Le Canada à l’instar de plusieurs autres pays occidentaux fait face à une baisse importante du taux de natalité et à un vieillissement de sa population. La solution de l’immigration semble être retenue par ce pays pour combler le déficit en main d’œuvre afin d’éviter un ralentissement de la croissance économique. Nous nous intéressons dans cette étude aux immigrantes africaines accueillies par la province du Québec et cherchons à évaluer leur contribution à la fécondité. Pour ce faire, les données du fichier des naissances de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec et du recensement du Canada de 2006 ont été utilisées. Pour effectuer l’analyse, nous avons premièrement mesuré (avec les fichiers du registre des naissances) l’évolution dans le temps de la contribution des immigrantes africaines à la natalité au Québec. Et deuxièmement, nous avons évalué la relation entre la région d’origine des femmes et la variable "ayant un enfant de moins d’un an" (récente maternité). Nous avons procédé à une analyse descriptive, et également à une analyse multivariée en utilisant un modèle logistique, et en considérant des facteurs sociodémographiques. Nos résultats montrent que les immigrantes africaines affichent un niveau de fécondité plus élevé par rapport à celui des natives et des autres immigrantes. Nous avons constaté que la contribution à la natalité et à la fécondité au Québec des immigrantes venant de l’Afrique Nord était plus importante que celles des autres immigrantes africaines. En outre, les résultats du modèle logistique montrent que les femmes immigrantes africaines de la première génération sont plus susceptibles d’avoir un enfant que les natives du Québec. Nous avons aussi remarqué un effet de la durée de séjour sur la fécondité des immigrantes africaines. Les résultats montrent que les immigrantes de la deuxième génération ont un niveau de fécondité proche des natives du Québec. Nous avons enfin trouvé que la fécondité des immigrantes africaines arrivées très jeunes au Québec est inférieure ou diffère peu de celle des natives du Québec. / Like many other western countries, Canada is facing a dramatic decrease of its birth rate as well as an ageing of its population. Immigration was chosen as a solution to make up for the workforce deficit in order to avoid a slowdown of the economic growth. For the purpose of this study we focus on African women immigrants in Quebec and we assess their contribution to fertility. To reach this objective, data from files of the birth registry of the Institut de la Statistique du Québec and from the 2006 census of Canada were pooled and used. In order to perform the analysis, firstly, we have measured (with the files of the birth registry) the evolution over time of the contribution of African women immigrants to the Quebec birth rate. And secondly, we have evaluated the relation between the women’s region of origin and the variable “having a child less than 1 year old” (recent maternity) obtained from the census. We have done a descriptive as well as a multivariate analysis, by using a logit model and by considering socio-demographic factors. Our findings show that African women immigrants have a higher fertility level than native women or other immigrant women. Their contributions, mostly the contribution of those who are from North Africa, to the Quebec fertility rate were the highest among all immigrant women. In addition, results of the logit model highlight that African immigrant women of the first generation are more likely to have a child than Quebec native women. We also observed an effect of the duration of stay on the fertility of African women immigrants. The fertility behavior of African immigrant women of the second generation is relatively close to those of native women. Finally, we found that the fertility of African women immigrants who arrived at a very young age in Quebec tends to be lower than that of native women.

Housing discrimination raises the costs housing searches for minority groups, creates barriers to homeownership and housing choice, and contributes to the perpetuation of racial and ethnic segregation. Segregation, in turn, is linked with the perpetuation of a host of racial and ethnic inequalities, from unequal access to jobs, to healthcare, to educational facilities. Thus, the problem of housing discrimination is not simply that it is unfair or illegal, but also that it contributes to larger social inequalities. This analysis of coastal Mississippi pre and post Hurricane Katrina provides an unusual opportunity to examine housing outcomes in an area that has experienced drastic changes in housing availability alongside a rapid influx of Latino migrants. I investigate whether some Latinos are more vulnerable to housing discrimination than others, where and when housing discrimination is more or less likely to occur, and how Latinos living in Mississippi post-Katrina interpret their own experiences with housing agents. Audit methods and interviews reveal that discrimination, often thought to be determined solely by agent prejudices, is also affected by social and economic factors external to the agent. The audits point instructively to patterns of discrimination as well as to methodological difficulties associated with detecting discrimination in tight housing markets, a finding that has implications for studying discrimination in other tight markets throughout the country. The findings also support theories of 'racial tipping', in that discrimination appears highest in moderately integrated neighborhoods as opposed to 'whiter' and 61 more integrated' neighborhoods. Finally, in-depth interviews reveal (1) a link between labor and housing market exploitation that leaves many Latino labor migrants homeless, (2) a relationship between housing discrimination and exploitation in the housing market, (3) reasons why many Latinos may be unlikely to file housing discrimination complaints, and (4) ways in which Latinos are forced to modify their behavior in everyday interactions simply to increase their odds of being treated fairly. In sum, this study points to a need to develop new methods for studying discrimination in tight housing markets, and to a dire need for broader institutional support of housing rights education and anti-discrimination enforcement initiatives in areas recovering from a disaster / acase@tulane.edu

