1985-1987 - Population Studies Center - University of Michigan

which has undertaken amajor assessment ofchangesin the status of blacks inthe United States since 1940.Reynolds Farley is Senior Research Consultantfor thestudy. The committee established five panels chargedwith assembling data and preparing reports on sixmajor topics: education, economic status, politicalparticipation, administration ofjustice, healthstatusand demography, and social and cultural change andcontinuity. A major summary report on the status ofblacks inthe United States willbe completed early in1988, with panel reports to follow later inthe year.METHODOLOGYUnited States: Census Undercount Adjustment and theQuality of Geographic Population Distributions.In a study by Mellon Fellow Allen Schirm andSamuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, asimulation procedure was developed to measure theeffects of synthetic adjustment for census undcrcountson the quality of estimated proportionate geographicpopulation distributions. Despite state-to-statc variationsin undercounts and measurement errors innational undercountestimates,synthetic adjustmentimprovesstate proportions for amajority of thenational population two-thirds of the time, although itmay produce a much poorer geographic distribution inany particular application. Schirm and Preston deriveanalytical expressions showing the conditions on whichimprovements from census adjustment depend. Theinvestigators presented their work at the 1987 annualmeetings of the Population Association of America,and at the Joint Statistical Meetings.United States: The Reporting of Voting Behavior.As an outgrowth of their work on the Soviet InterviewProject, a concern with how reliably peopleanswer survey questions led Barbara A. Anderson andBrian D. Silver to related research on vote misreportingin American elections. They have used election andvote validationdata from the National Election Studiesof the University of Michigan Centerfor PoliticalStudies and the Survey Research Center. ProfessorPaul R. Abramson of the Political Science Departmentat Michigan State University collaborated on thestudies.The investigators have explored several aspects ofelectoral behavior and race of interviewer effects.Although earlierliterature has maintained that respondentcharacteristics are unrelated to vote misreporting,they have found strong evidence that although moreeducated people are more likely tovotethanlesseducated people, those moreeducated people who donot vote, for whatever reason,are extremely likelytoclaim that they voted. In addition, although strongsupport of political norms, suchas a sense of citizenduty, is strongly related to actual voting,it is alsostrongly related toactual non-voters claimingto havevoted.They have also found that, although the respondentcharacteristics that lead to vote misreporting are thesame for blacksas whites,those blacknon-voters whoare interviewed by black interviewers are even morelikely to claimthat they voted. In further work on ractof interviewer effects, they have found that the race ofthe interviewer has strong and unexpected effects on awide range of racially-related attitudes and policypositions.Professors Abramson, Anderson, and Silver alsocollaborated on a study of theeffects of question orderin attitude surveys. A substantial decline inthe percentageof respondents endorsing the "citizen dutynorm" in the NES of1984 is argued tobe a methodologicalartifact resulting from changes inthe content ofquestionnaires andthe order of questions over time.The investigators'analyses suggest that even seeminglyminor changes in questionnaire content can substantiallyaffect the distribution of responsesto attitudinalquestions.United States: Public Goods and the Economics of theFamily.New theoretical approaches to the economics offamily structure and household behavior are beingdeveloped by David Lam and Theodore Bergstrom ofthe Department of Economics. Careful analysis of theirimplications willincrease our understandingof boththecauses and consequences of recent changes infamily structure in developing countries and in theUnitedStates.Using the modern theory of public goods, two theoreticalproblems of the household are being addressed.The first isconcerned with explaining how individualssort themselves into households through marriage,creation of jointfamilies, and life cycle living arrangements.The equilibrium theory of marriage has beenextended with particularattention to the "public good"dimensions of marriage decisions. The second problemis how joint decisions are made within the householdand how "household public goods" areallocated.Part of this analysis focuses on theeffects of householdcomposition on consumption and labor supply decisions,extending the interpretationof changes inrelative prices tochanges in household composition.The two questions are integrated in away analogous toResearch 9