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Despite mixed evidence, researchers often suggest that married adults tend to live generally healthier lifestyles than their unmarried counterparts. In this chapter, we propose and test a reconceptualization of the health lifestyle that distinguishes between “homebody” risks and “hedonic” risks that may help to make sense of previous findings concerning marriage and health-related behavior.

Using data from the 2004 Survey of Adults (n = 1,385), we employ ordinary least squares regression to model indices of normative and conventional homebody risks (greater body mass, infrequent exercise, poorer diet, and abstinence from alcohol) and unconventional and potentially dangerous hedonic risks (smoking, heavy drinking, going out to bars, eating out, inadequate sleep, and driving without seatbelts) as a function of marital status.

Our key findings indicate that married adults tend to score higher on homebody risks and lower on hedonic risks than never married adults, net of controls for age, gender, race/ethnicity, citizenship, interview language, education, employment status, household income, and religious involvement.

Research limitations include cross-sectional data, restricted indicators of health-related behavior, and narrow external validity.

Contrary to previous research, we conclude that the lifestyle of married adults is not uniformly healthy.

Mainstream sociology tends to consider mental processes and their underlying structures, including the perception of society, mainly to be a result of socialization, which is generally conceptualized in terms of the more or less intentional, interpersonal transmission of cultural elements. In contrast and rightly so, marxist theory has always insisted on praxis as an essential feature of consciousness formation. The concept of alienation, when it is not entirely subjectivized (as it is in the Seeman tradition), is usually derived directly from basic structural conditions of capitalism, especially from the coerced division of labor (Wallimann 1981). Conceived to be a constant of the entire system, it is of little use to explain within‐system variations of current images of society and of one's place within it.

The history of the public library is long and rich, and continues to reflect this institution's initial mission: to respond to the needs of an evolving democratic society. From its early days as a subscription service for the middle-class, through its evolution to become an educational site for the lower-classes and new immigrants, the public library has served as a touch-stone for urban industrial society in North America (Lerner, 1998, p. 138; Shera, 1974). Over the past century, public libraries have evolved to respond to the growing needs of the communities they serve and continue to do so with recent advances in technologies (such as DVDs, electronic books, the Internet, etc.), and with a more global outlook on the ways that people seek and share information. Indeed, the public library's constituents today are exceedingly diverse, including children and adults from a broad range of socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, all of whom seek information for a variety of personal and work-related purposes. The fact that public libraries have been fulfilling patrons' information needs for well over a century is a testament to their enduring success and versatility as information providers, and also points to the overall effectiveness of public librarians as intermediaries in the provision process.

Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced relations when imbalance offers the opportunity to reap material rewards. We argue that balance is preferred because it functions as a “compression heuristic,” allowing networks to be more easily encoded in, and recalled from, memory.

We present the results of a novel randomized laboratory experiment using nearly 300 subjects. We evaluate the independent and joint effects of degree of balance/imbalance and presence/absence of kin compression heuristics on network recall.

We find that memory for relationship valence is more accurate for balanced, rather than imbalanced, networks and that relationship existence and relationship valence are separable cognitive elements. We also use comparisons between kin and non-kin networks to suggest that humans are implicitly aware of the conditions under which imbalanced networks will be most durable.

We show that the tension/strain postulated to generate mental and behavioral responses to increase balance likely stems from cognitive limitations. More broadly, this connects balance theory to models of human cognition and evolution and suggests that human general processing ability may have evolved in response to social, rather than physical, challenges.

This article considers the independent liberty interests of children in foster care and their mothers in parental termination proceedings. Recent federal reforms impose a mandatory deadline for the state to terminate parental rights. That policy erroneously presumes that the passage of time alone establishes parental fault and satisfies a parent’s due process rights. It also fails to protect the minority of children who assert an interest in preserving a safe relationship with mothers who are unlikely to meet the state’s schedule – including many substance abusers and victims of domestic violence.

Travel and tourism graduates are facing challenges in securing jobs within the travel and tourism industry, as their degrees have low recognition among travel and tourism employers. Yet there are growing numbers of tourism courses provided by universities, and these are increasingly popular among students. This paper attempts an informed discussion of the relevance of travel and tourism degrees, comparing students' career expectations and aspirations with industry needs and perceptions of travel and tourism degrees and graduates. Students' perceptions were investigated, using a questionnaire survey, while the employers' perceptions and needs were explored through semi‐structured interviews. The results indicate a desire and optimism amongst current travel and tourism undergraduate students towards securing a job in the tourism industry, while the industry is not convinced, or at best unaware, of the benefits of tourism degrees and employing tourism graduates.

In this chapter, we draw on health lifestyle, human capital, and health commodity theories to examine the effects of educational attainment on a wide range of individual dietary behaviors and dietary lifestyles.

Using data from the 2005-2006 iteration of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 2,135), we employ negative binomial regression and binary logistic regression to model three dietary lifestyle indices and thirteen healthy dietary behaviors.

We find that having a college degree or higher is associated with seven of the thirteen healthy dietary behaviors, including greater attention to nutrition information (general nutrition, serving size, calories, and total fat) and consumption of vegetables, protein, and dairy products. For the most part, education is unrelated to the inspection of cholesterol and sodium information and consumption of fruits/grains/sweets, and daily caloric intake. We observe that having a college degree is associated with healthier dietary lifestyles, the contemporaneous practice of multiple healthy dietary behaviors (label checking and eating behaviors). Remarkably, household income and the poverty-to-income ratio are unrelated to dietary lifestyles and have virtually no impact on the magnitude of the association between education and dietary lifestyles.

Our findings are consistent with predictions derived from health lifestyle and human capital theories. We find no support for health commodity theory, the idea that people who are advantaged in terms of education live healthier lifestyles because they tend to have the financial resources to purchase the elements of a healthy lifestyle.

THE news that our royal President has been promoted to the command of a frigate sugges an increase rather than a relieving of naval duties. Our pleasure in the announcement is qualified by the fear that the further demands may make his presence with the Library Association in September even more difficult than it seemed to be a month ago. This is pure speculation on our part, but we are aware of the eagerness with which librarians look forward to the central event of the Centenary Year. We are assured that the matter is in good hands and at the right levels.