Fausto Amaro, PhD, is Professor and Director of the Family Studies Centre at the Higher Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Technical University of Lisbon. His research has focused on family policy, child abuse, adoption, sexual behavior, and mental health. He is the author and coauthor of several books and articles on these subjects.

Taghi Azadarmaki, PhD, graduated from Maryland University in 1991 with a dissertation on Ibn-Khalduan's social theory. After returning to Iran, he has taught several courses on social theory, social and cultural changes in Iran, and cultural studies. He has conducted some survey research on values in Muslim countries and worked on some social and cultural issues in Iran. He has run the Social Science faculty at the University of Tehran since 1996 and was promoted to professor in sociology in 2003. During the last 10 years he has published 14 books on social theory, cultural and social changes, Iranian modernity, and family and culture in Iran, and has published 34 papers on different issues in academic journals.

Yu-Hua Chen is Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology at the National Taiwan University. She recently served as executive editor for the Journal of Population Studies, a leading demographic publication in Taiwan. Emphasizing the influence of demographic processes, her research focuses on women's well-being and their families over the life course. She is also interested in comparing the consequences of socioeconomic change for families and households among Chinese societies. Her most recent publication is a chapter titled “The Impact of Co-residence on Marital Power: An Interplay Between Resources and Norms” (with Chin-Chun Yi) in Murray Rubenstein and Scott Simon (Eds.), Engendering Formosa (M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming).

Wilfried Dumon is Professor Emeritus at Katholijke Univeristeit Leuven, Department of Sociology, Belgium. He was secretary/ treasurer of the Committee on Family Research (CFR) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for many years. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden.

Elisa Facio is Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on racial-ethnic women and aging. She has been taking students to Cuba for over a decade. She also conducts research on gender inequality in Cuba during the Special Period.

Hannele Forsberg, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Social Work and vice-chair of the Childhood and Family Research Unit, University of Tampere. She has studied and written extensively about families, children, and the social construction of emotions in social problems work.

Carol D. H. Harvey, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Family Social Sciences, Faculty of Human Ecology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is a family researcher and teacher, with interest in family problem-solving among immigrant, [Page 646]refugee, and native families and among family caregivers with frail elderly members. She has worked in universities in the United States and Canada for 34 years; she has also had the opportunity to take sabbatical leaves in Finland, Scotland, and Australia.

Elizabeth Jelin is Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific Research, Argentina, Research Director at Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, and Director of the Doctoral Program in the Social Sciences developed jointly at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento and IDES. She is the author of numerous publications, including State Repression and the Labors of Memory, and editor of several volumes in the series “Memorias de la represión.” She is also the author and editor of Más allá de la nación: Las escalas múltiples de los movimientos sociales and of Pan y afectos: La transformación de las familias. Her research interests are in human rights, the family, citizenship, and social movements.

Tomáš Katrnák is a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies in Brno. His research concerns the sociology of family, demography, social inequality, and social stratification.

Ruth Katz received her PhD in sociology from Tel Aviv University. She is at the Department of Human Services, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Studies, University of Haifa, and a senior researcher at the Center for Research and Study of the Family and at the Center for Research and Study of Aging. Her main fields of interest include family relations, gendered division of labor, alternative lifestyles, intergenerational relations, immigrant families, and family theory.

Daniela Klaus is employed as a scientific researcher at the Department of Sociology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany. Her fields of interest are sociology of family and quantitative methods of empirical research. Currently, she is working in a cross-cultural study examining the value of children to their parents in Turkey, where she is doing her doctoral thesis on the subject of the demographic transition.

Thomas Klein is Professor of Sociology at Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests are family and population sociology, comparative social stratification, and life course research. He has authored many publications on various topics in these fields.

Sandra Kytir received her MA in sociology at the University of Vienna and is currently undertaking a PhD at Lancaster University. She tutors in statistics and works in social indicator research with a special focus on family issues. Her current research interest is in transition processes from state socialism to a market economy, focusing on uneven development in Eastern European countries.

Yoav Lavee received his PhD in family studies from the University of Minnesota. He is at the School of Social Work, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Studies, University of Haifa, and a senior researcher at the Center for Research and Study of the Family. His main fields of interest include family stress and coping, marital dynamics under stress, marital quality in a multicultural context, and family theory and methodology.

Kwang-Kyu Lee received a BA in history in 1960 from Seoul National University and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 1966 from the University of Vienna. From 1967 to 1998 Dr. Lee was a professor at Seoul National University, and became Professor Emeritus in 1998 at the same university. In 2003 Dr. Lee was president of the Overseas Koreans Foundation.

Irene Levin is a professor at Oslo University College, Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Her publications include [Page 647]books and articles on stepfamilies (including Stepfamilies—Variations and Manifold [Aventura, Oslo] and Stepfamilies—History, Research and Policy [The Howarth Press]), living apart together relationships (LAT—One Couple Two Homes [N. W. Damm, Oslo]), and symbolic interaction (To Understand Everyday Life From a Symbolic Interactionist Perspective [TANO, Oslo]).

Edward K. Mburugu is currently Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Recent articles have focused on development and fertility in Africa and the changing family and kinship in African development. He is also a coeditor of African Perspectives on Development (James Currey Ltd. 1994).

Innocent Victor Ogo Modo is Nigerian. He holds a PhD in social anthropology. Currently, he is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. He is a member of the committee of Family Research (RCO6) of the International Sociological Association.

