruined by logic and rationality. Like We are Seven, Anecdote for Fathers explores the nature of wisdom in children and adults. Similarly it is written in quatrains with 3 iambic tetrameters and a final iambic trimester, rhyming abab. It also, like We are Seven, encourages us to view the father ironically and to see his interrogation of his son, something initiated â€Å"in very idleness†, as an adult indulgence, either to fill a moment or to selfishly focus on his own sentiments and emotions. Even though the boy responds illogically, it portrays to us the feelings that Wordsworth might have had during his childhood, as the child doesn't know how to respond to the father it's quite difficult for him. The boy is suffering due to his father's alteration of mood or his complex emotions that are unknown to the child. The poem contrasts the cynicism and selfishness of the father with the physical and mental purity of the child. Time is meaningless anyway to a child's short existence and the poem illustrates how children are corrupted by society and adults. Wordsworth is implying that we should not force logic and rationality on our children, as we must respect their feelings: we are not all the same and that is the key to the mystery and beauty of life. In the last verse it can be seen that the father is the ‘child of the man'. The child can be seen as a symbol of nature, which is common in the three poems of Wordsworth. Overall it can be said, that Wordsworth sees a cynical point of view towards parents, but not towards the mother. It can be also said that the narrator and the father are both male, he could be seen as quite anti-male. He sees children as someone we must delicately take care, as they are our future's generation and happiness.

Earth Science Essay

Stars are one of the celestial bodies found in the solar system. Such celestial object produces heat, light, and different forms of radiations such as x-rays and ultraviolet rays caused by its cosmic energy engines. All stars are made up of gas, plasma, and matters comprised of subatomic particles that are extremely heated. From the earth, it may appear that stars are near because of their radiance shining over. However, stars are very far away that most of the scientists have to develop methods in order to calculate their distance. Two of the most notable methods are the parallax technique and the use of Cepheid variable (National Geographic, 2008). The parallax technique is used in order to identify the distance of the stars that are closest to the earth. Due to the revolution of the earth to the sun, the stars that are near to the earth shifts position against the stars that are in farther positions. These changes in the position of the nearby stars are known as the parallax shift. The parallax method functions by observing the distance of the shifting process and determining the earth’s orbit diameter. From there, astronomers are able to determine the parallax angle of the star’s distance. The main principle behind the method is that â€Å"the smaller the parallax shift, the farther away the star is from the earth† (Windows to the Universe Team, 2000, n. p. ). Such method is only applicable for stars that are within the range of few hundred light years from earth. Thus, when stars exceed the given range, the parallax shift could be too small to be measured through this technique (Windows to the Universe Team, 2000). For the countless distant stars that are in the range beyond 100 light years and are in clusters found in a different galaxy, the measurement is identified through the star’s property known as Cepheid variable. Stars that have this property undergo a fixed cycle where they get brighter and dimmer. This property is common among stars that are in â€Å"old age† (Berger, 2002, n. p. ). Because of their abundance in space, astronomers measure their distance by determining the number of cycle when stars are bright (Berger, 2002). There are many ways to measure the distance of the stars. It may be obtained from the stars spectral properties, temperature, brightness, and luminosity. Because of the major efforts in improving the measurements of the distances of the stars, various ways are also formulated in order to determine the cosmic distance of other celestial bodies present in the sky. References Berger, W. H. (2002). Measuring distance to the stars. In Intro to Astronomy: Discussion of the Field of Astronomy, University of California, San Diego. Retrieved September 17, 2008 from http://earthguide. ucsd. edu/virtualmuseum/ita/06_3. shtml. National Geographic. (2008). Stars. Retrieved September 17, 2008 from http://science. nationalgeographic. com/science/space/universe/stars-article. html Windows to the Universe Team. (2000, September). How do astronomers measure the distance to stars? Is it accurate? University Corporation For Atmospheric Research. Retrieved September 17, 2008 from http://www. windows. ucar. edu/tour/link=/kids_space/star_dist. html.

The Future of Marriage in America

http://marriage. rutgers. edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2007. htm The State of Our Unions The Social Health of Marriage in America 2007 Essay: The Future of Marriage in America David Popenoe  © Copyright 2007 Introduction In this year’s essay, David Popenoe argues that long-term trends point to the gradual weakening of marriage as the primary social institution of family life. More Americans today are living together, marrying at older ages or not at all, and rearing children in cohabiting or solo parent households. Overall, the U. S. trends are following the far-advanced trends toward nonmarriage in Northwestern European nations, albeit at a slower and more uneven pace. Popenoe attributes the weakening of marriage to a broad cultural shift away from religion and social traditionalism and toward faith in personal independence and tolerance for diverse life styles – otherwise known as â€Å"secular individualism. † This cultural shift is a central feature of modern societies and therefore unlikely to be reversed. Compared to Europeans, moreover, Americans are more libertarian and thus may be more susceptible to harshly negative consequences of secular individualism on family life. As Popenoe concludes, it will probably require a cultural awakening, perhaps prompted by rational self-interest, to avoid such an outcome. We will have to adopt the view that personal happiness depends on high-trust and lasting relationships and that such relationships require constraints on short-term adult interests in order to foster long-term commitments to children, and thus to the future. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE IN AMERICA David Popenoe Almost a decade ago, in our first annual State of Our Unions Report in 1999, the lead essay was â€Å"What’s Happening to Marriage. † The picture we painted was hopeful, if not especially optimistic. Marriage, we reported, â€Å"is weakening but it is too soon to write its obituary. † In this, our ninth annual report to the nation, I want to summarize what has been happening to marriage in recent years and peer into the future. One question in particular is compelling: Is marriage in America headed in the direction of the European nations, where it is an even weaker social institution than in the United States? Or are we, as in other areas of our national life—such as our higher level of religious participation and belief—the great exception to the seemingly entrenched trends of the developed, Western societies? This raises, in turn, another intriguing question: Is America still a single nation in family terms, or are we becoming more divided by region and class? Marriage and Family Trends of the Past Decade There can be no doubt that the institution of marriage has continued to weaken in recent