Recent Mexican narrative has produced a good number of novels where the sense of nostalgia becomes prevalent. The megalopolis that Mexico City has become with all the maladies that urban growth implies (continuous demographic and territorial growth, pollution and abuse of natural resources at the expense of many other regions of the country), is analogous to places like Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta and even Los Angeles. But beyond these, the sorrow and frustration expressed in several recent novels, points to the frustration of the middle classes portrayed in these narratives. At issue is their relation to the repressive atmosphere experienced through their youth at the hands of society's institutions but in particular to that of the State from the fifties onward. As if triggered by all these disappointments, as well as by a not too promising future, an 'industry of nostalgia' has been generated in much of the narrative subsequent to the period mentioned By contrast to the middle class' pretentious legitimization and representation of urban society at large, a series of multiple representations emerges and expresses alternate experiences. Though no less frustrated or optimistic about their past and immediate future than those of the middle class city dwellers, these marginal voices offer us a more complete picture of the urban experience in the Capital city. Their attitude is less sentimental in relation to that of their middle class brothers---who must embark on a nostalgic trip to the past in order to justify their present situation or find the origins of its conflicts In this study, I emphasize three key events of recent Mexican history that seem to affect, to a different degree, various sectors of the population of the Capital. First, the presidency of Miguel Aleman (1946--52) during the so called 'Mexican Miracle.' Second the presidency of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964--70) and its role during the 1968 student massacre. And third, the most recent presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988--94) which brought about a new economic collapse of the country and revealed too the purge and internal struggles for power within the ruling political party PRI to which all these presidents have belonged. These events help to understand the sense of alienation of the population at large / acase@tulane.edu

Between the 1960s and early 1990s, unprecedented numbers of unwed teenage women gave birth and then used public assistance to support themselves and their children. To outraged conservatives, this trend proved that teenagers were abusing the welfare system by having children outside marriage and then using welfare money to support their indolent lifestyles. The liberals counter-argued that since an overwhelming majority of single teenage mothers were poor and socially disadvantaged, they would have received welfare irrespective of whether they had postponed childbirth. The liberals therefore believed that poverty and lack of opportunity for upward social and economic mobility were the underlying causes of single teenage births and welfare use. Set against the backdrop of this debate and using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths data, in this study I follow the life experiences of 225 single teenage parents between 1979 and 1993 in order to examine how parenthood affected their educational or welfare status. I also examine how their experiences differed from their peers, who were of the same age but had children either after they were married or after they were relatively older. Furthermore. I study the influence of childhood socio-economic status on men and women's later life chances, regardless of their marital and fertility status. Lastly, I compare the educational attainment of single teenage mothers with that of single teenage fathers. My findings show that irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds, having children as teenagers increased single women's chances of receiving welfare for longer periods. However, their childhood socio-economic status had a much larger impact on men and women's later educational status than their age and marital status at childbirth. Finally, even though single teenage mothers experienced greater day to day child-care responsibilities, their educational attainment was at par with that of single teenage fathers / acase@tulane.edu