Ivo Mozný is Professor of Sociology and Social Philosophy and a senior researcher at the School for Social Studies, Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic. Dr. Mozny's scholarly interests include sociology of the family, poverty, social policy, social conflict and change, and higher education. Dr. Mozny has also published four books on family and social change and many papers in sociological journals, and is engaged in governmental advisory committees on the family and social policy.

Fahad Al Naser obtained his PhD in sociology of family from Michigan State University in 1986. Since his return to Kuwait, he has been teaching at Kuwait University. He has published many articles and has also authored textbooks related to marriage, family, divorce, mate selection, and the like, in both Arabic and English. While writing his contribution to this volume, he was just ending his term as chair of the Department of Sociology & Social Work, Kuwait University. After the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 (from the Iraqi occupation), Dr. Fahad was deeply involved with humanitarian projects that were related to rehabilitating the people of Kuwait who were affected by the crisis. He also serves on the board of several educational committees and institutions.

Bernhard Nauck is the founding Professor of the Department of Sociology at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. He received his PhD in 1977 from the University of Cologne, and habilitation in 1983 and 1987 (University of Bonn and Augsburg). His research interests include comparative family sociology, life course, and migration, and he has published some 150 scholarly pieces in German, English, French, Turkish, and Italian. Currently, he is president of the Committee on Family Research of the International Sociological Association.

Rudolf Richter, PhD, is University Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Vienna. He has been a member of the coordination team of the European Observatory on the Social Situation, Demography and the Family since 2000. He was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in 1985 and at Arizona State University in 1996. He is a member of several international sociological scientific organizations and is a past president of the Austrian Association of Sociology and a past vice president of the Committee of Family Research of the International Sociological Association. His main areas of research include sociology of family, sociology of the life course, political sociology, Eastern European studies, cultural sociology, and interpretative sociology.

[Page 648]Anne R. Roschelle is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender, with a specialty in family poverty. She also conducts research on gender inequality in Cuba during the Special Period.

Barbara H. Settles, PhD, is Professor of Individual and Family Studies, University of Delaware, Newark. Her recent writings have focused on futures of families in the United States and internationally, immigration, migration and the concepts of home and society, prevention and family life and sexuality education, comparisons of the United States to China in family formation and intergenerational caregiving, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Xuewen Sheng worked as a research professor in the Department of Marriage and Family Studies, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China, from 1982 to 1997, with major research areas of comparative family studies and gender and aging issues. He received his MA on Human Development and Family Studies in 1999, and he is currently a PhD candidate on Human Development of Family Studies at the University of Delaware. His interest areas include comparative family studies, human development, and research methodology.

J. P. Singh is Professor in the Postgraduate Department of Sociology, Patna University, India. Earlier he was Reader in Research Methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He obtained a PhD in demography from the Australian National University, Canberra. He held a UNDP Fellowship at the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, and was a Professional Associate of the Institute of Population Studies, East-West Center, Hawaii. During the last three decades of his academic career, he has published eight books and over 50 research papers in books and leading professional journals from India and abroad.

Peter Somlai is Professor and Head of the Department of History of Social Theory in the Institute of Sociology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He taught on family and society in several universities in the United States, Germany, and Romania. His current research interest is theories of deviance. Recent publications include a chapter titled “Global Citizenship: An Essay on Its Ambiguities” in J. A. Myers-Walls & P. Somlai, with R. N. Rapoport (Eds.), Families as Educators for Global Citizenship (London: Avebury Press, 2001).

Maura I. Toro-Morn is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender with a specialty in global migrations from a gendered perspective. She also conducts research on gender inequality in Cuba during the Special Period.

Olga Tóth is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She conducted a series of empirical studies on family and gender in recent decades. Her main research topics are family formations, violence in the family, and connections between generations. She also teaches courses for undergraduate students in different universities. She has published in Hungarian and in English.

David de Vaus is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has also worked as the director of research at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, where he has conducted research on cohabitation, intergenerational relationships, family values, mental health and families, and family disruptions as experienced by children. He is [Page 649]the author of many books including Letting Go: Relationships Between Adults and Their Parents (1994); Australian Family Profiles: Social and Demographic Patterns (1997) (with Ilene Wolcott); and Diversity and Change in Australian Families (2004).

Chin-Chun Yi is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is also teaching at the Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University. Her research interests include changing females' domestic status, youth study, and the transformation of private universities in Taiwan. Her recent publications are “Taiwan's Modernization Women's Changing Roles” (in Peter Chow [Ed.], Taiwan's Modernization in Global Perspective [Praeger, 2002]), “The Linkage Between Work and Family: Females' Employment Patterns in Three Chinese Societies” (in Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 2002), and “The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Values: Teenagers and Their Parents in Taiwan” (in Journal of Comparative Family Studies, in press).

Susan C. Ziehl is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Industrial Sociology at Rhodes University, Grahams-town, South Africa. She holds an M.ECON degree from the University of Stellenbosch and a PhD from Rhodes University. She also spent 2 years at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Her main research and teaching area is family sociology, with specific emphasis on household structures, marital status, and family law. She also teaches in industrial sociology, in particular, a course on gender and work. Her other areas of interest are infertility and modern reproductive technology, demography, affirmative action, and sexual harassment. Recent publications include Population Studies (Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forging the Links—Globalization and Family Patterns” (in Society in Transition, 34[2], 2003).