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The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have converged. Family change has not been uniform, however, and the widening gaps in marital status, relationship stability, and childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child well-being in poor families and future inequality. This paper uses data from a recent cohort of young adults – Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – to investigate whether disparities in cognitive ability and non-cognitive skills contribute to this gap. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of differences in key family outcomes across education groups show that, though individual non-cognitive traits are significantly associated with union status, relationship instability, and single motherhood, they collectively make no significant contribution to the explanation of educational gaps for almost all of these outcomes. Measured skills can explain as much as 25 percent of differences in these outcomes by family background (measured by mother’s education), but this effect disappears when own education is added to the model. Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly predictive of educational attainment but, conditional on education, explain very little of the socioeconomic gaps in family outcomes for young adults.

Changes in the traditional values, institutional context, and choice of change programs are currently shaping the postmodern science and practice of organization development (OD). These changes manifest themselves in powerful new value orientations, intervention frameworks, and practices that challenge OD's long-held beliefs in ethical and justice-based treatment. In this effort, traditional and new paradigm ethical dilemmas are explored, as well as their relationship to four postmodern practices and five emergent intervention techniques. Components of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are explained relative to change management programs generally, and to emergent techniques specifically. Published case illustrations are used to depict new paradigm ethical dilemmas and opportunities to create a “just change.”

This chapter focuses on the increasing use of both assistive technology (AT) and teacher assistants (TAs) to support students with disabilities within the inclusive classroom, and why it is vital that teacher assistants have appropriate training in the area of AT. A description of assistive technology and its role in inclusion of students with special needs is provided along with a description of training in assistive technology that was undertaken with teacher assistants. Implications for training and support of teacher assistants in the area of assistive technology are also discussed.

Research on self-regulation has tended to focus on goal-related performance, with limited attention paid to individuals’ affect and the role it plays during the goal-striving process. In this chapter we discuss three mechanisms to integrate affect within a control theory-based self-regulation framework, and how such integrations inform future research concerning employee stress and well-being. Specifically, affect can be viewed as a result of velocity made toward one’s desired states at work. Fast progress results in positive affect, which enhances employee well-being and reduces the detrimental effects associated with exposure to occupational stressors. On the other hand, slow or no progress elicits negative affect, which induces employee distress. Second, affect can also be considered an input of self-regulation, such that employees are required to regulate their emotional displays at work. Employees who perform emotional labor compare their actual emotional display against the desired display prescribed by display rules. Third, affect can function as a situational disturbance, altering employees’ perceptions or assessments of the input, comparator, and output for other self-regulatory processes.