The important effects of kinship on marital relationships have long been examined in depth and thoroughly documented by sociologists; but little evidence has been reported in the literature on economics. This study explores the kinship-related factors that influence the stability of marriage, with a particular focus on the unique characteristics and long-standing traditions of Chinese society. One important finding is that women's traditional functions and kinship network are the main determinants of the marriage outcome of older couples, whereas preconceived notions of family and kinship play a significant role in the success or failure of marriage for younger couples.

This paper explores an emerging common phenomenon of new immigrant groups clustering in suburban areas. We argue that the households of new immigrant groups are concerned with neighborhood safety. They are attracted to suburban neighborhoods which generally have lower crime rates. Since suburban neighborhoods have become more heterogeneous, households of new immigrant groups can look for safer neighborhoods in the suburbs without necessarily paying a higher housing cost than they would reside in the central city or in other neighborhoods in the same suburban context. With such budget constraints, only a limited number of suburban neighborhoods are available. Subsequently, these households spatially cluster in suburban areas. The 1996 Toronto census data in general confirms this picture.

Social exclusion has been defined as possible combinations of at least three of the following six disadvantages: low income, unemployment, lack of social interaction, inactive political participation, lack of social-support relationship, and ill health. This paper studies the social-excluded population of Taiwan, first by employing the Database of Taiwan Social Change Surrey (TSCS/2002) to estimate their number. The study has three main findings. First, the severely disadvantaged group, characterized by having at least three disadvantages out of the six, is about 4.5% of Taiwan's population second, the disadvantages of low income and a lack of social support relationship are the two decisive dimensions of the six in forming the severely disadvantage group. And third, the current findings show that the demographic characteristic of the severely disadvantaged group are the relatively uneducated, the unmarried, and the elderly. By multiple correspondence analysis, three clusters of disadvantaged groups are identified: the poverty-extended, the unemployment- marginalized, and the self-excluded.
In addition to estimating the unmber of the multi-disadvantaged in Taiwan, the author reflects upon the shortcomings of methods employed in this and related studies. There are two reasons to explain why the databases employed in related researches are not suitable for the thematic definition and concepts. First, the concepts and dynamics of social exclusion are too complicated to be reduced into exact operational definition. The so-called multi-disadvantages method, which employs intersected selection, can easily result in fallacious statistics. Finally, it is suggested that other method, such as life course case studies, might get closer to the reality of social exclusion and multi-disadvantages.

This study seeks to compare health trajectories across the two major ethnic groups of the elderly in Taiwan, the Taiwanese and the Mainlanders, over 11 years of follow-up. This ethnic division is considered a salient dimension of social stratification in Taiwan, shaping the two groups of elders' pathways through life. Data are from the first four waves of the Taiwan Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly (N=3,540). Proportional hazard models with time-dependent covariates and multinomial logistic regression were employed to compare health trajectories across ethnicity. There are three major findings. (1) Self-rated health is shown to be a remarkably strong predictor of mortality despite controlling for other variables, which is consistent with the bulk of studies in this area. (2) By using a national representative sample of the elderly in Taiwan and treating self-rated health as a time-dependent covariate, evidence from this study reveals that self-rated health reflects a person's health trajectory. (3) Considerable differences exist in the ways socio-structural forces are related to the health trajectories of Mainlanders and Taiwanese, respectively, over the 11 years of follow-up. In conclusion, it seems that, among this elderly population, the ethnic inequality in health can be explained away by Mainlanders' higher socio-economic standing, which is different from the racial/ethnic health disparities observed in the United States, where social class accounts for part of the differences, but the health disparities between African Americans and whites remain after adjusting for measures of social class.

”The little traditional fertility culture” is the logical starting point for an up-to-date study on fertility culture change. Through the experimental study on the fertility culture in a village before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, some differences come up between ”the big traditional fertility” and ”the little traditional fertility culture”, such as: (1) it has supreme value for family to birth boys; (2) the villagers generally disagreed with the common saying of ”the more births, the better” and instead desired birth control (3) the villagers' average ages of marriage and of onset of fertility were abnormally young. This study increases the knowledge of traditional fertility culture and may prompt a reevalution of both the effectiveness of birth control policies and standard thinking about China's demographic transition.