Browsing by Author "Torche, Florencia"

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    Panel Conditioning in a Longitudinal Study of Adolescents' Substance Use: Evidence from an Experiment
    (OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC, 2012) Torche, Florencia; Warren, John Robert; Halpern Manners, Andrew; Valenzuela, Eduardo
    Panel surveys are widely used in sociology to examine life-course trajectories and to assess causal effects. However, when using panel data researchers usually assume that the act of measuring respondents' attitudes and behaviors has no effect on the attributes being measured or on the accuracy of reports about those attributes. Evidence from cognitive psychology, marketing research, political science and other fields suggests that this assumption may not be warranted. Using a rigorous experimental design, we examine the magnitude of panel conditioning bias - the bias emerging from having answered questions in prior waves of a survey - in a panel study of substance use among adolescents in Chile. We find that adolescents who answered survey questions about alcohol, cigarette, marijuana and cocaine use were considerably less likely than members of a control group to report substance use when re-interviewed one year later. This finding has important implications, and also points to the need for sociologists to be concerned about panel conditioning as an important methodological issue.
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    The effect of birthweight on childhood cognitive development in a middle-income country
    (2011) Torche, Florencia; Echevarria, Ghislaine
    Methods We merge birth registry information on birthweight with standardized Math and Spanish test scores for all fourth graders in Chile to create a prospective data set. Twin fixed-effects models are used to estimate the causal effect of intra-uterine growth on test scores. Fixed-effect estimates are compared with traditional regression results in a cross-section of births to gauge the omitted variable bias emerging from unobserved genetic, maternal and pregnancy-related factors in cross-sectional models.
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    The Normativity of Marriage and the Marriage Premium for Children's Outcomes1
    (2021) Torche, Florencia; Abufhele, Alejandra
    Children born to married parents have better health, behavioral, educational, and economic outcomes than children of unmarried mothers. This association, known as the "marriage premium," has been interpreted as emerging from the selectivity of parents who marry and from a positive effect of marriage. The authors suggest that the positive effect of marriage could be contextual, emerging from the normativity of marriage in society. They test this hypothesis using the case of Chile, where marital fertility dropped sharply from 66% of all births in 1990 to 27% in 2016. The authors find that the benefit of marriage for infant health was large in the early 1990s but declined as marital fertility became less normative in society, to fully disappear in 2016. Multivariate analysis of temporal variation, multilevel models of variation across place, sibling fixed effects models, and a falsification test consistently indicate that marriage has a beneficial effect when marital fertility is normative and a weak effect when is not. Generalizing from this case, the authors discuss contextual effects of diverse practices and statuses.
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    Trust and reciprocity: A theoretical distinction of the sources of social capital
    (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2011) Torche, Florencia; Valenzuela, Eduardo
    The social capital literature has focused on the functional and structural properties of social relations, partially neglecting the way in which they are experienced by individuals. Drawing on anthropological and social theory, this article distinguishes two ideal-typical forms of social capital - reciprocity and trust - based on the meaning of the social relations that embed them. Reciprocity is the type of social capital embedded within personal relations, triply defined in the factual, social and temporal dimensions by co-presence, reciprocity and memory, respectively. Trust is the type of social capital embedded within relations with strangers, defined by the condition of impersonality or anonymity. These two types of social capital cannot be reduced to extremes in a continuum, nor are they fungible, and while reciprocity is by definition particularistic ( this is the source of its strength as a linking mechanism), trust has a universalistic potential. Analytical and empirical implications of this distinction are outlined.