Hernan Vera

Women in Age-Discrepant Marriages

This research seeks to identify salient sociodemographic correlates of womens likelihood of marrying outside the normative age patterns. The data were drawn from the Public Use Sample of the 1980 Census. Logistic regression analyses show that Black women are significantly more likely than White women to be in age-heterogamous marriages. Marital history appears to be the strongest predictor of age-discrepant marriages - remarried subjects exhibit the highest probability of entering such unions. The analysis also suggests that wives who are heterogamous on other dimensions vis-à-vis their husbands are also more likely to be in age-heterogamous marriages.

The intelligence of rapists: new data.

IQs of violent sexual offenders (rapists) were compared to those of alleged nonviolent sexual offenders, nonsexual violent offenders, and nonsexual nonviolent offenders. Data were gathered from defendants referred to the medical coauthor for pretrial psychiatric evaluation. Rapists scored lower in the IQ test, but this difference did not appear to be significant in the pairwise X2 comparisons. This held true after controlling for the race of the defendant.

Violence and Sexuality Three Types of Defendants

This article is an empirical profile of defendants charged with acts of violence alone, such as assault; violence and sexuality, such as rape; and purely sexual, such as exposure. The three groups are compared along four types of variables: background, medical and mental health history, psychiatric, and some derived from the circumstance of the criminal event.

On Dutch windows

In The Netherlands, living room windows are big, left uncovered day and night, and elaborately decorated. This pattern, which is widespread in all urban and rural regions in this country, disappears abruptly as soon as the border into Germany is crossed where windows are generally smaller, consistently covered, and more sparsely decorated. Going south into Flanders, the disappearance of open and decorated windows is gradual but noticeable.The cognitive and sensory meaning of a single object in material culture, the Dutch window, is examined as a concrete articulation of the boundary between the public and private realms by “thinking it with” successive conceptual frames in sociology. Assuming that material objects are embodiments of ideas, the study focuses on (a) the norms for looking and for looking out of the windows, (b) the territorial boundary being established and, (c) the information game played through the windows in a context of the notion of privacy. Photographs of the cultural objects under consideration, i.e., Dutch windows, are presented throughout the text as reminders that the cultural and material realms are sensually linked. The study concludes that objects in material culture must be examined in terms of the active, purposive acts we accomplish by adapting the objects to our practical and expressive needs.

On gold diggers: Status gain or loss in age heterogamous marriages

Deviations from the age norms governing mate selection often provoke negative stereotypes regarding the participants. This article focuses on age heterogamous unions or so-called May-December marriages, involving an older person with a young spouse. The public often attributes pecuniary (gold digger) motives to the latter. Our research tests the widespread notion that the younger woman exchanges youth for status or money. Using data from the Panel on Income Dynamics, age homogamous and age heterogamous couples are compared in terms of each of the spouses achieved and inherited status and the contribution these make to explained variance in family income. Analysis using hierarchical multiple regression revealed that, contrary to popular belief, the status of the older spouse does not make a more important contribution toward explained income. Indeed, in this study, the reverse was the case in that the wifes status contributed more toward explained income. The notion that age heterogamy in marriage represents a channel of upward mobility for young women married to older men needs systematic reexamination.

Age irrelevancy in society: The test of mate selection

Abstract This research focuses on age differences in marriage. The purpose is to develop a partial test of whether over the past five decades age has become less relevant and age norms less constraining. A reduction in the strength of age norms should result in a decrease in coeval marriages. If age norms become less binding, then one should expect people to cast a wider age net when selecting their mate, leading to an increase in the number of marriages with unconventional age differences. Microdata samples of 111000 from 1940 through the 1980 Census of the United States Population were used to derive trends in the proportion of ageheterogamous and age-homogamous couples. The results show that between 1940 and 1980 there was no abatement of age homogamy. In fact a strong trend towards increasing homogamy was discovered. This movement toward increased homogamy, and the converse decrease in the age heterogamy, indicates that age has become more, not less, relevant in mate selection.