years. Whereas marriage was once the dominant and single acceptable form of living arrangement for couples and children, it is no longer. Today, there is more â€Å"family diversity:† Fewer adults are married, more are divorced or remaining single, and more are living together outside of marriage or living alone. [The most recent data are available in the second half of this report. Today, more children are born out-of-wedlock (now almost four out of ten), and more are living in stepfamilies, with cohabiting but unmarried adults, or with a single parent. This means that more children each year are not living in families that include their own married, biological parents, which by all available empirical evidence is the gold standard for insuring optimal outcomes in a child’s development. In the late 1990s quite a bit was written about a â€Å"marriage and family turnaround,† or a reversal of the many family weakening trends. Most negative family trends have slowed appreciably in recent years; they have not continued in the dramatically swift trajectory upward that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of this may be due simply to the slowing of social trends as they â€Å"mature. † The only major family trend that has actually reversed direction is divorce. After rising steeply, beginning around 1965, the divorce rate has dropped gradually since the early 1980s, apparently mainly the result of adults becoming better educated and marrying at a later age. Other possible reasons for the decreasing divorce rate are the rise of non-marital cohabitation and a decline in second and subsequent marriages. Divorcees, for example, have become more likely to cohabit rather than remarry, thus avoiding remarriages that have always had a disproportionately high risk of divorce. The Marriage Gap One surprising development of recent years is the growth of a marriage and divorce â€Å"gap† between differently educated segments of the population. People who have completed college (around a quarter of the population) tend to have significantly higher marriage and lower divorce rates compared to those with less education. Among those married in the early 1990s, for example, only 16. 5 percent of college educated women were divorced within ten years, compared to 46 percent for high school dropouts. Indeed, most of the recent divorce rate decline has been among the college educated; for those with less than a high school education, the divorce rate actually has been rising. 1) The weakening of marriage and the resultant growth of family diversity thus is found much more prominently among those with less education and associated lower incomes. The underlying reason for this may be as simple as the fact that the personality and social characteristics enabling one to complete college are similar to those that foster today’s long-term marriages. Or, that delayed entry into the adult world of work and childbearing, and the incr ease in income and knowledge that college typically fosters, better allows mature values and financial security to undergird choice of partner and family life. Whatever the reasons, this marriage and divorce gap has been a major contributor to the growing economic inequality in America. Some expect the marriage gap to grow larger in the future because children tend to follow the family behavior of their parents. Children of the educated and financially comfortable are better socialized to marry successfully and to contain childbearing within marriage, whereas children of the lower classes often do not have this advantage. But it is doubtful that this gap will have much effect on the over-all drift of marriage in America. The increase in the college-educated portion of the population has been slowing appreciably. And the fertility of college-educated women has dropped. Twenty-four percent of college-educated women aged 40-44 were childless in 2004, compared to only 15 percent of women that age who didn’t finish high school. (2) On a national scale, the continuation of this fertility discrepancy could seriously counteract any beneficial family effects of higher education. The European Direction No matter how weak it has become, however, compared to other modern nations marriage remains at the center of American life. About 85 percent of Americans are expected to marry sometime in their lives, compared to less than 70 percent in a number of European nations. Only ten percent of Americans in an international survey agreed that â€Å"marriage is an out-dated institution,† compared to 26 percent in the UK and 36 percent in France. (3) Only about ten percent of American couples are cohabiting outside of marriage, compared to almost one third in Sweden. And our commercial wedding industry certainly has become huge. Yet an overriding question is whether marriage and family trends in every modern society are headed in a common direction. In other words, is there a set of family trends endemic to modern (urban, industrial, democratic, and still mostly Western) societies that supercedes economic, cultural, and even religious differences among regions and nations? If so, the current family system in the United States is not an exception but merely a laggard; we will gradually be swept up in the tide. Up to now, the pacesetters in most contemporary marriage and family trends—all moving in the direction of a non-marriage culture—have been the nations of Northwestern Europe, especially the Nordic countries. They have the latest age at first marriage, the lowest marriage and highest non-marital cohabitation rates, and the largest number of out-of-wedlock births. The nations in Southern Europe such as Spain, Italy and Greece, with less cohabitation and fewer out-of-wedlock births, tend to look more like the United States. Family traditionalism remains stronger in these southern nations, and young people live longer in their childhood homes, often until they marry, rather than living independently or in cohabiting unions. The United Kingdom and the Anglo-settler nations, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, typically stand somewhere in between the two extremes. But with respect to each of the dominant family trends of recent decades the other modern nations have been moving, albeit at varying speeds and not without some temporary lapses, in the Northwest European direction. The percentage of people getting married has been going down, the number of people cohabiting outside of marriage has been increasing, and the out-of-wedlock birth percentage has been skyrocketing. Between the early to mid 1990s and the early 2000s, for example, the marriage rate dropped twelve percent in Italy, 14 percent in Spain, 22 percent in Canada, 28 percent in New Zealand and 24 percent in the United States. At the same time, the non-marital cohabitation percentage (of all couples) climbed 23 percent in Italy and Australia, 53 percent in the United Kingdom, and 49 percent in the United States. The nonmarital birth rate jumped 24 percent in the United States, 48 percent in the United Kingdom, 96 percent in Italy, and a whopping 144 percent in Spain. 4) In one major respect the United States has long been the pacesetter and not the laggard. For generations, we have had the highest divorce rate. Yet even this is now changing. The U. S. rate has been dropping for several decades, while the divorce rate in many European nations has stayed the same or been climbing. The number of divorces per one thousand married women in the United Kingdom in 2002 was 14. 4, not too far from the United States rate of 18. 