Editorial Comments

INTRODUCTION

Many thanks to colleagues at the University of Toronto Press for publishing the Journal and its attractive new look.

To our readers, authors and subscribers, we appreciate your patience as JCFS’ relationship with the University of Toronto Press matures and goes forward.

We, Todd Martin, Judith Horan and I, Don Swenson, would like to offer a warm welcome to our new associate editors. You and your scholarly skills are most welcome to the Journal.

Elyse Jennings, Harvard University, USA

Gerardo Meil, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Ria Smit, Lone Star College, USA; University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Kamila Kolpashnikova, Oxford University, UK

This issue is composed of three research articles plus a book review. There is no common theme that unites them and each is a unique contribution to the growing literature of comparative family studies.

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE

The first article is on intimate violence. The authors, Tyrone C. Cheng, and Celia C. Lo, focused not so much in the incidents of violence but on the factors that contributed women reporting to the police of their being victimized by an intimate partner. Cheng and Lo commence their article by defining intimate violence as grabbing, scratching or biting, pushing or shoving, shaking, punching or slapping, choking, burning, and/or restraining. Their literature review focused on the reporting of the assault and the results of reporting.

The data they used came from National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2010, in the United States. The sample consisted of 3,226 women. The researchers observed that the results of their logistic analysis gave partial support to their hypothesis, that contacting police about intimate partner violence would be associated with physical violence, injury, concern for personal safety, minority ethnicity, education, income, age, and marital status. Two important findings that have practicable implications for women is that if they do report to the police, there is a reduction of future violence. However, the authors observed, is that women do not tend to contact the authorities until after 31 incidences of abuse.

HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITION

Household living arrangements play a crucial role in survival efforts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Tyler Myroniuk and Collin Payne introduce us to household composition in Malawi and how it affects the well-being of the members of the household. The research question they ask is whether changes in overall household size and the addition of dependents and working age individuals are associated with changes in household wealth, a signal of well-being? Because they are asking a question of change over time, they needed to us a longitudinal data set. They selected the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health which is representative of Malawi’s rural areas, through a repeated sample of several thousand respondents from the countries three main regions: North, Central, and South of the country.

The authors found that that an increase in household size corresponds with increases in a household’s wealth index. However, when the number of household members is more than 11, there tended to be a decline in the households wealth. This is a classic story of “the diminishing of returns.” The authors conclude their analysis by saying:

The presence of young and working-age males appears to be critical for the generation and maintenance of household wealth. Given other research on the role of females in providing caregiving and social support within the family unit, our findings suggest that gendered roles are still crucial to households’ survival in contemporary rural Malawi. Identifying the mechanisms connecting the addition of members, and the part they play in possibly increasing or decreasing a household’s wealth and, ultimately, its well-being, ought to be the next empirical step in this line of demographic research.

PARENTING IN MULTICULTURAL FAMILIES

From a sample of 20 intercultural married couples in Japan, Teresa Koide, Tomoko Yoshida, Erina Ogawa, Makiko Kuramoto, Jimena Emily Homma, and Miho Naruse weave a story of the many challenges that couples of dual ethnic backgrounds face in modern Japan.

Their literature review covers topics such as “layers of culture,” “conformity and tightness of culture,” “intercultural parenting,” and “differences in perceptions and social capital.” These concepts enabled...