The Groomal Shower: A Variation of the American Bridal Shower

This article describes and analyzes an innovative variation of the traditional bridal shower, called the groomal shower. While retaining many ceremonial elements of the bridal shower, the groomal differs in several ways, most notably in that the honoree is a man. The implications of these differences through this new form of ritual are explored. The elements of initiation, ordeal, and reciprocity are examined to provide an understanding of the meaning of this activity for the participants. The groomal shower is a reflection of our changing attitudes toward marriage and another indication of the move toward greater equalitarianism. Viewed as a form of anti-ritualism, the groomal may be seen as representing a move toward greater ethical sensitivity in human relations.

Prolegomena for a Sociological Study of the Chinese Family in Indigenous Terms

We examine the Chinese family from an indigenous perspective. Starting from the meanings conveyed by the ideograms in the Chinese language, we analyze 4 different concepts into which the English term and sociological notion of family can be translated. Then, we examine the physical and ideological structures on which the ideograms are based. Our analysis reveals that the Chinese family has similarities with what in the West is called lineage and tribe, having complicated functions in politics, economics, and religion. Chinese views of family are related to a worldview that emphasizes continuity of being, which results in the distinctive emphasis on ancestor worship. Accompanying industrialization and urbanization, the Chinese in Taiwan have made adjustments to preserve the ideal of a joint family type and the equal obligation to support parents among sons, rather than moving toward a conjugal system, as W. J. Goode (1970) predicted.

Future Challenges: The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations

These concluding remarks demonstrate that systemic racism involves the institutionalized patterns of subordinate and dominant societal positions, respectively, for people of color and for whites in a white-controlled, hierarchically arranged society. It reviews the systemic reality of white-imposed racism in the past and present, as it is seen in the exploitative and discriminatory practices of whites targeting people of color—and thus in the significant resources and privileges unjustly gained and legitimated by whites in that process.

Racial and Ethnic Relations Today

In this Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Relations, we have aimed to foster and put forth cuttingedge thinking on an often controversial set of racial-ethnic topics. To achieve the volume that you now have in your hands, we decided not to start from a pre-constructed outline that prejudged what is going on in the fields we cover. On the contrary, we started from a list of important scholars in these fields and asked them to tell us what topics they thought should be included in a major reference work of this kind and which topics they felt capable of taking on. Their savvy responses yielded, after considerable work and interactive discussions, the informative contents of this handbook. The authors are all authoritative researchers on the topics they deal with. A white television host once asked a well-known black political leader he was interviewing: “Don’t you feel that you play the race card too much? Don’t you feel that this is unfair because today’s accusation of racism is very similar to the old accusation of communism that Senator McCarthy overplayed and discredited?” The latter fielded the question with grace and intelligence. However, his sharp answer was perhaps not the most significant aspect of this interview. More striking was but the fact that the white journalist did not ask the question if racism was still a threat to U.S. democracy. This deliberate avoidance of mentioning the reality and consequences of continuing racial and ethnic oppression in the United States, as well as around the world, is a main characteristic of racial and ethnic differentiation today. This handbook opens with a topic that has been taken for granted for too long: the racial categorization of some people as “white” and superior, while others are categorized as “not white” and as eminently different and inferior in one or more ways. Charles A. Gallagher, a leading U.S. expert in this area, notes that whiteness remains a relatively invisible way to classify human beings. Other people are classified as minorities; some have a “race”; others have ethnicity; and others are just different. Whiteness often remains implicit and unstated, but still held in the mind. Yet viewing “white” as a racial identity helps to support the societal fiction that “race” characteristics—rather than racial exploitation, imposed poverty, or institutionalized exclusion— are responsible for the inequality between and among people of different skin colors in the United States and overseas. Contrary to much popular belief, human populations cannot be placed without ambiguity and error into discrete, mutually exclusive categories based on anatomical and