4. In the past, the incidence of family breakup was closely aligned with the incidence of divorce, but this is no longer the case. Because more people now cohabit in place of marrying, when a cohabiting couple breaks up it is not registered as a divorce would be. Unfortunately, we have no standard reporting system for the breakup of cohabiting couples, but all empirical studies show that cohabiting couples breakup at a much higher rate than married couples. While only ten percent of American couples cohabit, some 20 percent of British couples do. So if we are considering total family breakup, it is likely the case that Britain plus a number of other European nations now surpass us. There is one other important respect in which America has been in the vanguard of family trends—we have the highest percentage of mother-only families. Many European nations have a much higher percentage of out-of-wedlock births than we do, but the great majority of these births are to unmarried but cohabiting couples. In America, much more often, children are born to a lone mother with the father not in residence and often out of the child’s life. Nearly half of all extramarital births in America were of this nature in 2001, according to the latest available data. 5) One reason is our relatively high percentage of births to teenagers, 80 percent of which are non-marital and more than half of those to lone mothers; another is that 70 percent of all unwed births to African Americans are to lone mothers. However, the gap in mother-only families between the United States and other nations of the West is also in the process of diminishing. Being born to a lone mother is onl y one route to living in a mother-only family. Another route is through the break-up of parents after the child is born, which is far more common among parents who cohabit compared to those who marry. With parental break-up rates in other nations climbing rapidly, thanks largely to increased non-marital cohabitation, many of these nations are catching up with us in the alarming statistic of mother-only families. Even by the early 1990s, according to the calculations of several scholars, New Zealand had caught up with the United States with nearly 50 percent of children expected to experience single parenting by age 15, and the figure for Canada and five European countries exceeded 33 percent. (6) These percentages would probably be much higher if they were recalculated today using more recent data. So if we are moving in the direction of the more negative family trends of other modern nations, and they are moving in the direction of our negative trends, where does this leave us? Aren’t we all in a common basket, destined to witness an institution of marriage that is ever weakening? Before considering this, let us first have a look at the possibility that America is becoming increasingly bifurcated into two distinct cultures. Could it be that only one part of America is moving in a European family direction? The American Red-Blue Divide The recent family trends in the Western nations have been largely generated by a distinctive set of cultural values that scholars have come to label â€Å"secular individualism. † It features the gradual abandonment of religious attendance and beliefs, a strong leaning toward â€Å"expressive† values that are preoccupied with personal autonomy and self-fulfillment, and a political emphasis on egalitarianism and the tolerance of diverse lifestyles. An established empirical generalization is that the greater the dominance of secular individualism in a culture, the more fragmented the families. The fundamental reason is that the traditional nuclear family is a somewhat inegalitarian group (not only between husbands and wives but also parents and children) that requires the suppression of some individuality and also has been strongly supported by, and governed by the rules of, orthodox religions. As a seeming impediment to personal autonomy and social equality, therefore, the traditional family is an especially attractive unit for attacks from a secular individualistic perspective. On average, America has been moving in the direction of secular individualism, as can be seen in the general drift of our family trends. But the â€Å"on average† covers up some very substantial variations, some of which account for why, looked at internationally, we are a nation with relatively conservative family values. A recent National Cultural Values Survey (7) found that American adults usefully can be split into three groups, based on the degree to which they have embraced secular individualism, ranging from the Orthodox to the Progressives, with Independents in the middle. The survey found 31 percent of the population in the religiously Orthodox category, 17 percent in the secular Progressive category, and 46 percent as Independents. The Orthodox category is far larger than one finds in Western Europe and the other Anglo nations, and the Progressive category (i. e. , secular individualist) is considerably smaller, and therein lies the major basis for American family exceptionalism. One thing that makes these categories so prominent in American culture is that they are strongly expressed geographically. As analyzed by demographers at the University of Michigan, the two extremes are reflected in the so-called Red (Republican) and Blue (Democratic) state distinction frequently made in recent national political analysis. 8) The more Progressive Blue states are principally those of the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, and the West Coast, while the more Orthodox Red states are found in the South, the lower Midwest, and the Mountain region of the West. Reflecting their different ideologies, the Blue states tend to have lower marriage and higher cohabitation rates, along with lower fertility, while the Red states are more t raditional in their family structure. [See box in the second half of this report. The ideology and family behavior found in the Blue states resembles that of the other Western nations, although not quite as far down the path of Progressivism. If one were referring only to this part of America, one would not be talking about American exceptionalism. The large Orthodox population of the Red states, however, does give the United States a unique configuration in the modern world. If it were not for this population, we would not be having a â€Å"culture war† and we probably would not even be having a national conversation about the weakening of marriage. There is no such conversation about marriage in the Northwestern European nations, despite the fact that the institution of marriage is considerably weaker there than it is here. It is clear that the family structure of America is exceptional in some respects. The question is, are we so exceptional that we can resist the modern trend of marriage and family decline? So far the answer is no—we have been headed down the same path as every other modern, Western society toward ever-increasing secular individualism with its associated family structures. If this trend continues, the family structure of the Red states will come to look more and more like today’s Blue states, and the Blue states will look ever more like Europe. The Prospect for Cultural Change To reverse this trend of marriage and family decline would take a cultural transformation of some kind, and it is interesting to consider and evaluate what this might look like, and what could bring it about. One potential source of change would be a significant expansion in influence and authority of today’s orthodox, anti-individualist religions. Much has been written in recent years about the weakening of secularization, pointing out that modernization no longer necessarily means the demise of religion. The evidence for this comes from the newly modernizing countries of the world, however, where orthodox religions have actually been gaining, rather than losing, strength. There is no evidence that anything like this has been happening to date in