Women’s Strategic Responses to Intimate Partner Violence: A Study in a Rural Community of Bangladesh

The objective of this study was to explore women’s strategic responses to physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Twenty women from a rural area of the Narshingdi district in the Dhaka division of Bangladesh who experienced physical violence at home participated in the study. Development of the interview protocol and data analysis were carried out by applying the consensual qualitative research (CQR) method. The results showed that several themes, such as women’s responses to intimate partner violence, arose from the data. First, coping strategies to pre‐violent events included three themes: (i) leaving the scene; (ii) trying to divert attention; and (iii) preparing to protest. Women’s strategic responses to violent events consisted of four themes: (i) leaving the scene; (ii) remaining silent or no giving response; (iii) seeking help from others; and (iv) protesting against the violence. Lastly, women’s strategic responses to post‐violent events consisted of three themes: (i) temporary abstinence; (ii) verbally abusive behavior to family members; and (iii) going to the parental home. Given the findings of this study, we conclude by suggesting that more work is needed to better understand effective strategies and to draw women to institutional services to prevent violence to a greater extent.     

Challenging Nuclear: Antinuclear Movements in Postauthoritarian Indonesia

In mid-2006, the Indonesian government announced a plan to build nuclear power plants geared towards meeting soaring demands for energy in the country. After prolonged procrastination, the government is determined that time is ripe for Indonesia to go nuclear. While discussions on adopting nuclear power are steadily gaining currency among high officials and political elites, it is simultaneously being contested by an antinuclear alliance consisting of multiple groups that form an organized resistance. The organized resistance is primarily driven by suspicions that the current government does not possess the capacity to handle high-risk technology. Using combined approaches of STS and social movement studies, the paper discusses the contestation of nuclear risk discourses and how lack of trust in the government has led to the ascendancy of antinuclear movements. In situating the paper within postauthoritarian Indonesia, this paper observes how shifts towards democratic change has allowed a network of civil society groups to organize resistance against nuclear power both at the national and local levels. The paper also highlights the way in which civic epistemology guides antinuclear groups to produce popular risk assessments that confront scientific calculations of nuclear risk. Lastly, it presents a vignette of how civil society groups mobilize local resources to explore alternative energy systems that ultimately undermine the government’s nuclear ambitions.     

On the Failure Probability of Used Coherent Systems

In analyzing the lifetime properties of a coherent system, the concept of “signature” is a useful tool. Let T be the lifetime of a coherent system having n iid components. The signature of the system is a probability vector s=(s₁, s₂, …, s_n), such that s_i=P(T=X_i:n), where, X_i:n, i=1, 2, …, n denote the ordered lifetimes of the components. In this note, we assume that the system is working at time t>0. We consider the conditional signature of the system as a vector in which the ith element is defined as p_i(t)=P(T=X_i:n|T>t) and investigate its properties as a function of time.     

Revolution,war and modernization: Population policy and fertility change in Iran

Fertility trends in Iran over recent decades can be plausibly related to a number of causal factors. Population policy shifts were quite marked, and were related to political upheaval and war, which influenced both official policy and popular perceptions of the nation’s need for children. A range of developmental factors were also important. The key fertility trends to be explained include the rise to an exceptionally high level in the early 1980s (a TFR of just below 7), and the speed of the subsequent decline to a TFR of about 2.7 in 1996. As well as estimating the proximate determinants of these trends, the paper sets them in their political and developmental context. Iran’s fertility trends are then compared with those of Islamic countries of North Africa and West Asia to gain additional insights into possible causal factors. An adequate explanation of fertility change in Iran needs to draw on elements of a number of theories of fertility transition.     

Examination of Interest Inventories Based on Roe's Classification

This article describes the adaptation of two interest inventories translated into English, based on Roe's (1956) classification of occupations. In an analysis based on the responses of 181 participants, the items followed the 6 rules for interest inventory items formulated by Meir and Gati (1981). The Cronbach alpha reliability of the 8 field scores in the 2 inventories ranged between .73 and .91. A Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) on 8 field scores on the Ramak, 8 field scores on the Courses and 6 personality type scores on Holland's (1973) Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) supported the construct validity of the inventories.     

Robust surface estimation in multi-response multistage statistical optimization problems

As the ordinary least squares (OLS) method is very sensitive to outliers as well as to correlated responses, a robust coefficient estimation method is proposed in this paper for multi-response surfaces in multistage processes based on M-estimators. In this approach, experimental designs are used in which the intermediate response variables may act as covariates in the next stages. The performances of both the ordinary multivariate OLS and the proposed robust multi-response surface approach are analyzed and compared through extensive simulation experiments. Sum of the squared errors in estimating the regression coefficients reveals the efficiency of the proposed robust approach.     

Leveraging risk assessment for foodborne outbreak investigations: The Quantitative Risk Assessment-Epidemic Curve Prediction Model

Root cause analysis can be used in foodborne illness outbreak investigations to determine the underlying causes of an outbreak and to help identify actions that could be taken to prevent future outbreaks. We developed a new tool, the Quantitative Risk Assessment-Epidemic Curve Prediction Model (QRA-EC), to assist with these goals and applied it to a case study to investigate and illustrate the utility of leveraging quantitative risk assessment to provide unique insights for foodborne illness outbreak root cause analysis. We used a 2019 Salmonella outbreak linked to melons as a case study to demonstrate the utility of this model (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2019). The model was used to evaluate the impact of various root cause hypotheses (representing different contamination sources and food safety system failures in the melon supply chain) on the predicted number and timeline of illnesses. The predicted number of illnesses varied by contamination source and was strongly impacted by the prevalence and level of Salmonella contamination on the surface/inside of whole melons and inside contamination niches on equipment surfaces. The timeline of illnesses was most strongly impacted by equipment sanitation efficacy for contamination niches. Evaluations of a wide range of scenarios representing various potential root causes enabled us to identify which hypotheses, were likely to result in an outbreak of similar size and illness timeline to the 2019 Salmonella melon outbreak. The QRA-EC framework can be adapted to accommodate any food–pathogen pairs to provide insights for foodborne outbreak investigations.     

The Fundamental Endogeneity of Survey-Based Cultural Dimension

Survey-based cultural dimensions are used extensively in empirical analysis as the primary source of quantitative cultural scores. However, survey-based cultural dimensions have a significant endogeneity problem. The individuals responding to the surveys are affected by their current socioeconomic condition and environment (social mood), meaning that the outcomes are a mixture of culture and current socioeconomic effects. The World Value Survey (WVS) waves provided empirical support for the endogeneity problem. Our empirical findings show that in-country scores frequently change between waves. In addition, the countries in the WVS change their ranking between waves; so, even the relative position held by a country is questionable when measured along survey-based cultural dimensions. This finding contrasts with the idea that cultural values are sticky. We provide an alternative method for capturing cultural dimensions based on the grammatical structures of languages that capture ancestral culture with no fear of the current socioeconomics pollution of the measure.