In many high-fertility countries, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, substantial proportions of women give non-numeric responses when asked about desired family size. Demographic transition theory has interpreted responses of "don't know" or "up to God" as evidence of fatalistic attitudes toward childbearing. Alternatively, these responses can be understood as meaningful reactions to uncerta...

This paper examines in depth the determinants of repartnering in Italy. With data from a national survey conducted in 2003, the effects of socio-economic, demographic and contextual characteristics on second-union formation among separated women are examined. The analysis is of particular interest in a country such as Italy, which is undergoing a transition from traditional to modern family beh...

Mona El-Sheikh and her colleagues have assembled an impressive series of studies for this monograph. To date, researchers interested in the consequences of marital conflict on children have focused primarily on the main effects of psychological variables. Although these studies have been invaluable in helping us to better understand risk and resiliency factors associated with children’s exposur...

The married consistently report better levels of psychological health compared to the unmarried. Using a cross-sectional questionnaire design, this research examines to what extent this relationship between marital status and psychological wellbeing can be explained by perceived social support. The data reveal that, after controlling for demographic variables, number of daily hassles and coping...

BACKGROUND Husband alcohol use has frequently been found to be related to husband-to-wife marital violence. Research has demonstrated a prospective link between husband alcohol use before marriage and husband-to-wife aggression in the first year of marriage. The present study examined the relationships of husband violence, marital conflict, and couple's alcohol use in the first year of marriage...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have indicated that married people have lower mortality and are generally healthier. Most previous studies have been cross-sectional and few studies investigated the effect of marital transition on health. With a prospective design and repeated measures of variables, we sought to analyse the temporal relation between marital transition and change in health behaviours...

The north-western populations of Pakistan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) adjoining the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are an amalgamation of native and migrated Pashtun tribes. These tribal populations are in transition due to war conditions and geo-political turmoil on both sides of the border since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Bio-demographic and epidemiological data for these...

This longitudinal study investigated the relationship between retirement transitions and subsequent psychological well-being using data on 458 married men and women (aged 50-72 years) who were either still in their primary career jobs, retired, or had just made the transition to retirement over the preceding 2 years. The findings show that the relationship between retirement and psychological w...