the Western European and Anglo nations. Quite the opposite; with each passing year these nations—including the United States—are more secular than ever before. The National Cultural Values Survey noted above found that regular churchgoing has dipped below 50 percent and only 36 percent believe â€Å"people should live by God’s principles,† concluding that â€Å"America no longer enjoys cultural consensus on God, religion, and what constitutes right and wrong. â€Å"(9) A powerful indicator of future trends are the beliefs and attitudes of today’s young people, which are unmistakably more secular and individualist than those of their elders. A recent study concluded that emerging adults (ages 18-24) in America, compared to their earlier counterparts and their older contemporaries, are more disaffected and disconnected from society, more cynical or negative about people, and have moved in a liberal direction. (10) A Pew Foundation national survey found that 20 percent of today’s young people (18-24) say they have no religious affiliation or are atheist or agnostic, nearly double the percentage of the non-religious found in that age group less than 20 years ago. In the same time period the percentage of young people who did not agree that they had â€Å"old fashioned values about family and marriage† jumped from 17 percent to 31 percent. (11) A study in Britain, starkly pointing up the entrenched nature of this generational shift, found that a child with two religious parents has only a 50 percent chance of being religious, while a child with one religious parent has 25 percent chance of being religious. 12) Another cultural transformation that could move the family in a more traditional direction is widespread immigration. In combination with low birthrates, massive immigration is capable of changing the culture, social experiences, and self-identity of a population—including the ideologies of secularism and individualism. This possibility is beginning to be discussed in Europe, where birthrates in many nations remain well below replacement level and immigration, mostly from orthodox Muslim countries with high birthrates, is h igh and growing. The percentage of foreign born in many Western European nations is now similar to that in America, around twelve percent, but the birthrates of these groups are typically far higher than the indigenous populations. Projections are that the percentage of people of â€Å"foreign origin† may reach as high as one third in some European nations by 2050, and far higher than that in the major cities. (13) What is not known is how these new immigrants ultimately will react to secular individualism and the other cultural beliefs and practices of modern, Western democracies. As many have noted, because of long-standing antipathies between peoples of the Muslim faith and those of Christianity, often violent and going back well more than a millennium, it does seem possible that Europe faces the prospect of a major cultural transformation sometime in the future through immigrants who, rather than assimilate, will pull the culture in a new direction. The immigration situation in the United States, however, is different, and it does not seem as likely that in the foreseeable future immigrant groups will be able to seriously shift our culture in a more traditional direction. The most likely candidate for cultural change, of course, is the growing Hispanic population. The percentage of Hispanics is projected to reach 25 percent of the total population by 2050, when non-Hispanic Whites will make up only a slim majority. (14) But unlike Europe we are already a nation made up of many different immigrant groups; many Hispanics have been here for years, and they share a common religious heritage in Christianity. Thus Hispanics don’t pose the same threat of not assimilating to Western culture as do the Muslims. Indeed, to date, Hispanics seem to have assimilated into the American culture of secular individualism more than the reverse. For example, the unwed birth percentage among Hispanics has jumped from 19 percent in 1980 to 48 percent in 2005 and stands well above the percentage for the non-Hispanic White population (25 percent). Hispanics have the same divorce rate as non-Hispanic Whites, and in recent years their rate of non-marital cohabitation has grown faster than that of any other immigrant group. These trends contradict earlier expectations that Hispanics might bring this nation a new wave of family traditionalism. The prediction of the continued growth of secular individualism within modern cultures rests on some powerful facts. So far in the Western experience, at least, the dominant sociological factors associated with secular individualism are that the higher the educational and income levels of a population, and the more urbanized it is, the greater the degree of secular individualism. Is it likely that any time in the near future educational, income, and urbanization levels in America will drop? They have been increasing inexorably for three centuries, so a turnaround would most likely occur only in the event of some catastrophe, either natural or man-made. Absent such a catastrophe (which certainly can not be ruled out in today’s world), the most likely future scenario is that secular individualism will increasingly dominate the cultures of the West. The best prospects for cultural change, therefore, rest on the possibility that, at some time in the future, new generations of secular individualists themselves will undergo a change of heart. One way this might occur is through the growth of new, non-orthodox religious ideologies that remained compatible with secular individualism but take it in new directions. Unfortunately, the new religious strains that have emerged in recent decades, so-called New Age religions, have been profoundly individualistic. None has shown any interest in preserving marriage and family solidarity. Indeed, they seem part and parcel of the secular individualist movement, albeit with a more â€Å"spiritual† bent. The same seems to hold true for today’s rapidly growing â€Å"green† movement, which itself shows signs of becoming a new quasi-religion in which the environment has replaced God as a focus of almost divine adoration. So far there is little evidence that â€Å"pro-green† translates into â€Å"pro-marriage† or â€Å"pro-family,† although it is conceivable that somehow the conservation of nature could become translated into the conservation of the family. Any widely accepted â€Å"new morality† that might change family behavior would probably have to be compatible with secular individualism’s motivating force—rational self-interest. The self-interest of today’s young people still includes the desire to have strong intimate relationships and to want to do best by their children. And there is every reason to believe that these interests will continue into the future because they are, in fact, an intrinsic part of being human. The task that lies ahead, then, is to help young people to see the importance of marriage and strong families as the best way to achieve these interests; to help them realize that a better and more meaningful way of life, both for themselves and for their children, involves a commitment to long-term marriage. What Can be Done? As a first step, the institution of marriage needs to be promoted by all levels of society, particularly the families, the schools, the churches, the non-profit sector, and the government. The great majority of American high school seniors still want to get married, with 82 percent of girls and 70 percent of boys recently saying that â€Å"having a good marriage and family life† is â€Å"extremely important† to them. These percentages, in fact, represent a slight increase from the late 1970s. 15) But as high schoolers