‘By Helping Others,We Helped Ourselves:’ Volunteering and Social Integration of Ex-Soviet Immigrants in Israel

Recent immigrants seldom join the ranks of volunteers for various social causes. Immigrants from former socialist countries have been shown to be particularly averse to organized forms of volunteering for reasons rooted in their past, including forced forms of collectivism imposed by the state. In this qualitative study, we explored the perceptions and practices of volunteering among ex-Soviet immigrants (mostly educated middle-aged women) who ran a project for the benefit of elderly. Our findings show that most volunteers chose causes targeting fellow immigrants, their resettlement and well-being, and were motivated by the wish to build co-ethnic support network and overcome marginalization in the Israeli society. Other volunteers were driven by the need for self-actualization in the context of underemployment and occupational downgrading. Personal empowerment and higher identification with the receiving society were the most salient outcomes of volunteering for our informants. We conclude that for some immigrants, volunteering can serve as a strategy of social integration.     

The Nigerian Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System: Contexts,Institutions, Operation

Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Systems are playing increasing roles in national and global data infrastructure, facilitating the achievement of key developmental goals. The performance of CRVS systems in many developing countries including Nigeria is sub optimal and information on their structure and operations scanty. This paper characterizes the statutory, institutional, and operational elements and social contexts of the Nigerian CRVS System. It includes a context analysis of the system and a review of improvement strategies and interventions. The paper shows that the Nigerian CRVS System is built on viable statutory and institutional platforms—the constitutional enshrinement of: universal, compulsory and continuous civil registration and, a central registration institution—the National Population Commission (NPC). NPC has registration hierarchy and infrastructure deployed at every level of political administration and mechanisms for efficient coordination of registration and production of vital statistics on live-births, deaths and stillbirths amongst other vital events. The major weaknesses of the system include inadequate financing and deployment of registration facilities, conflicting statutes and institutional arrangements for the registration of key events like death and stillbirths. Other weaknesses include intra-organizational conflicts in resource allocation and weak ICT infrastructure within the NPC. These are compounded by overarching contextual issues namely registration unfriendly sociocultural norms, weak national data infrastructure, systemic corruption, poverty and undeveloped civic culture. Domestic initiatives and interventions to improve the system have focused on birth registration, while multilateral interventions have only made a modest impact on the system. Thus, holistic in-country improvement initiatives supported with robust interventions are imperative to overcome weaknesses in the Nigerian CRVS system. However fundamental improvements in CRVS systems in developing countries like Nigeria may likely only follow sustainable solutions to overarching contextual issues especially poor infrastructure, weak institutions, poverty and systemic corruption.     

On the Nearness of Records to Population Quantiles with Respect to Order Statistics in the Sense of Pitman Closeness

In this paper, Pitman closeness criterion is used to compare the nearness of record values and order statistics from two independent samples to a specific population quantile of the parent distribution while the underlying distributions are the same. General expressions for the associated Pitman closeness probability are obtained when the support of the parent distribution is bounded and also unbounded. Some distribution-free results are achieved for symmetric distributions. The exponential and uniform distributions are considered for illustrative proposes and exact expressions are obtained in each case.     

Interactive Hazards Education Program for Youth in a Low SES Community: A Quasi‐Experimental Pilot Study

A pilot study of an interactive hazards education program was carried out in Canberra (Australia), with direct input from youth participants. Effects were evaluated in relation to youths’ interest in disasters, motivation to prepare, risk awareness, knowledge indicators, perceived preparedness levels, planning and practice for emergencies, and fear and anxiety indicators. Parents also provided ratings, including of actual home‐based preparedness activities. Using a single group pretest‐posttest with benchmarking design, a sample of 20 youths and their parents from a low SES community participated. Findings indicated beneficial changes on a number of indicators. Preparedness indicators increased significantly from pre‐ to posttest on both youth (p < 0.01) and parent ratings (p < 0.01). Parent ratings reflected an increase of just under six home‐based preparedness activities. Youth knowledge about disaster mitigation also was seen to increase significantly (p < 0.001), increasing 39% from pretest levels. While personalized risk perceptions significantly increased (p < 0.01), anxiety and worry levels were seen either not to change (generalized anxiety, p > 0.05) or to reduce between pre‐ and posttest (hazards‐specific fears, worry, and distress, ps ranged from p < 0.05 to < 0.001). In terms of predictors of preparedness, a number of variables were found to predict posttest preparedness levels, including information searching done by participants between education sessions. These pilot findings are the first to reflect quasi‐experimental outcomes for a youth hazards education program carried out in a setting other than a school that focused on a sample of youth from a low SES community.     

