Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: Each year, thousands of consumers seek assistance for their debt problems from a non-profit consumer counseling organization. Such organizations aim to provide both financial assistance (e.g., negotiating with creditors to reduce interest rates and/or accept lower monthly payments) and/or personal finance education designed to teach consumers how to avoid future debt (e.g. budgeting and credit literacy). Although the benefits provided by these organizations can be real, the counseling that they offer and the messages that they deliver often fail to address individuals’ root psychological causes of indebtedness. The current study uses Galileo theory and method to determine the underlying attitude structures of consumers seeking to change their spending behaviors and consequently develop effective messages to produce significant change in those structures, and in the corresponding spending behaviors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Much of the recent literature on time spent doing housework has focused on the effects of individuals’ earnings relative to their partners’. By contrast, this paper analyzes the association between women’s own earnings and the time they spend doing housework in the context of heterosexual married couple households. Using a sample of 2119 married women from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), I find that the relationship between women’s relative earnings and housework time documented in previous research is driven entirely by women’s own absolute earnings. What matters to women’s housework is not how much money they make compared to their male partners, but simply how much they make. This finding underscores the importance of income inequality among women in explaining variation in their housework time: Women in the lowest quintile of own earnings spend more than one additional hour per day on housework compared to women in the highest quintile. Further, I show that the variation in married women’s own earnings can explain the “gender display” pattern in the association between women’s relative earnings and their housework time documented in some recent studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A study was conducted on three different age groups, preadolescents (5th graders), adolescents (9th graders) and young adults (college students). The aim of the study was to investigate 1) reasons for video game play, 2) game preferences and 3) time spent in video game play across the three age groups. Results showed that children at different stages of development differ in their motives for video game use, the types of games that they like to play and the amount of time they spend in video game play. The data also showed that the uses and gratifications predictors of heavy video game use differed among the three age groups.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines differences in men’s and women’s time spent on housework as they move through key lifecourse transitions. Most research on housework has examined change indirectly by using cross-sectional data to compare time spent on housework across groups with different characteristics. This paper adopts a longitudinal approach to directly examine differences in time spent on housework in relation to employment, marital and parental transitions. This is an important issue as the pathways that individuals take through the lifecycle have changed dramatically in recent decades. For example, many individuals experience periods of de facto cohabition prior to marriage, periods of separation and divorce, and longer periods with none or fewer children in the household compared to previous generations. It is important to examine how these differing pathways affect the gender division of labor in housework time. We use national panel data from Australia at two time points, 1996/97 and 2000. The results show that women spend far more time on housework than men, but that time on housework varies considerably in relation to key lifecourse transitions, in particular changes in marital status. We conclude that the varying paths individuals take through the lifecourse influences time spent on housework.

Publication Type: Roundtable Paper
Abstract: Police officers have large amounts of discretion as to how they spent their time during a typical shift. Anecdotal evidence from officers and police supervisors suggests that officers spend a great deal of their time handling domestic disputes, yet there is little empirical data with which to confirm this assertion. In this paper, we investigate the amount of time police officers spend on domestic calls and whether officer characteristics such as gender, experience, and training (in domestic violence and mediation techniques) help explain variations in officer time. We also compare amount of time spent on domestic incidents with time spent on other incidents to determine whether officers spend comparatively more time dealing with domestic disputes.