Measures of accessibility as social indicators: A note

Although accessibility to jobs, services and amenities is an important component of the quality of life, it is rarely articulated in operational definitions of the concept. This note stresses the importance of physical accessibility to social well-being in cities, and outlines and reviews several measures which could be used to reflect territorial variations in accessibility to specific ‘goods’. One measure-a modified version of the gravity model-is elaborated in detail, and its utility as a social indicator is illustrated using the example of accessibility to primary medical care in Edinburgh, Scotland.     

The Evolving and Complementary Impacts of Transportation Infrastructures on Population and Employment Change in the United States, 1970–2010

Transportation infrastructures play an essential role in influencing population and employment change. While railroads, highways, and airports were constructed in different time periods, now they complement each other in terms of providing accessibility. This study uses county-level data to examine the impacts of the three forms of transportation infrastructure on population and employment change in the continental United States from 1970 to 2010. The findings suggest that transportation infrastructures play evolving but complementary roles in affecting population and employment change during the study period: railroads act as a distributive factor, highways take a facilitator role, and airports behave like growth poles. Diversification of the roles indicates that transportation infrastructures have evolved from a pure growth factor to an essential multifaceted development element of human society.     

Creative Class Concentrations in Shanghai,China: What is the Role of Neighborhood Social Tolerance and Life Quality Supportive Conditions?

Creative class refers to the demographic segment composed of intellectuals, knowledge intensive workers and artists in different fields. Creative class is of essential social significance in that its members are capable of booming regional economy through innovation. Rather few studies have empirically examined the neighborhood social determinants of intra-urban creative class concentrations (CCCs), especially in the developing countries. Using the case of Shanghai city in China, this paper characterizes the CCCs in relation to social tolerance and life quality supportive conditions (LQSCs) at district level. Data for CCCs are collected from Shanghai’s Population Census (2010) at the district level. A set of social diversity indices (ethnic, education, income, marriage status, and birth place) are used as proxy for tolerance and LQSCs are described by a set of indicators from 8 domains (job chance, medical care, educational facilities, commutation, food resources, housing, leisure, and natural amenities). Multivariable linear regression is employed to identify the determinants of CCCs. Results show that both neighborhood social tolerance and LQSCs have significant influences on different categories of CCCs. In particular, creative class is attracted by the neighborhoods that are open and welcoming to the outsiders. In addition, creative class emphasizes accessible medical care, traveling convenience, elementary education institution, great housing choices, and more natural amenities in their neighborhood. The variance decomposition method demonstrates that neighborhood LQSC determinants are more important for the intellectuals, knowledge workers and total CCCs. For the artists, the neighborhood social tolerance determinants are more influential. Our study generates a set of neighborhood social indicators to understand the intra-urban CCCs.     

Neighborhood Social Disadvantage and Bicycling Behavior: A Big Data-Spatial Approach Based on Social Indicators

Social Indicators Research - Characterizing the travel behavior of disadvantaged neighborhoods is of significance for social inequality elimination and public well-being promotion. However, rather...     

Does Intergenerational Educational Mobility Shape the Well-Being of Young Europeans? Evidence from the European Social Survey

The level of accessibility to basic services is an important issue because it is closely related to social inclusion and social capital, key aspects of societal well-being. There is a large and growing literature on access to health care in an era of dwindling public resources due to recent economic downturns. Health care is an essential service, but it is not the only basic service. The literature on access to basic services including, but not limited to, health care is relatively small. The paper aims at contributing to the literature by providing a new index to measure and monitor household accessibility to basic services. A study of Italian regions is presented. It is shown that northern regions have more accessible basic services than central, southern and island regions. A longitudinal comparison has been performed. The results are very worrying because show that policy makers have failed in reducing regional (and in particular north–south) disparities in basic service accessibility. Measuring and monitoring the level of accessibility is central for an adequate provision of basic services and for exploring how the delivery of basic services in the most problematic regions can be improved.     

Der gesellschaftliche Umgang mit menschlicher Hilfsbedürftigkeit

Gender relationships are based on social constructions of dependence and independence. Dependence is a status concerning care receivers as well as care givers. Even after years of formal education care work is not yet seen as a profession because of its traditional background in Christian charity and unpaid tasks of women in the family. In the centre of public attention so far are the costs of caring, not the achievements. The critique of the welfare state leads to reductions of benefits and services and to privatisation. Thereby care work becomes a public issue. Considerations of justice can no longer be restricted to the public sphere. Instead, it becomes evident that the private sphere, where a significant part of care takes place, needs to be included in a democratic discourse on justice. There must also be included the discourse on the concept of work, so far often restricted to paid employment as well as the growing internationality of personal services in the sphere of shadow work.     

基于分层线性模型的流动人口社会融合影响因素研究

根据2012年全国流动人口动态监测结果和反映31个省市基本公共服务均等化的指标数据,建立分层线性模型从流动人口个体和省级层面考察影响流动人口社会融合的影响因素和作用程度的大小。研究发现,流动人口的社会融合不仅与个人因素有关,而且还受地区基本公共服务差异化的影响。个体层面从户口性质、就业状况、医疗保险、自我融入意愿、本地人接受程度、收入情况与住房条件解释流动人口社会融合差异的63?12％;省级层面从基础教育、医疗卫生、公共就业及基本社会保障解释流动人口社会融合的差异为36?83％。最后从政府、公民社会参与角度出发,提出促进流动人口社会融合的措施和建议。     

Stressors,Coping Resources,Functioning, and Role Limitations Among Older Korean Immigrants: Gender Differences

This study explored the differential impacts of stressors and coping resources on the functioning and roles of 246 older Korean immigrant men and women. Older Korean immigrant women were significantly more likely than men to have acculturation and socioeconomic stressors, physical/social functioning problems, and role limitations. English-language barriers and lack of transportation were significantly related to lower functioning and higher role limitations of older Korean women compared to those of older men. Providing social and health care services with bilingual and transportation services to older Korean immigrant women is recommended to increase their physical/social functioning and role performance.     

