In Taiwan, it took only forty-four years to achieve the same degree of urbanization that required almost a century in the United States. It is obvious that urbanization is determined by the abundance of land resources as well as the speed of population growth and of economic growth. In turn, urbanization has an impact on the configuration of political economy and the quality of urban life.
Along with the development of cities everywhere in the world, theories concerning urbanization have also evolved from central place theory, urban base theory, dependency theory, modernization theory to global economic integration theory. Based on the Population Census in Taiwan between 1956 and 2000, this paper explores whether and how well these theories fit the development experiences of cities in Taiwan.

The main purpose of this paper is to explain the initial destination choices of the skilled immigrants from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan who landed in Canada in 1983-1999, based on an application of a multinomial logit model to the micro data of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Our findings strongly support the human capital investment theory and the ethnic enclave theory. We also found some indications of the increasing importance of transnationalism and the attempts at using Quebec as a stepping stone to settle down in other parts of Canada as landed immigrants. We infer that the heavy concentration of these immigrants in Ontario and British Columbia will persist, and that in the rest of Canada, only Alberta has some chance of increasing significantly its share of these immigrants.

Since 1970, family sociologists and marriage psychologists have attempted to investigate the factors affecting marital satisfaction. Their analyses, however, focused on the impacts of individual, spousal and conjugal interactional properties but paid less attention to the influence of familial systems. In this paper, we emphasize that Chinese marriage value is familial-oriented, and then conceptualize marital satisfaction as an individual subjective assessment of his/her marital and familial situation. Data drawn from the 2001 Taiwan Social Change Survey are employed to examine how conjugal as well as familial factors affect marital satisfaction.
On the basis of reports of 1677 married Taiwanese, 92% of the respondents reported they were satisfied with their marriage. The results of logistic regression analyses indicate that marital satisfaction is associated with cohabitation and supportive resolution toward conjugal conflicts. As hypothesized, familial factors such as family and community support systems have positive impacts on marital satisfaction.

This study uses the survey data of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan, which were jointly collected by Taiwan Provincial Family Planning Institute and the University of Michigan in 1989 and 1993, to examine the relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction among Taiwanese elderly. Here, leisure activities include the participation of informal organizations, travel activities, and other leisure activities. The focus of this examination are fourfold: (1) participation rates of various leisure activities, (2) the applicability of various theories on leisure activities, (3) determinants of leisure activities, and (4) the relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction.
The analytical results show that the participation rates of informal organization for Taiwanese elderly are relatively low, around 10%, while the rates for travel activities are around 30%-40%. The participation rates for leisure activities vary a lot. Watching TV is almost a unanimous leisure activity for the elderly. The rates for visiting friends and playing with grandchildren are between 50% and 60%; and about 40% for worshiping god or meditation. In brief, the leisure activities for Taiwanese elderly are mostly traditional and static.
The foci of theoretical discussion include: (1) the relationship between activities and role, (2) changes in activities, and (3) the relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction. The participation of informal organization is more closely related to role than other actives. It has been observed that although the index of informal organization participation remains unchanged for the majority of Taiwanese elderly, there are substantial proportions of the elderly whose index increased or decreased. It is also observed that the increase of informal organization participation has a positive function on life satisfaction. We thus are inclined to conclude that the theory of activity or continuity is the best choice for the case of Taiwan. On the other hand, participation in other leisure activities is unrelated to role. The proportions increased or decreased are greater than those without change. They, however, are positively related to life satisfaction. It seems that the theory of activity is more applicable to other leisure activities. Finally, travel activities are not related to one’s identity either. About half of them had changed their participation rate, and the changes have a negative function on life satisfaction. On the contrary, the index of traveling is positively related to life satisfaction. It seems that none of the theories mentioned in this paper is able to explain the results fully.