In this dissertation, I advance a model of marriage as a relationship of economic interdependence. To do this I replicate, update, and revise previous research by Sorensen and McLanahan (1987). I use data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 1997 Current Population Surveys as well as the 1970 Census 5% Public Use Samples. Not surprisingly, I find that the proportion of the joint income provided by wives has increased over the 27 year time period, though it appears to be slowing in the 1990s. I expand on the models developed by the original researchers by incorporating measures of husbands' and wives' occupational characteristics and husbands economic well-being. While married women's returns to their hours of employment increased in 1980 and 1990 relative to 1970, in 1997 married women's returns to their hours of employment were not significantly higher than their 1970 levels. I am unable to determine if this lack of improvement is due to declining employment conditions for married women or improved employment conditions for men. When I examine the effects of husbands' income deciles on wives' contributions, I find that economically disadvantaged husbands are more reliant on their wives for economic support and, moreover, that this dependence has increased over time. I find no significant differences in Black and white wives' incomes contributions when their husbands have approximately the same income. I conclude that economic interdependence is the most appropriate model for contemporary marriages / acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this study was to examine possible barriers to protease inhibitor therapy and to evaluate the effectiveness of protease inhibitor therapy in a field setting. A retrospective period cross-sectional study of HIV-infected individuals who received care from an HIV outpatient clinic between January 1996 and July 1998 was conducted. Logistic regression was used to determine socio-demographic and clinical characteristics associated with both receiving and responding to protease inhibitor therapy Of the 1874 individuals who were eligible for protease inhibitor therapy, 1004 (53.5%) had received protease inhibitor therapy. Individuals who received protease inhibitor therapy were more likely to be men (OR 1.38, [1.09--1.77]), less likely to be African-American (OR 1.86, [1.48--2.33]), less likely to have a history of substance use (OR 1.42, [1.15--1.76]), less likely to have a history of incarceration (OR 1.44, [1.00--2.07]), more likely to have attended the clinic within the past six months (OR 6.66, [4.98--8.92]), more likely to have a baseline CD4+ count below 200 cells/dl (OR 2.16, [1.74--2.70]), and more likely to have been diagnosed with an opportunistic process (OR 2.12, [1.68--2.69]) Of the 458 individuals who had received protease inhibitor therapy and had at least two viral load measurements, 200 (43.7%) experienced at least a one-log drop in viral load. Individuals who experienced at least a one-log drop in viral load were more likely to have a history of substance use (OR 1.65, [1.06--2-55]), more likely to have less than six months of antiretroviral therapy prior to initiating protease inhibitor therapy (OR 1.84, [1.16--2.92]), and less likely to have experience with more than one protease inhibitor (OR 2.02, [1.28--3.21]). In addition, in comparison to individuals who had a low baseline viral load, individuals who had a medium or high baseline viral load were more likely to experience a one-log drop in viral load (OR medium: 6.98, [4.14--11.79], OR high: 14.09, [7.49--26.50]) The results from this study indicate that there are barriers to receiving protease inhibitor therapy in a field setting. Additionally, this study demonstrates that not all individuals who receive protease inhibitor therapy experience at least a one-log drop in viral load / acase@tulane.edu

The use of insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) has proven to be a promising and affordable intervention for controlling malaria in endemic areas of sub-Saharan Africa. However, there is concern that sustained ITN use in areas of high malaria transmission may delay the acquisition of clinical malaria immunity, consequently shifting the burden of mortality from younger to older children. Furthermore, there is concern that the efficacy of ITNs may diminish following sustained use due to the potential of lowered malaria immunity among the target population. To address these concerns, monitoring of child mortality using a demographic surveillance system (DSS) was continued for an additional two years after ITNs were distributed to control villages at the completion of a two-year community randomized control trial that assessed the impact of ITNs in an area of intense perennial malaria transmission in western Kenya. Consequently, all-cause child mortality (1--59 months) was assessed among children living in villages where ITN coverage has been sustained for over four years, as well as within villages where ITNs had only recently been introduced within the past two years. An additional aim of this research was to provide an evaluation of the DSS at identifying births and death in children <5 years old using a two-sample capture-recapture method. Results from this research provide no evidence of a shift in mortality from younger to older children following sustained ITN coverage in this setting. ITNs were associated with saving approximately 355 post-neonatal infants and 468 children 1--59 months over the course of the four-year trial. Additionally, ITNs were shown to remain efficacious at reducing all-cause post-neonatal infant mortality, and to a lesser extent 1--59 month mortality, over the entire course of the trial. And lastly, capture-recapture methods appear to be a worthwhile tool for assessing differential ascertainment of vital demographic events between subgroups of the population monitored with a DSS / acase@tulane.edu