reach young adulthood, when the attraction of cohabitation and careers gains strong currency, making the actual commitment to marriage is not easy. Young people need, therefore, to be made continually aware of the many benefits married life brings, both for themselves and for their children. The empirical evidence is now strong and persuasive that a good marriage enhances personal happiness, economic success, health and longevity. This ev idence should become a regular part of our educational programs and our public discourse. Yet successful marriage promotion requires more than empirical evidence. Marriage has fallen by the wayside, in part, because it receives less and less social recognition and approval. Any norm of behavior requires for its maintenance the continuing support of the community, including active social pressures to uphold it. When social approval and pressures wither, the norm weakens. Today’s young people have been taught through the schools and in their communities a strong message of tolerance for â€Å"alternative lifestyles. † â€Å"Thou shalt not make moral judgments about other people’s family behavior† seems to have become a dominant message in our times. The reason for this is completely understandable; children and young people come from ever more diverse family situations which are not of their own doing, and they should be fully accepted and not be penalized. The problem is that this moral message is carried on into adult life, where it is applied not to children and young people but to adults who do have choices about how they shape their lives. In an effort not to judge much less stigmatize any adult life style, we have all too often become virtually silent about the value and importance of marriage. This silence is extremely damaging to the promotion of a pro-marriage culture. The widespread promotion of marriage is directed at only half of the problem, however. Getting people to marry is one thing, helping them to stay married is something else entirely. Helping people to stay married is the main focus of an important set of programs known as marriage education. Typically conducted in group settings rather than counseling situations, marriage education programs focus on developing the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed for making a wise marital choice and having a successful marriage. Although marriage education has been around for many decades, it recently has been thrust into the limelight thanks to widespread publicity and government financial assistance. The importance of marriage education is magnified by the fact that the marital relationship today is so different from what it was in the past. Marriage is now based almost entirely on close friendship and romantic love, mostly stripped of the economic dependencies, legal and religious restrictions, and extended family pressures that have held marriages together for most of human history. Until fairly recent times marriages had little to do with romantic love, sexual passion, or even close friendship; they were functional partnerships in the intense struggle of life. Today, a successful marriage rests almost entirely on how well one gets along, intimately and for the long term, with someone of the opposite sex. The â€Å"relationship knowledge† this requires has never been part of formal education, but there is no reason to believe that it can not effectively be taught to married couples and those about to be married, as well as to younger people as part of the high school curriculum. Indeed, the initial empirical evaluations of marriage education programs conclude that they are both well-received and have generally positive outcomes. Marriage promotion and marriage education are essential steps, but in order fully to rebuild the institution of marriage there would probably have to be a cultural shift of a more fundamental nature. Modern cultures would need to pull back from the now dominant thrust of secular individualism—the excessive pursuit of personal autonomy, immediate gratification, and short-term personal gain—and give greater emphasis to issues of community and social solidarity. This could come about through a growing realization, based on rational self-interest, that our personal happiness and sense of well-being over the long course of life are less affected by the amount of independence, choice, bodily pleasure and wealth we are able to obtain than by the number of stable, long-term and meaningful relationships we have with others. (16) And through a greater recognition of the fact that short-term adult interests can be in conflict with the long-term health and wellbeing of children, and that our children’s welfare has everything to do with the future of our nation. Conclusion America is still the most marrying of Western nations, but nevertheless we are caught up in the prevailing trends of modernity that lead toward an ever-weakening institution of marriage. Marriage rates have been dropping and cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth rates have been rising, thanks in large part to the growing influence of secular individualism in all modern cultures. The negative effects of this are felt most profoundly by our children, who are growing up in family situations that are less and less optimum from a child-development perspective. As we move in the direction of the weaker family structures of Europe it is important to remember that we lack many of the welfare â€Å"safety-nets† found there, and therefore the negative effects of marital decline on children are likely to be heightened in this country. We are not a unified nation in family terms. We have a marriage gap, whereby the college-educated have a stronger marriage culture than the less well-educated. And we have a Red state/Blue state divide, whereby the nation is geographically split up into areas of family traditionalism and non-traditionalism. Yet these divisions remain peripheral to the overall waning of marriage in America. The rebuilding of a stronger marriage culture is possible. In addition to the heavy promotion of marriage built around the self-interest of today’s young people, it will probably require a cultural shift of some magnitude, one in which stable, predictable, and long-term relationships with others come to be viewed as the best foundation for adult personalities, childrearing, and family life. Footnotes 1. Steven P. Martin, â€Å"Trends in Marital Dissolution by Women’s Education in the United States,† Demographic Research 15-20 (December 2006), 537-560. 2. Jane Lawler Dye, â€Å"Fertility of American Women: June 2004. † Current Population Report, P20-555, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau (2005),Table 7. 3. Reported in Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, â€Å"Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,† unpublished manuscript, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2007). 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all calculations are by the National Marriage Project from published international data sources. . Lisa Mincieli and Kristin Moore, â€Å"The Relationship Context of Births Outside of Marriage: The Rise of Cohabitation,† Child Trends Research Brief 2007-13 (May 2007). 6. Patrick Heuveline, J. M. Timberlake, and F. F. Furstenberg, Jr. , â€Å"Shifting Childrearing to Single Mothers: Results from 17 Western Countries,† Population and Devel opment Review 29-1 (March 2003), 47-71. 7. Culture and Media Institute, Alexandria, Virginia (2007). 8. Ron J. Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert, â€Å"The Second Demographic Transition in the U. S. : Exception or Textbook Example,† Population and Development Review December 2006), 32-4. 