T F Liao
Biographic Data
| ID | 23511 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T F Liao |
| GIVEN NAMES | T F |
| FAMILY NAME | Liao |
| SIGNATURE | LIAO T F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1296-7660 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 207 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Abductive Analysis and Analytical Induction: Similar Origins but Different Goals for Social Research
What is the purpose of social science research? We argue that different data analytical approaches lead to fundamentally different endpoints. We examine the convergence and similarities between abductive analysis and Florian Znaniecki’s sociological method of analytical induction. Both approaches originated in a similar intellectual and historical climate and share similar methodological precepts such as recognizing the transformative analytical …
Assortative Agreement: A Reply to Gonalons-Pons and Schwartz
To See or Not to See: Another Look at the Mechanisms Behind Growing Earnings Homogamy in the United States
Highlights Changes in assortative mating matter more for earnings homogamy than prior work had reported. The prior 10.8% estimate was unstable owing to random noise in the samples. Reducing noise in the samples yields a larger estimated contribution of assortative mating. Cohorts with higher earnings homogamy following marriage were already characterized by higher homogamy at marriage entry. Earnings assortative mating changed in a nonlinear traj…
Unstable Hours, Unequal Health: Gendered Occupational Health Costs of Work-Hour Volatility in the U.S.
Introduction Work-hour instability is a key feature of precarious employment, yet its population-level health implications remain insufficiently understood and may be obscured by employment-based selection. Methods Using the Current Population Survey linked across two four-month observation periods separated by an eight-month unobserved interval, we construct a work-hour volatility index from within-person changes in work hours and estimate gende…
Assessing the impact of timing errors in sequence analysis
The standard practice in sequence analysis is to regard sequences as exact and measured without error. Transition timing is a common source of sequence measurement error in social research. In this paper, we propose a method for conducting Monte Carlo simulations of transition timing errors to assess the robustness of sequence analysis outcomes against such timing errors. The method consists in repeating multiple times the analyses with updated s…
Understanding the Effect of Adult Children’s Education on Older Parents’ Subjective Well-being: Evidence from China
While the effects of children’s education on parents’ longevity, cognition, and physical health have been explored in the literature, little is known about whether and how children’s education influences parents’ subjective well-being. Utilizing data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper explores the effect of adult children’s education on older parents’ life satisfaction with a special focus on the mechanisms and ge…
A study of Filipina migrant workers’ subjective health in Hong Kong and an assessment of eight scoring methods for the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-12)
For studying non-US populations with the SF-12 version 2 instrument, we recommend using the latent confirmatory factor analysis model that assumes a normal distribution and an identity link function for analyzing the MCS and PCS dimensions simultaneously
Do Birds of a Nest Flock Together? A Study of Home Provinces and Migration Paths among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
There is strong evidence that migration is networked. However, it is unclear whether having the same province of origin can also lead to similar migratory paths. This study investigates the question of whether a shared home province among Filipina migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong is associated with shared or linked migration paths to Hong Kong. Using a unique data source, the 2017 Survey of Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, we employed …
Unemployment: A Hidden Source of Wage Inequality
Although unemployment plays a central role in the emergence of labour market disparities, rarely any studies have linked its dynamics with the overall level of wage inequality. This study addresses this gap by assessing how unemployment is associated with both between- and within-group wage disparities. Hypotheses derived from labour market theories are tested using comprehensive longitudinal data from the Dutch OSA Labour Supply Panel spanning 1…
Employment conditions and mental health of overseas female migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong: A parallel mediation analysis
The findings call for increased scrutiny of employment conditions and mental well-being of MDWs
Collective Memory, Visual Communication, and Symbolic Interactions with Statues: The Case of the Charging Bull of Wall Street
This research is concerned with individuals’ symbolic interactions with the Charging Bull statue. We chose this statue because it is an extremely popular tourist attraction and the most visited nonhuman statue in New York City. However, there is no research devoted to understanding how visitors interact with the statue. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine people’s interactions as a unique way of communicating with the Charging Bull sta…
Methods and theory for analyzing intensive longitudinal data in family research