<p>As an aggregate, American households have shown rising debt levels over the past few decades, yet we do not understand how debt varies within households over time and what factors influence this variation in a meaningful way. To date, household debt appears predominantly as a component of measures of net worth, obscuring heterogeneity in the meaning of debt within a household. Moreover, most studies focusing specifically on indebtedness rely on cross-sectional data. In addition, no cohesive theoretical model exists to account for changing patterns of debt. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps. Utilizing a variety of methodological approaches and drawing on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, it adds sociological explanation to a social process that has been previously ignored and under-theorized.</p> <p>First, drawing from literature in economics and sociology, I propose a dynamic, life course model of indebtedness that specifies three mechanisms driving differentiation in household indebtedness: institutional context (period), social heterogeneity, and patterned disadvantage, or structural risk. Second, I use multilevel logistic regressions to explore the association between the hypothesized mechanisms and the likelihood of holding non-collateralized debt. While experiencing negative life course risks increases the likelihood of holding debt, I find that occupying positions of structural disadvantage--being black, being in poverty--decreases the likelihood of holding debt, while having advantages--higher education, being married, holding assets--increases the likelihood of holding debt, pointing to distinct differences in who can access debt to buffer life course shocks and who cannot. Examining the interrelationships between debts and assets further underscores the tenuous economic well-being of the disadvantaged. I find that those most likely to experience negative life events are both less likely to have financial assets with which to buffer these events and more likely to experience constrained access to non-collateralized debt.</p> <p>Third, I employ multilevel linear regressions to examine the association between the proposed mechanisms and three unique indicators of debt burden. I find that many of the standard coefficients included in models of net worth are not significant predictors of the level of non-collateralized, non-revolving debt, suggesting that we know much more about the correlates of income and wealth than we do household debt. Variation in debt burden may be better understood by heterogeneity in non-economic variables frequently not captured in survey research. To better explore this unobserved heterogeneity, I utilize latent class regression models to estimate the early life course trajectories of debt burden for the NLSY79 cohort. I find four distinct trajectories of indebtedness with varying consequences for later life financial outcomes. Overall, I conclude that household debt is nuanced and contextually contingent. More importantly, debt adds to our understanding of long-term stratification processes when studied as a unique indicator of inequality.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Immigrant communities in Massachusetts Gateway Cities face a number of economic and social challenges that can be difficult to understand or quantify through traditional research methods. This thesis explores the use of sentiment analysis of microblogging data as an alternative method for assessing well-being of immigrant communities, with a focus on Portuguese speaking immigrants. I collected Tweets from four key cities in Massachusetts and analyzed them using two sentiment lexicons, one in Portuguese and one in English. I compared results between languages as well as correlated with a number of traditional indicators of well-being gathered from U.S. Census data. I found that the results from the English analysis were overall more positive than those from the Portuguese analysis, but most differences were not statistically significant. I also found some correlations between the demographic data and the sentiment analysis results with promising implications for further research. </p>

This dissertation is a study of Mexican children along the U.S. border from 1880 to 1930. The study explores the ways in which Mexican children were incorporated into the growing capitalist border society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, there were demographic changes in both the United States and Mexico as children comprised an increasingly significant portion of the population. As a result of this growth, and the heightened visibility of children, both nations focused on the implications, both positive and negative, of being "nations of youth." Along the border, the fears and hopes associated with children were accentuated as a result of the already difficult ethnic relations between Mexicans and Anglo Americans and shifting international relations between Mexico and the United States. Mexican children became symbols of the tremendous socio-economic changes taking place along the border. Issues of control, which expressed themselves in the creation of institutions to monitor immigration, expanding educational and social service systems, and the rapid incorporation of Mexican children into the labor force, were hotly contested. On the U.S. side of the border Mexican children entered a highly racialized society in which Mexicans were considered inferior and useful only as low-paid workers. Yet at the precise time that the population of Mexican children was growing along the border, American society advocated a more protective stance towards children. As a consequence of these two circumstances, Mexican children played a unique role in this region. Mexican children were recruited as workers, and expected to act as adults by both employers and family. Schools sought to educate them yet the education was limited by ethnic stereotypes which dictated that Mexican children would become nothing more than low-paid, menial laborers. Mexican parents attempted to control their children, particularly in maintaining a Mexican identity and values while Americanization efforts undermined their parental authority. American nationalists viewed them with alarm, fearful that the growing numbers of Mexican children would overwhelm that Anglo American population. The Mexican government, in turn, viewed the emigration of Mexican children as a cultural and economic loss to the nation.