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A robust body of scholarship has attached unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily living arrangements to a greater risk of union instability in the United States. These aspects of family life, which often co-occur, are overrepresented among disadvantaged populations, who also have an independently higher risk of union instability. Existing scholarship has modeled these family experiences as correlated events to better understand family and union instability, yet the authors assert a direct effort to test whether or how unintended childbearing differs across marital and stepfamily statuses makes important contributions to established research on relationship stability. Drawing on the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the authors test potential moderating effects to better understand the linkages between unintended childbearing and union dissolution among 7,864 recent, higher-order births to partnered mothers via discrete-time, event history logistic regression models. Findings confirm that unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily status are all linked with a greater risk of dissolution. However, unintended childbearing is differentially linked to instability by marital status, with unintended childbearing being associated with a higher risk of dissolution for married couples relative to cohabiting couples. Unintended fertility does not seem to increase the risk of instability across stepfamily status. Findings provide more evidence in support of selection, rather than causation, in explaining the association between unintended childbearing and union instability among higher-order births. Results suggest that among higher-order births, unintended childbearing may reflect underlying relationship issues.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of combining grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES) grades on specific iron losses and the flux density distribution within a single-phase magnetic core.

This paper presents the results of finite-element method (FEM) simulations investigating the impact of mixing two different GOES grades on losses of a single-phase magnetic core. The authors used different models: a 3D model with a highly detailed geometry including both saturation and anisotropy, as well as a simplified 2D model to save computation time. The behavior of the flux distribution in the mixed magnetic core is analyzed. Finally, the results from the numerical simulations are compared with experimental results.

The specific iron losses of a mixed magnetic core exhibit a nonlinear decrease with respect to the GOES grade with the lowest losses. Analyzing the magnetic core behavior using 2D and 3D FEM shows that the rolling direction of the GOES grades plays a critical role on the nonlinearity variation of the specific losses.

The novelty of this research lies in achieving an optimum trade-off between the manufacturing cost and the core efficiency by combining conventional and high-performance GOES grade in a single-phase magnetic core.

The purpose of this study is to explore and theorise about the desistance process of Maltese mothers who previously used drugs. The study unpacks how initial and continued desistance from high-risk drug use (HRDU) is impacted by being a mother within the Maltese context and identifies contingencies for desistance and examines how they are negotiated along the desistance pathways.

The study adopted a symbolic interactionist-inspired career framework and involved in-depth exploration of trajectories of mothering and desistance of eight Maltese women with a history of HRDU. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews and analysis used an evolved grounded theory methodology.

Four explanatory categories were identified in the interview data to document the role of mothering in the various pathways to desistance recounted by the women. These are: becoming a mother; differing pathways of desistance in relation to mothering; the lived experience; identity negotiation and transformation. This study highlights how identity fluidity and transformation is central to the desistance process.

The paper aims to inform policy and practice with mothers who use drugs and their families and has important implications for the development and delivery of gender transformative interventions.

This study challenges taken-for-granted beliefs about the influence of mothering on desistance and identifies the complexities involved.