Although family scholars have long relied on longitudinal data, electronic methods of data collection like web- and app-based surveys have greatly increased the amount of data with many repeated measures at short intervals, sometimes called intensive longitudinal data. The authors provide a conceptual overview of this type of data, paying particular attention to the appropriate frequency for the intervals, and discuss some of the unique contribut…
Fertility of Female Filipino and Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
The relationship between migrant workers’ migratory moves and their fertility is complex. The literature on international migration contains three main explanations of the relationship—the disruption hypothesis, the adaptation hypothesis, and the selectivity hypothesis. The research reported in the literature has so far focused on international migrants, many of whom have the prospect of becoming legal immigrants, while there is little research o…
Strategies for Multidomain Sequence Analysis in Social Research
Multidomain/multichannel sequence analysis has become widely used in social science research to uncover the underlying relationships between two or more observed trajectories in parallel. For example, life-course researchers use multidomain sequence analysis to study the parallel unfolding of multiple life-course domains. In this article, the authors conduct a critical review of the approaches most used in multidomain sequence analysis. The paral…
Understanding Anti-Covid-19 Vaccination Protest Slogans in the US
This study aims to investigate public protest slogans in response to the Biden Administration's announcement of two COVID-19 vaccination regulations on November 4, 2021. We identified three protest themes: (1) support for individual freedom/rights, (2) opposition to government's control, and (3) anti-science reasoning/misinformation/disinformation. Major policy recommendations include implementing efforts to dispel unscientific misinformation/dis…
A Study of Cumulative Covid-19 Mortality Trends Associated with Ethnic-Racial Composition, Income Inequality, and Party Inclination among US Counties
This research analyzes the association between cumulative COVID-19 mortality and ethnic-racial composition, income inequality, and political party inclination across counties in the United States. The study extends prior research by taking a long view-examining cumulative mortality burdens over the first 900 days of the COVID-19 pandemic at five time points (via negative binomial models) and as trajectories of cumulative mortality trends (via gro…
Linked labor force trajectories: Empirical evidence from dual-parent families in the United States and Australia
Social Exchange in Mate Selection of Female Migrants in China
In China, a critical challenge for rural-to-urban migrants planning to settle down is to convert their rural hukou (household registration) to an urban one through a limited set of de jure channels. This study argues that marriage is a key channel that some migrants take, notably for female migrants. Using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey, we analyzed how educational and age disparities between female rural-to-urban migrants and t…
Individual Components of Three Inequality Measures for Analyzing Shapes of Inequality
In common sociological research, income inequality is measured only at the aggregate level. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there is more than meets the eye when inequality is indicated by a single measure. In this article, I introduce an alternative method that evaluates individuals' contributions to inequality as well as the between-group and within-group components of these individual contributions. I first highlight th…
Sequence analysis: Its past, present, and future
This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a lif…
Using Sequence Analysis to Quantify How Strongly Life Courses Are Linked
Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the sequence distance between members of an observed …
Income Inequality, Social Comparison, and Happiness in the United States
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state's overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest …
Comparing Groups of Life-Course Sequences Using the Bayesian Information Criterion and the Likelihood-Ratio Test
How can we statistically assess differences in groups of life-course trajectories? The authors address a long-standing inadequacy of social sequence analysis by proposing an adaption of the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the likelihood-ratio test (LRT) for assessing differences in groups of sequence data. Unlike previous methods, this adaption provides a useful measure for degrees of difference, that is, the substantive significance, an…
Guanxi: How China Works
Data Collection for Migrant Live-In Domestic Workers: A Three-Stage Cluster Sampling Method
This article discusses an innovative method of collecting survey data on a special population, migrant live-in domestic workers, for which it is difficult to define an appropriate sampling framework. These migrant workers, however, have regular gatherings in public spaces within a certain period of time during the weekends. In this article, we present the method of collecting data on this group of domestic workers and the procedures for implement…
Visualizing Sequences in the Social Sciences: Relative Frequency Sequence Plots