9. Executive Summary, op. cit. 10. Tom Smith, â€Å"Generation Gaps in Attitudes and Values from the 1970s to the 1990s,† in R. A. Settersten, Jr. , F. F. Furstenberg, Jr. , and R. C. Rumbaut (eds. ), On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004). 11. The Pew Research Center, â€Å"A Portrait of Generation Next,† Washington, DC, 2007. 12. Alasdair Crockett and David Voas, â€Å"Generations of Decline: Religious Change in the 20th Century,† Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (December 2006), 45-4. 3. David Coleman, â€Å"Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition, † Population and Development Review 32-3 (September 2006), 401-446. 14. Philip Martin and Elizabeth Midgely, â€Å"Immigration: Shaping and Reshaping America,† Population Bulletin 58-2 (June 2003), p. 22. 15. Data from Monitoring the Future surveys, reported in this second half of this report. 16. For an important statement about this, see John Ashcroft and Phil Caroe, â€Å"Thriving Lives: Which Way for Well-Being? † Relationships Foundation, Cambridge, England (2007). SOCIAL INDICATORS OF MARITAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING TRENDS OF THE PAST FOUR DECADES Marriage Divorce Unmarried Cohabitation Loss of Child Centeredness Fragile Families with Children Teen Attitudes About Marriage and Family THE RED/BLUE AMERICAN FAMILY DIVIDE The Red State/Blue State divide has become a familiar theme in national politics. In a series of recent presidential elections, the so-called Red states have tended to vote Republican and the Blue states have voted Democratic. The Red states consist of the South (e. g. Alabama), the lower Midwest (e. g. Oklahoma), and the Mountain Region of the West (e. g. Montana). The Blue states are those of the Northeast (e. g. Massachusetts), the upper Midwest (e. g. Minnesota), and the West Coast (e. g. California). Less well known is the fact that the Red and Blue states also differ significantly in family terms, and this may help to explain their politics. The Red states typically have a more traditional family structure than the Blue States; people in the Red states marry younger and in larger numbers, cohabit outside of marriage less, and have more children. This is in large part because Red Staters are likely to be more religiously observant and to belong to denominations that profess allegiance to more conservative social values. However, the Red states also have higher divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates than the Blue states, and these rates can hardly be considered indicators of traditionalism, much less religiosity. A closer look at the actual demographic differences among the states can help us to better understand the nature and causes of the Red/Blue American family divide. Red states have significantly higher marriage rates. The national marriage rate was 41 marriages per 1000 single women in 2005. Some of the highest marriage rates are found in the South, with Arkansas (77) and Alabama (54) leading the pack, and in the Mountain states of Idaho (66), Wyoming (60) and Utah (58). The lowest marriage rates, in contrast, are found in the Northeast with Pennsylvania (24), New Jersey (27), Delaware (28) and Connecticut (28) at the bottom. a) Higher marriage rates are associated with less non-marital cohabitation, and this also clusters geographically along Red/Blue lines. The national rate of unmarried partner households (as percent of all couple households) was 10% in 2005. States in the South and Midwest have the lowest percentages: Alabama (6%), Mississippi (8%), Kansas (8%), and Arkansas (8%). At the opposite pole are the states in the Northeast and Northwest: Vermont (14%), Maine (13%), Oregon (12%) and Washington (12%). (b) Statewide fertility rates fo llow a similar Red/Blue geographic distribution. The national fertility rate was 67 births per 1000 women ages 15-44 in 2005, but it was in the 70s in a number of Red states, Idaho (77), Kansas (70), and Georgia (70), and only in the 50s for Vermont (51), Maine (54) and Massachusetts (56). In addition to family traditionalism, the fertility rate in a number of southwestern States is greatly affected by the higher-fertility Hispanic population. (c) Put all together, these demographic characteristics add up to more married couples with children in the Red states and fewer in the Blue states, and this is ne of the biggest reasons for the Red/Blue political divide. Married people with children have tended disproportionately in recent presidential elections to favor the Republican Party. Indeed, for recent elections the correlation between married-with-children and voting Republican is one of the highest ever found between demographic factors and voting behavior. (d) Yet the Red states also, interestingly, have the highest out-of-wedloc k birth percentages and divorce rates. While 37% of all births in the U. S. ere out-of-wedlock in 2005, the unwed birth percentages for the Red states of Mississippi (49%) and Louisiana (48%) are far ahead of the Blue states of New Hampshire (27%) and Minnesota (30%) A closer examination, however, shows that this Red/Blue geographic pattern of unwed births is heavily dictated by the racial and ethnic make up of each state, as well as by educational and income levels. States such as Mississippi and Louisiana are at the top partly due to the extremely high unwed birth percentages for Blacks (77%) and Hispanics (50%). The state with the highest overall unwed birth percentage is New Mexico (51%), owing mainly to the contribution of its large Hispanic population. If one removes Blacks and Hispanics from the equation and looks just at unwed births among Whites, a geographic pattern more influenced by family traditionalism emerges. For the White population only, the unwed birth percentage in Mississippi (26%) is lower than for the White population in New Hampshire (27%). Unwed birth percentages below the national average of 25% for Whites are also found in the Red states of Alabama (21%), North Carolina (23%), and Georgia (23%). In contrast, above average unwed birth percentages for Whites are found the in secular and cohabitation-high Blue states of Vermont (32%) and Maine (35%) and Oregon (29%). (e) The picture is further complicated, however, by the fact that marriage, cohabitation, and unwed birth rates are so strongly affected by income and educational levels. In general, people with lower incomes and less education tend to marry less, cohabit more, and have more births out-of-wedlock. While professed traditional family values may help to generate fewer unwed births, they do not seem to provide much protection against divorce. The highest divorce rates are found in the more religiously-based Red states such as Arkansas (25), Oklahoma (25), and West Virginia (23), in striking contrast to more secular Blue states such as Pennsylvania (11), and Massachusetts (11). The national divorce rate was 16 divorces per 1000 married women in 2005. (f) Level of educational achievement is the single factor that probably best explains the geographic distribution of divorce. The lower the educational (and associated income) level, the higher the divorce rate, and educational levels are substantially lower in the Red states than in the Blue states. The Blue states of the West Coast stand as an exception to this education-based pattern, however, with the divorce rates for highly-educated Oregon and Washington being above the national average (probably California, too, but unfortunately divorce rates for that state are not available). In addition to education, therefore, another important causal factor in divorce may be the level of geographic mobility in a state, making the more recently settled and more transient populations of the West Coast and Mountain states more vulnerable to divorce. Mobility levels may also help to account for another geographic exception: the long-settled Red states of the Central Plains (e. g. Iowa and North Dakota) have very low divorce rates, comparable to those of the East Coast states. Footnotes: a. Calculations by the National Marriage Project obtained using data from the Current Population Surveys, March 2005 Supplement, as well as Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2005, National Vital Statistics Report 54:20, July 21, 2006, Table 3. The exceptionally high marriages rates in Nevada and Hawaii are not considered here because so many out-of-staters go to these states to get married. b. Calculations by the National Marriage Project using data downloaded from the American Community Survey, 2005. c. Fertility rates from â€Å"Births: Preliminary Data for 2005,† National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 11, December 28, 2006. d. Ron J. Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert, â€Å"The Second Demographic Transition in the US: Exception or Textbook Example? ,† Population and Development Review 32:4 (December, 2006). e. Unmarried mother birth data from â€Å"Births: Preliminary Data for 2005,† National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 11, December 28, 2006. f. Calculations by the National Marriage Project obtained using data from the Current Population Surveys, March 2005 Supplement less population in CA, GA, HI, IN, LA and MN to match unreported divorces in these states. Divorce counts from Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2005, National Vital Statistics Report 54:20, July 21, 2006, Table 3. The highest divorce rate, of course, is found in Nevada (38. ), and not considered here because of the out-of-stater problem. MARRIAGE Key Finding: Marriage trends in recent decades indicate that Americans have become less likely to marry, and the most recent data show that the marriage rate in the United States continues to decline. Of those who do marry, there has been a moderate drop since the 1970s in the percentage of couples who consider their marriages to be â₠¬Å"very happy,† but in the past decade this trend has swung in a positive direction. Americans have become less likely to marry. This is reflected in a decline of nearly 50 percent, from 1970 to 2005, in the annual number of marriages per 1000 unmarried adult women (Figure 1). Much of this decline—it is not clear just how much—results from the delaying of first marriages until older ages: the median age at first marriage went from 20 for females and 23 for males in 1960 to about 26 and 27, respectively, in 2005. Other factors accounting for the decline are the growth of unmarried cohabitation and a small decrease in the tendency of divorced persons to remarry. The decline also reflects some increase in lifelong singlehood, though the actual amount can not be known until current young and middle-aged adults pass through the life course. The percentage of adults in the population who are currently married has also diminished. Since 1960, the decline of those married among all persons age 15 and older has been 13 percentage points—and 25 points among black females (Figure 2). It should be noted that these data include both people who have never married and those who have married and then divorced. In order partially to control for a decline in married adults simply due to delayed first marriages, we have looked at changes in the percentage of persons age 35 through 44 who were married (Figure 3). Since 1960, there has been a drop of 20 percentage points for married men and 18 points for married women. (But the decline has not affected all segments of the population. See the accompanying box: The Marriage Gap. ) Marriage trends in the age range of 35 to 44 are suggestive of lifelong singlehood. In times past and still today, virtually all persons who were going to marry during their lifetimes had married by age 45. More than 90 percent of women have married eventually in every generation for which records exist, going back to the mid-1800s. By 1960, 94 percent of women then alive had been married at least once by age 45—probably an historical high point. (1) For the generation of 1995, assuming a continuation of then current marriage rates, several demographers projected that 88 percent of women and 82 percent of men would ever marry. 2) If and when these figures are recalculated for the early years of the 21st century, the percentage of women and men ever marrying will almost certainly be lower. It is important to note that the decline in marriage does not mean that people are giving up on living together with a sexual partner. On the contrary, with the incidence of unmarried cohabitation increasing rapidly, marriage is giving ground to unwed unions. Most people now live together before they marry for the first time. An even higher percentage of those divorced who subsequently remarry live together first. And a growing number of persons, both young and old, are living together with no plans for eventual marriage. There is a common belief that, although a smaller percentage of Americans are now marrying than was the case a few decades ago, those who marry have marriages of higher quality. It seems reasonable that if divorce removes poor marriages from the pool of married couples and cohabitation â€Å"trial marriages† deter some bad marriages from forming, the remaining marriages on average should be happier. The best available evidence on the topic, however, does not support these assumptions. Since 1973, the General Social Survey periodically has asked representative samples of married Americans to rate their marriages as either â€Å"very happy,† â€Å"pretty happy,† or â€Å"not too happy. â€Å"(3) As Figure 4 indicates, the percentage of both men and women saying â€Å"very happy† has declined moderately over the past 25 years. (4) This trend, however, is now heading in a positive direction. 1 Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992): 10; Michael R. Haines, â€Å"Long-Term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present,† The History of the Family 1-1 (1996): 15-39. 2 Robert Schoen and Nicola Standish, â€Å"The Retrenchment of Marriage: Results from Marital Status Life Tables for the United States, 1995. † Population and Development Review 27-3 (2001): 553-563. 3 Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, this is a nationally representative study of the English-speaking, non-institutionalized population of the United States age 18 and over. Using a different data set that compared marriages in 1980 with marriages in 1992, equated in terms of marital duration, Stacy J. Rogers and Paul Amato found similarly that the 1992 marriages had less marital interaction, more marital conflict, and more marital problems. â€Å"Is Marital Quality Declining? The Evidence from Two Generations,† Social Forces 75 (1997): 1089. THE MARRIAGE GAP There is good news a nd bad news on the marriage front. For the college-educated segment of our population, the institution of marriage appears to have gained strength in recent years. For everyone else, however, marriage continues to weaken. Thus there is a growing â€Å"marriage gap† in America, between those who are well educated and those who are not. Recent data indicates that, for the college educated, the institution of marriage may actually have strengthened. It once was the case that college-educated women married at a lower rate than their less educated peers. Indeed, marriage rates for college-educated women were lower well into the late 20th Century. Since around 1980, however, this situation has reversed. College-educated women are now marrying at a higher rate than their peers. Not only that, but the divorce rate among these women is relatively low and has been dropping. This may be due partly to the fact that college-educated