Exploring Social and Geographical Trajectories of Latin Americans in Sweden

Close to 20 percent of the Swedish population are of immigrant origin; one in eight is foreign‐born. About 45 percent of all immigrants originate from outside Europe and most of these have entered the country as refugees or relatives of refugees. Issues connected to immigration, including the number of immigrants, settlement patterns and level of social integration of ethnic minorities, have been much discussed in Sweden in recent decades. This paper focuses on the integration of Latin American immigrants in Sweden. It compares the level of integration – measured as educational achievement, labour market participation, income and housing – experienced by first and second generation migrants. I use register information allowing me to include all 1^st and 2^nd generation Latin Americans that have lived in Sweden between 1990 and 2006 (in total 127,000 individuals). Data are longitudinal, which means that individuals can be followed over time. I make use of the longitudinal material in order to study changes in residential patterns and in attempts to explain educational and employment outcomes for second generation Latin Americans. The general conclusion of the paper is that in terms of integration, LAC immigrants have an intermediate position compared to other immigrant categories; they are often better off than people from Africa and the Middle East but clearly below the level experienced by some other migrants, especially those from Western Europe. This cannot be explained by level of education. The average level of education is high for first generation immigrants from LA countries. For many people, the level of labour market participation and income increase over time but one important result of this analysis is that second generation Latin Americans seem to do less well in Sweden compared to many other second generation migrants.     

Life Experiences and Vulnerabilities of Homeless Women: A Comparison of Women Unaccompanied Versus Accompanied by Minor Children, and Correlates with Children's Emotional Distress

The histories and service needs of 2 groups of homeless women, those unaccompanied by minor children (n = 46) and those accompanied by minor children (n = 22), were compared, on the basis of their responses to a biennial survey of homeless people in a midsize city in the southeast United States. Mothers of children aged 2–10 also completed a measure of stress symptoms for their children (n = 20). Irrespective of family status group, problems such as substance abuse, history of mental illness, health problems, chronicity of homelessness, and crime victimization tended to cluster together. The findings also suggest that declining and/or inadequate levels of public benefits, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Medicaid-funded health care in particular, have adversely affected the 2 groups, particularly families with children. The young children in this sample experienced elevated levels of stress, and significant associations were found between children's stress levels and certain risk factors of their mothers. Implications for service delivery are discussed.     

THE DISTRIBUTION SECTOR AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: ARE THERE PATTERNS? YES

Using an increasing returns specification for distribution, an inverted U pattern between the share of distribution in gross domestic product and the level of development is shown to arise. A cross-section time-series data set is constructed and merged with one used to analyze the service sector. In contrast to the rising pattern found for services, an average time-series relation that exhibits an inverted U pattern is established. The empirical results are robust, for example, to choice of functional form and country and time period coverage. A similar pattern is found in the average cross-section (country) relation between distribution and development.     

The Politics of Integration—new Sites for Old Practices?

Public education authorities throughout the Australian States and Territories have moved towards the development of policies and programmes to integrate students considered disabled into regular classrooms. The implementation of policy frequently is reduced to disputation over resources which, it is argued, will facilitate integration. This paper contends that such debates sustain the flawed notion that integration is simply a technical issue to be achieved through deployment of special equipment and personnel to regular schools, recommending a further consideration of the contribution of pedagogy, curriculum and school organisation to disabling or enabling educational programmes.     

Medicine on the line? Computer‐mediated social support and advice for people with diabetes

The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of medical and welfare issues and ostensibly devoted to the mutual social support of participating members, has raised the potential for the development of new forms of 'virtual' health care. This article critically analyses the use by people with diabetes of one such Usenet group. It seeks to establish, first, the extent to which such a site provides some demonstrable measure of social support to its participants. This is approached by undertaking a structural analysis of the site to identify the extent of usage, and the nature of supporting interventions using a fivefold classification (instrumental, informational, esteem and social companionship and other). Second, the article attempts to identify any disparity between the lay health-knowledge in evidence and biomedical opinions proffered by the use of a panel of consultant diabetiologists. The results of the analysis suggest that the diabetes newsgroup provides an example of an active forum for largely well-informed participants who routinely use the media as an aid to the reflexive management of their medical condition. It also raises the prospect of a renegotiated relationship between medical knowledge and lay experience based upon shared learning     

Three-level main-effects designs exploiting prior information about model uncertainty

To explore the projection efficiency of a design, Tsai, et al [2000. Projective three-level main effects designs robust to model uncertainty. Biometrika 87, 467–475] introduced the Q criterion to compare three-level main-effects designs for quantitative factors that allow the consideration of interactions in addition to main effects. In this paper, we extend their method and focus on the case in which experimenters have some prior knowledge, in advance of running the experiment, about the probabilities of effects being non-negligible. A criterion which incorporates experimenters’ prior beliefs about the importance of each effect is introduced to compare orthogonal, or nearly orthogonal, main effects designs with robustness to interactions as a secondary consideration. We show that this criterion, exploiting prior information about model uncertainty, can lead to more appropriate designs reflecting experimenters’ prior beliefs.     

Residential Remittances and Food Security in the Upper West Region of Ghana

In recent years, out migration from the Upper West Region to the southern belt of Ghana for farming has become commonplace. The natural question that has arisen is: what is the potential impact of remittances from this migration pattern on food security in the region? Using multivariate ordered logistic regression this study assesses the linkage between remittances and household food security (derived using the HFIAS) among urban and rural households (n=1,438) in the region. The findings show that urban remittance‐receiving households and rural remittance and non‐remittance receiving households were more likely (OR=2.44, p<0.05; OR=2.46, p<0.001; and OR=1.49, p<0.1, respectively) to report being more severely food‐insecure than urban non‐remittance receiving households. The findings demonstrate that household strategies such as migration and remittances on their own are not sufficient to ameliorate the precarious food insecurity situation of the region. The study calls for development of alternative livelihoods in the region.     

How do people differentiate between jobs: and how do they define a good job?

Employed individuals from a range of jobs (n=18) were interviewed using a repertory grid technique, to explore the criteria they used to distinguish between different jobs. The concepts of 'a good job' and 'a job good for health' were also discussed. Interactions with others and the job itself were the most commonly used criteria and were also the most common features of a 'good job'. Pay and security were mentioned frequently but were less important when comparing jobs and when defining a 'good job'. Physical activity was rarely associated by interviewees with a 'good job' but was frequently associated with a 'job good for health'. A comprehensive definition of a 'good job' needs to take all these factors into account.