Visualization is a potentially powerful tool for exploration and complexity reduction of categorical sequence data. This article discusses currently available sequence visualization against established criteria for graphical excellence in the visual display of quantitative information. Existing sequence graphs fall into two groups: They either represent categorical sequences or summarize them. The authors propose relative frequency sequence plots…
Sequence analysis: Its past, present, and future
This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a lif…
Socialization, Life Situations, and Gender-Role Attitudes regarding the Family among White American Women
There are two major theoretical perspectives explaining differences in gender-role attitudes: the socialization or social-learning theory, and situational theory in the form of macrosituational and microsituational (microstructural) hypotheses. In this article, we synthesize the two theories. We use data from the 1985 General Social Survey to evaluate this synthetic theory for white women in the United States. The findings show that socialization…
Comparing Social Groups: Wald Statistics for Testing Equality Among Multiple Logit Models
Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple social groups such as race, ethnic group, and nation.This paper examines the Wald test for testing equality of logit coefficients from models of multiple social groups. I propose a Wald statistic that can perform some joint tests of group comparisons that the usual likelihood ratio test cannot. Two examples apply the Wald statistic for testing various h…
Filipino and Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong: Their Life Courses in Migration
This article presents a portrayal of Filipino and Indonesian female domestic workers' life courses in migration, using the life history calendar data from the 2017 survey of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Applying sequence analysis, we first analyzed migration trajectory features such as individual migration trajectories, duration spent in each state, and longitudinal diversity of state distributions. We found that Indonesian domestic wor…
Data Collection for Migrant Live-In Domestic Workers: A Three-Stage Cluster Sampling Method
This article discusses an innovative method of collecting survey data on a special population, migrant live-in domestic workers, for which it is difficult to define an appropriate sampling framework. These migrant workers, however, have regular gatherings in public spaces within a certain period of time during the weekends. In this article, we present the method of collecting data on this group of domestic workers and the procedures for implement…
Income Inequality, Social Comparison, and Happiness in the United States
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state's overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest …
Comparing Groups of Life-Course Sequences Using the Bayesian Information Criterion and the Likelihood-Ratio Test
How can we statistically assess differences in groups of life-course trajectories? The authors address a long-standing inadequacy of social sequence analysis by proposing an adaption of the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the likelihood-ratio test (LRT) for assessing differences in groups of sequence data. Unlike previous methods, this adaption provides a useful measure for degrees of difference, that is, the substantive significance, an…
Sociological Tools Measuring Occupations: New Classification and Scales
Measuring and Analyzing Class Inequality with the Gini Index Informed by Model-Based Clustering
The most widely used measure for studying social, economic, and health inequality is the Gini index/ratio. Whereas other measures of inequality possess certain useful characteristics, such as the straightforward decomposability of the generalized entropy measures, the Gini index has remained the most popular, at least in part due to its ease of interpretation. However, the Gini index has a limitation in measuring inequality. It is less sensitive …
Evaluating Distributional Differences in Income Inequality
Income and wage inequality between gender and other social groups is commonly evaluated by the difference in average income or the decomposition of the total amount of inequality into between-group and within-group components using an inequality measure such as the Theil index. Either approach ignores the dispersional difference between social groups, often manifested in glass-ceiling and glass-floor effects. The author introduces a refined Theil…
Contact with Parents in Japan: Effects on Opinions toward Gender and Intergenerational Roles
Ronald R. Rindfuss, Tim Futing Liao, Noriko O. Tsuya, Contact with Parents in Japan: Effects on Opinions toward Gender and Intergenerational Roles, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 812-822
Strategies for Multidomain Sequence Analysis in Social Research
Multidomain/multichannel sequence analysis has become widely used in social science research to uncover the underlying relationships between two or more observed trajectories in parallel. For example, life-course researchers use multidomain sequence analysis to study the parallel unfolding of multiple life-course domains. In this article, the authors conduct a critical review of the approaches most used in multidomain sequence analysis. The paral…
The social definition of time for university students
In today's world, universities, in particular those in the West, have increasingly become networked, informationalized, and commercialized, and tend to operate on a clock or chronologic time like a business or corporation, though their demands on individuals are often in real or chronoscopic time terms. In light of the increasing demand in time by the university as corporation, we study in this article a neglected aspect of such a modern universi…
Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life
The Effect of Multiple Roles of South Korean Married Women Professors: Role Changes and the Factors Which Influence Potential Role Gratification and Strain
Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks
In this article, we investigate the factors predicting the inclusion and positioning of a particularly important family member in an American's discussion network: one's spouse. With data from the 1985 General Social Survey, we first investigate factors that underlie propensities among married Americans to include spouses as members of their discussion networks. We then investigate factors underlying their propensities to name their spouse as the…
Individual Components of Three Inequality Measures for Analyzing Shapes of Inequality
In common sociological research, income inequality is measured only at the aggregate level. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there is more than meets the eye when inequality is indicated by a single measure. In this article, I introduce an alternative method that evaluates individuals' contributions to inequality as well as the between-group and within-group components of these individual contributions. I first highlight th…
A Flexible Approach for the Decomposition of Rate Differences
Conventional methods of decomposing the difference between two rates, such as Kitagawa’s classic component analysis, are confined to taking the average of compositional differences. I propose a more general modeling approach involving three steps: (1) A system of equations with the various additive components of the rate difference is set up; (2) unknowns (refined rate differences) are estimated with Clogg’s purging method; (3) the components are…
Using Sequence Analysis to Quantify How Strongly Life Courses Are Linked
Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the sequence distance between members of an observed …
Were past Chinese families complex? Household structures during the Tang Dynasty, 618–907 AD
The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of multiple-family units. However, reports on family size in China's past suggest that the average household size was not large in ancient times. Using population registers for Dunhuang and Turfan from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad ), this article is the first serious attempt to analyze household structures in ancient China. While a high proportion of simple-…
A Unified Three-Dimensional Framework of Theory Construction and Development in Sociology
Popper's logic of scientific discovery and Kuhn 's paradigm switches in science have been considered competing schools of thought in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge. In the present paper the author establishes a unified three-dimensional framework that synthesizes the quintessential ideas of these schools. Theories are tested for confirmation or falsification in the first dimension; their scope conditions are defined and …
Methods and theory for analyzing intensive longitudinal data in family research
Although family scholars have long relied on longitudinal data, electronic methods of data collection like web- and app-based surveys have greatly increased the amount of data with many repeated measures at short intervals, sometimes called intensive longitudinal data. The authors provide a conceptual overview of this type of data, paying particular attention to the appropriate frequency for the intervals, and discuss some of the unique contribut…
Fertility of Female Filipino and Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
The relationship between migrant workers’ migratory moves and their fertility is complex. The literature on international migration contains three main explanations of the relationship—the disruption hypothesis, the adaptation hypothesis, and the selectivity hypothesis. The research reported in the literature has so far focused on international migrants, many of whom have the prospect of becoming legal immigrants, while there is little research o…
Linked labor force trajectories: Empirical evidence from dual-parent families in the United States and Australia
A Cautionary Note on the Analysis of Life-Cycle Events: Comments on Smith and Meitz
A Flexible Approach for the Decomposition of Rate Differences
Conventional methods of decomposing the difference between two rates, such as Kitagawa’s classic component analysis, are confined to taking the average of compositional differences. I propose a more general modeling approach involving three steps: (1) A system of equations with the various additive components of the rate difference is set up; (2) unknowns (refined rate differences) are estimated with Clogg’s purging method; (3) the components are…
A Unified Three-Dimensional Framework of Theory Construction and Development in Sociology
Popper's logic of scientific discovery and Kuhn 's paradigm switches in science have been considered competing schools of thought in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge. In the present paper the author establishes a unified three-dimensional framework that synthesizes the quintessential ideas of these schools. Theories are tested for confirmation or falsification in the first dimension; their scope conditions are defined and …
Theory Construction and Development in Sociology: A Reply to Willer and to Harris and Walker