Child-custody reform and the division of labor in the household

We investigate whether the adoption of joint-custody laws affects the amount of time that married mothers and fathers devote to market and household work. Our findings suggest that custody reform induces a reallocation of time within marriage, with mothers working more in the market and fathers working more in the home. However, fathers lower their labor-force-participation rates in response to custody reform. The patterns in the data are most easily reconciled with models that emphasize shifts in bargaining power to one household member, which is likely the father in the case of joint-custody reform.     

Approximate Bayesian inference in semi-mechanistic models

Inference of interaction networks represented by systems of differential equations is a challenging problem in many scientific disciplines. In the present article, we follow a semi-mechanistic modelling approach based on gradient matching. We investigate the extent to which key factors, including the kinetic model, statistical formulation and numerical methods, impact upon performance at network reconstruction. We emphasize general lessons for computational statisticians when faced with the challenge of model selection, and we assess the accuracy of various alternative paradigms, including recent widely applicable information criteria and different numerical procedures for approximating Bayes factors. We conduct the comparative evaluation with a novel inferential pipeline that systematically disambiguates confounding factors via an ANOVA scheme.     

Is Chinese National Health Insurance Effective in the Face of Severe Illness? A Perspective from Health Service Utilization and Economic Burden

Over the past decade, health insurance coverage has expanded dramatically in China. Health insurance benefits, however, remain shallow or ambiguous. This study examines the effect of Chinese national health insurance policy on health service utilization and economic burden in urban settings using the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance Household Survey. We employ the Heckman selection model to correct for selection bias among hospital inpatients, and find that compared to individuals without health insurance, those with health insurance are more likely to be admitted to the hospital when their physicians recommended them to enter the hospital as inpatients. Health insurance is also associated with about 45.6 % decrease in out-of-pocket inpatient expenditures. Individuals with urban employee basic medical insurance see the largest decrease in economic burden, followed by individuals with urban resident basic medical Insurance, and those with new rural cooperative medical insurance.     

Subjective Recognition of Emotional Expressions in Face Transplant Patients

One of the most prevalent problems in face transplant patients is an inability to generate facial expression of emotions. The purpose of this study was to measure the subjective recognition of patients’ emotional expressions by other people. We examined facial expression of six emotions in two facial transplant patients (patient A = partial, patient B = full) and one healthy control using video clips to evoke emotions. We recorded target subjects’ facial expressions with a video camera while they were watching the clips. These were then shown to a panel of 130 viewers and rated in terms of degree of emotional expressiveness on a 7-point Likert scale. The scores for emotional expressiveness were higher for the healthy control than they were for patients A and B, and these varied as a function of emotion. The most recognizable emotion was happiness. The least recognizable emotions in Patient A were fear, surprise, and anger. The expressions of Patient B scored lower than those of Patient A and the healthy control. The findings show that partial and full-face transplant patients may have difficulties in generating facial expression of emotions even if they can feel those emotions, and different parts of the face seem to play critical roles in different emotional expressions.     

The Life Course,Cohort Dynamics,and International Differences in Aging Trajectories

In recent years, population health research has focused on understanding the determinants of later-life health. Two strands of that work have focused on (1) international comparisons of later-life health and (2) assessing the early-life origins of disease and disability and the importance of life course processes. However, the less frequently examined intersection of these approaches remains an important frontier. The present study contributes to the integration of these approaches. We use the Health and Retirement Study family of data sets and a cohort dynamic approach to compare functional health trajectories across 12 high-income countries and to examine the role of life course processes and cohort dynamics in contributing to variation in those trajectories. We find substantial international variation in functional health trajectories and an important role of cohort dynamics in generating that variation, with younger cohorts often less healthy at comparable ages than the older cohorts they are replacing. We further find evidence of heterogeneous effects of life course processes on health trajectories. The results have important implications for future trends in morbidity and mortality as well as public policy.     

Heterogeneous climate effects on human migration in Indonesia

We examine the effect of anomalous temperatures, rainfall levels, and monsoon timing on migration outcomes in Indonesia. Using panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey and high-resolution climate data, we assess whether intra- and inter-province moves are used as a response to climatic shocks. We evaluate the relative importance of temperature, rainfall, and monsoon timing for migration. Only temperature and monsoon timing have significant effects, and these do not operate in the direction commonly assumed. Estimated effects vary according to individuals’ gender, membership in a farm household, and location. We also analyze climate effects on sources of household income, which highlights the multi-phasic nature of household responses. Results undermine narratives of a uniform global migratory response to climate change and highlight the heterogeneous use of migration as a response to such changes. By extending previous research on environmentally induced migration in Indonesia, we also highlight the sensitivity of estimates to alternative climate and migration measures.