women, once the leaders of the divorce revolution, now hold a more restrictive view of divorce than less well educated women. b The out-of-wedlock childbearing of college-educated women has always been well below that of other segments of the population. Now, among those who delay marriage past age 30, this is the only group becoming more likely to have children after marriage rather than before. c There is more good news. The marriages of the college educated have become more egalitarian than ever, both in the sense that husbands and wives are matched more equally in their educational and economic backgrounds, and that they hold more egalitarian attitudes about marital gender roles. d As icing on the cake, all of this may add up to greater marital happiness. The percentage of spouses among this group who rate their marriage as â€Å"very happy† has held fairly steady over recent decades, whereas for other parts of the population the percentage has dropped significantly. In large numbers, therefore, the college educated part of America is living the American dream—with happy, stable, two-parent families. There is one problem, however, and it is a serious one for the future of the nation. College-educated women aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. In 2004, for example, twenty four percent of women 40 to 44 years old with a bachelor’s degree were childless, com pared to only fifteen percent of those without a high school degree. f For the non college-educated population, unfortunately, the marriage situation remains gloomy. Marriage rates are continuing to decline, and the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is rising. In the year 2000, fully forty percent of high-school drop-out mothers were living without husbands, compared with just twelve percent of college-grad mothers. g Because of the many statistically well-documented benefits of marriage in such areas as income, health, and longevity, this gap is generating a society of greater inequality. America is becoming a nation divided not only by educational and income levels, but by unequal family structures. a Joshua R. Goldstein and Catherine T. Kenney, â€Å"Marriage Delayed or Marriage Foregone? New Cohort Forecasts of First Marriages for U. S. Women,† American Sociological Review 66-4 (2001): 506-519. b Steven P. Martin and Sangeeta Parashar, â€Å"Women’s Changing Attitudes Toward Divorce: 1974-2002: Evidence for an Educational Crossover,† Journal of Marriage and Family 68-1 (2006): 29-40. c Steven P. Martin, â€Å"Reassessing Delayed and Forgone Marriage in the United States,† unpublished manuscript (2004), Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Robert Schoen and Yen-Hsin Alice Cheng, â€Å"Partner Choice and the Differential Retreat from Marriage,† Journal of Marriage Family 68-1 (2006): 1-10; Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco, â€Å"Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: the 1960s Through the 1990s,† Journal of Marriage and Family 63-4 (2001): 1009-1037. e Calculation by the Na tional Marriage Project of data from The General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. f Jane Lawler Dye, Fertility of American Women: June 2004, Current Population Report, P20-555, Washington, DC: U. S. Census Bureau (2005): Table 7. g David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, â€Å"The Uneven Spread of Single-Parent Families,† in Kathryn M. Neckerman (ed. ) Social Inequality (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 3-77. |   | |Figure 1. Number of Marriages per 1,000 Unmarried Women Age 15 and Older, by Year, United States (a) | | |Year |Number | | | |1960 |73. |(b) | | |1970 |76. 5 | | | |1975 |66. 9 | | | |1980 |61. 4 | | | |1985 |56. | | | |1990 |54. 5 | | | |1995 |50. 8 | | | |2000 |46. 5 | | | |2005 |40. | | |a We have used the number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women age 15 and older, rather than the Crude Marriage Rate of | |marriages per 1,000 population to help avoid the problem of compositional changes in the population, that is, changes which stem| |merely from there being more or less people in the marriageable ages. Even this more refined measure is somewhat susceptible to | |compositional changes. |b Per 1,000 unmarried women age 14 and older. | |S ource: U. S. Department of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, Page 87, Table 117; and Statistical | |Abstract of the United States, 1986, Page 79, Table 124. Figure for 2004 was obtained using data from the Current Population | |Surveys, March 2004 Supplement, as well as Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2005, National Vital | |Statistics Report 54:20, July 21, 2006, Table 3. http://www. cdc. gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_20. pdf) The CPS, March | |Supplement, is based on a sample of the U. S. population, rather than an actual count such as those available from the decennial | |census. See sampling and weighting notes at http://www. bls. census. gov:80/cps/ads/2002/ssampwgt. htm | |Figure 2. Percentage of All Persons Age 15 and Older Who Were Married, by Sex and Race, 1960-2005 United Statesa | | |Total Males |Black Males |White Males |Total Females |Black Females |White Females | | | | | | | | | |1960 |69. 3 |60. 9 |70. 2 |65. 9 |59. 8 |66. 6 | |1970 |66. 7 |56. 9 |68. |61. 9 |54. 1 |62. 8 | |1980 |63. 2 |48. 8 |65. 0 |58. 9 |44. 6 |60. 7 | |1990 |60. 7 |45. 1 |62. 8 |56. 9 |40. 2 |59. 1 | |2000 |57. 9 |42. 8 |60. 0 |54. 7 |36. 2 |57. 4 | |2006 |56. 3 |40. 9 |58. 5 |53. |34. 3 |56. 3 | |a Includes races other than Black and White. | |b In 2003, the U. S. Census Bureau expanded its racial categories to permit respondents to identify themselves as belonging to more than | |one race. This means that racial data computations beginning in 2004 may not be strictly comparable to those of prior years. | |Source: U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P20-506; America's Families and Living Arrangements: March 2000 and| |earlier reports; and data calculate d from the Current Population Surveys, March 2006 Supplement. | |Figure 3. Percentage of Persons Age 35 through 44 Who Were Married by Sex, 1960-2005, United States | | | | | | | |Year |Males |Females | | |1960 |88. 0 |87. | | |1970 |89. 3 |86. 9 | | |1980 |84. 2 |81. 4 | | |1990 |74. 1 |73. 0 | | |2000 |69. 0 |71. | | |2006 |67. 9 |69. 5 | |Source: U. S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1961, Page 34, Table 27; Statistical Abstract of | |the United States, 1971, Page 32, Table 38; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1981, Page 38, Table 49; and U. S. Bureau | |of the Census, General Population Characteristics, 1990, Page 45, Table 34; and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001,| |Page 48, Table 51; internet tables (http://www. ensus. gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2005/tabA1-all. pdf) and data calculated | |from the Current Population Surveys, March 2006 Supplement. Figure for 2006 was obtained using data from the Current Population | |Surveys rather than data from the census. The C PS, March Supplement, is based on a sample of the U. S. population, rather than an| |actual count such as those available from the decennial census. See sampling and weighting notes at | |http://www. bls. ensus. gov:80/cps/ads/2002/ssampwgt. htm | |Figure 4. Percentage of Married Persons Age 18 and Older Who Said Their Marriages Were â€Å"Very Happy,† by Period, United States | | | | | |Period |Men |Women | |1973-1976 |69. |68. 6 | |1977-1981 |68. 3 |64. 2 | |1982-1986 |62. 9 |61. 7 | |1987-1991 |66. 4 |59. | |1993-1996 |63. 2 |59. 7 | |1998-2004 |64. 4 |60. 4 | |Source: The General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. The trend for| |both men and women is statistically significant (p