I thank Professor Wilier and Professors Harris and Walker for making comments on my recent publication in this journal. Much of what they argue is due to inability to come to grips with the issues and ignorance of the differential emphasis of these issues. Their comments, however, together with my reply, will help the reader at large to see more clearly some general points that are vitally important to theory construction and development in socio…
Immanence and Transcendence: The Relationship between Patterns of Family Decision Making and Fertility among Catholics and Protestants
Swanson attributes the spread of Protestantism and the Reformation vis-à-vis the existence of Catholicism to the form of governance in European societies. This article takes up Swanson's theoretical framework and studies the Catholic fertility differential — one of the behavioral patterns that differentiate Catholics from Protestants — in the light of this pattern-of-decision-making approach. It is found that a contemporary American woman living …
Contact with Parents in Japan: Effects on Opinions toward Gender and Intergenerational Roles
Ronald R. Rindfuss, Tim Futing Liao, Noriko O. Tsuya, Contact with Parents in Japan: Effects on Opinions toward Gender and Intergenerational Roles, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 812-822
Sitting in Oblivion as a Taoist Practice of Positive Alienation: A Response to Negative Alienation in the Tang Dynasty
Changing, especially deteriorating, social conditions may engender (negative) alienation. Common strategies of de-alienation include social movements. Alienation takes on a positive form when actively practised. In this paper I briefly review how positive alienation is reflected in Taoist thought, and use it as a starting point to examine in greater detail how this form of alienation can be achieved, as discussed in Zuowanglun or Discourse on Sit…
Interpreting Probability Models
A theoretical framework of collective action for the evaluation of family planning programs
Discrete Latent Variable Models
Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks
In this article, we investigate the factors predicting the inclusion and positioning of a particularly important family member in an American's discussion network: one's spouse. With data from the 1985 General Social Survey, we first investigate factors that underlie propensities among married Americans to include spouses as members of their discussion networks. We then investigate factors underlying their propensities to name their spouse as the…
Bootstrapping: A Nonparametric Approach to Statistical Inference
Socialization, Life Situations, and Gender-Role Attitudes regarding the Family among White American Women
There are two major theoretical perspectives explaining differences in gender-role attitudes: the socialization or social-learning theory, and situational theory in the form of macrosituational and microsituational (microstructural) hypotheses. In this article, we synthesize the two theories. We use data from the 1985 General Social Survey to evaluate this synthetic theory for white women in the United States. The findings show that socialization…
Measuring population aging as a function of fertility, mortality, and migration
Introduction to Special Issue on Demography
China: The Many Facets of Demographic Change
Sociological Methodology 1997
The Effect of Multiple Roles of South Korean Married Women Professors: Role Changes and the Factors Which Influence Potential Role Gratification and Strain
Were past Chinese families complex? Household structures during the Tang Dynasty, 618–907 AD
The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of multiple-family units. However, reports on family size in China's past suggest that the average household size was not large in ancient times. Using population registers for Dunhuang and Turfan from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad ), this article is the first serious attempt to analyze household structures in ancient China. While a high proportion of simple-…
The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) is a term introduced by Fielding and Lee (1998) to refer to the wide range of software now available that supports a variety of analytic styles in qualitative research. The software does not “do” the ...
Comparing Social Groups: Wald Statistics for Testing Equality Among Multiple Logit Models
Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple social groups such as race, ethnic group, and nation.This paper examines the Wald test for testing equality of logit coefficients from models of multiple social groups. I propose a Wald statistic that can perform some joint tests of group comparisons that the usual likelihood ratio test cannot. Two examples apply the Wald statistic for testing various h…
Measuring and Analyzing Class Inequality with the Gini Index Informed by Model-Based Clustering
The most widely used measure for studying social, economic, and health inequality is the Gini index/ratio. Whereas other measures of inequality possess certain useful characteristics, such as the straightforward decomposability of the generalized entropy measures, the Gini index has remained the most popular, at least in part due to its ease of interpretation. However, the Gini index has a limitation in measuring inequality. It is less sensitive …
Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life
The Core Concept of Social Sustainability: Can we Cut the Gordian Knot
Sociological Tools Measuring Occupations: New Classification and Scales
Sociology (34 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Population (17 works) · Demography (16 works) · Mathematics (16 works) · Geography (12 works) · Law (11 works)