The satisfaction of Finnish adoptive parents with statutory pre-adoption counselling in inter-country adoptions

We examined how satisfied Finnish adoptive parents were with statutory pre-adoption counselling in inter-country adoptions. The data were collected through the Finnish Adoption Study using a retrospective survey measuring satisfaction with received pre-adoption counselling. All adoptive parents with a child under the age of 18, adopted from abroad between the years 1990 and 2007, were included. The sample of the study comprised parents of 1451 children and a total response rate of 55.7% was achieved. The data consisted of self-scored reports of satisfaction as well as open answer questions. Parent satisfaction and associated variables were analysed using chi-square and multiple logistic regression. Of the respondents, 81.7% reported satisfaction with the pre-adoption counselling they had received. The level of satisfaction was stable over time and did not differ according to service provider, whereas family type and sending country were associated with satisfaction. However the explanations for satisfaction were different for those services provided in units specialized in adoption and for those provided by municipal child protection services. The components found to explain satisfaction and dissatisfaction were experience, adoption knowledge, and attitude of the social worker, service accessibility and availability issues, as well as the content of the pre-adoption counselling offered.     

Flexible modelling of simultaneously interval censored and truncated time‐to‐event data

This paper deals with the analysis of data from a HET‐CAM^VT experiment. From a statistical perspective, such data yield many challenges. First of all, the data are typically time‐to‐event like data, which are at the same time interval censored and right truncated. In addition, one has to cope with overdispersion as well as clustering. Traditional analysis approaches ignore overdispersion and clustering and summarize the data into a continuous score that can be analysed using simple linear models. In this paper, a novel combined frailty model is developed that simultaneously captures all of the aforementioned statistical challenges posed by the data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Operative strategies of HLB's scouts of a citrus property within the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil

This research aimed to study the activity of the HLB's scouts, workers whose function is to identify symptomatic plants, in order to understand the physical constraints, cognitive and organizational involved in accomplishing the task, characterizing the operative approach used to identify diseased plants, and to elucidate what aspects hinder the identification of symptoms. The method adopted for the research was the Ergonomic Analysis of Work--EAW [6]. The results, after validation with the operators and management, allowed understanding the complex relationships between the physical, cognitive and organizational aspects present on activity. Major difficulties were observed mainly in relation to the disposal of the scouts on the platforms and in relation to working hours, at the beginning and end of the journey. Important findings have highlighted strategies, unknown by the organization, used by scouts to locate candidates' trees to the fine analysis of investigation of symptoms. In conclusion, the analysis enable to understand the constraints and find technical and organizational solutions to the survey work on citrus groves as well as it showed signs and symptoms not investigated yet or rarely considered by researchers involved on searches aimed at increasing the ability to diagnose the disease in the field.     

The specter of failure: rendering Afghan women as sites of precarity in empowerment regimes

This article analyzes how the category of “Afghan women” and discourses of precarity intersect within the women’s empowerment regime in Afghanistan. By examining an NGO that seeks to empower women through writing, I argue that staff members draw upon precarity as a go-to logic to describe the state of Afghan women writers’ successes under conditions of insecurity and limited communication. Specifically, it is writers’ desires to subvert their social orders and to carve out their own futures that staff members and writing coordinators frame as subject to potential destruction. While recent work has highlighted the importance of recognizing the precarious lifeworlds of vulnerable populations, this article points to the potential implications of a hyper-recognition of precarity – namely, the obscuring of the complexities of individual women’s past and present realities. Through analyzing the pedagogies of one empowerment NGO working with women in a post-9/11 Afghanistan, I show how the logic of precarity is concerned with the vulnerability of women’s desires and sentiments, rather than their material and political vulnerabilities. It is thus deeply inflected by a historically situated “common sense” about which potentialities and aspirations are inherent to Afghan women.     

Childcare costs and the demand for children—evidence from a nationwide reform

Exploiting the exogenous variation in user fees caused by a Swedish childcare reform, we are able to identify the causal effect of childcare costs on fertility in a context in which childcare enrollment is almost universal, user fees are low, and labor force participation of mothers is very high. Anticipation of a reduction in childcare costs increased the number of first and higher-order births, but only seemed to affect the timing of second births. For families with many children we also find a marginally significant negative income effect on fertility.