Poverty,Inequality and Deprivation in South Africa: An Analysis of the 1993 SALDRU Survey

This paper analyses poverty and inequality in South Africa based on data from a comprehensive multi-purpose household survey undertaken in 1993 to provide baseline statistics on poverty and its determinants to the new government. The paper shows that South Africa has among the highest levels of income inequality in the world and compares poorly in most social indicators to countries with similar income levels. Much of the poverty in the country is a direct result of apartheid policies that denied equal access to education, employment, services, and resources to the black population of the country. As a result, poverty has a very strong racial dimension with poverty concentrated among the African population. In addition, poverty is much higher in rural areas, and particularly high in the former homelands. Poverty among female-headed households and among children is also higher than average. Moreover, poverty is closely related to poor education and lack of employment. The poor suffer from lack of access to education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, transport, are heavily indebted, have little access to productive resources, and are heavily dependent on remittances and social transfers, particularly social pensions and disability grants. The paper uses an income-based definition of poverty for most of the analysis. In addition, it develops a broad-based index of deprivation including income, employment, wealth, access to services, health, education, and perceptions of satisfaction as its components. While on average the two indicators correspond fairly closely, the income poverty measure misses a considerable number of people who are severely deprived in many of the non-income measures of well-being. This group of severely deprived not identified by the income poverty measure consists predominantly of Africans living in rural areas, concentrated particularly in the province of KwaZulu/Natal.     

Sequential Neighborhood Effects: The Effect of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on Children’s Reading and Math Test Scores

Prior research has suggested that children living in a disadvantaged neighborhood have lower achievement test scores, but these studies typically have not estimated causal effects that account for neighborhood choice. Recent studies used propensity score methods to account for the endogeneity of neighborhood exposures, comparing disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged neighborhoods. We develop an alternative propensity function approach in which cumulative neighborhood effects are modeled as a continuous treatment variable. This approach offers several advantages. We use our approach to examine the cumulative effects of neighborhood disadvantage on reading and math test scores in Los Angeles. Our substantive results indicate that recency of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods may be more important than average exposure for children’s test scores. We conclude that studies of child development should consider both average cumulative neighborhood exposure and the timing of this exposure.     

Combining vertical service with horizontal service to promote family planning]

How Bazhong County of Sechuan Province, China, carries out family planning through a combination of what are termed vertical and horizontal services is described. Vertical service refers to assistance such as premarital education, prenatal hygiene, child health care, and family planning, while horizontal service refers to household assistance for married women. Premarital education is designed to help young people acquire sufficent knowledge about family planning, hygiene, and eugenics, and stresses the disadvantages involved in marriages between close relatives. Prenatal hygiene provides safe and convenient medical accommodations for delivery of the child as well as maternal care. Child health services assure that the best facilities are to be made available for physical examinations, vaccinations, and medical treatment. The family planning program involves comprehensive measures such as distribution of contraceptives and safe sterilization. In addition, the county provides medical assistance for couples unable to have children. Horizontal service providing household assistance for married women promotes scientific farming (e.g., how to use fertilizer), helps people increase their income by teaching them skills, and provides social services to improve life style and education. These vertical and horizontal services have brought about substantial improvements in the standard of living, family harmony, and population control.     

Decent Living Standards: Material Prerequisites for Human Wellbeing

Children whose parents experience adverse social, economic, or health-related living conditions are more likely to face similar types of disadvantage in their adult life. However, a limitation of many earlier studies is that they do not account for the multidimensionality of the concept of living conditions, and that the child generation’s life courses are targeted as static and independent from the societal context in which they are imbedded. The current investigation addressed these aspects by focusing on the complexity, duration, and timing of disadvantage with regard to how adverse circumstances in the family of origin are associated with trajectories of social, economic, and health-related living conditions across adulthood. We also examined the role of educational attainment for these associations. Analyses were based a Swedish cohort born in 1953 (n = 14,294). We first conducted sequence analysis, followed by hierarchical cluster analysis, to generate ‘outcome profiles’, i.e. trajectories of adult disadvantage. Second, several indicators of adverse circumstances in childhood were analysed by means of multinominal regression analysis, showing the odds of ending up in the different trajectories. The results indicated that individuals who grew up under adverse conditions were more likely to experience disadvantaged social, economic, and health-related trajectories. This was particularly the case for trajectories characterised by a high degree of complexity, i.e. coexisting disadvantages, and—among men only—by a longer duration of disadvantage. Educational attainment was identified as a powerful mediator, suggesting that efforts to increase equal educational opportunity may be a way of reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.     

Area Social Deprivation and Public Health: Analyzing the Spatial Non-stationary Associations Using Geographically Weighed Regression

The prevalence of non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) worldwide poses an alarming threat to public health. Recent literature has embraced the opinion that incorporating the social factors should advance the understanding of NCDs prevalence. In this context, examining the NCDs prevalence in association with area social deprivation should provide critical implications for coping with public health risks. However, few empirical studies have examined this specific issue, especially in the developing countries. Using the principal component analysis, an area social deprivation index (ASDI) is established for the Shenzhen city (China) by integrating ten indicators from four dimensions: education, housing, socially disadvantaged population, and economically disadvantaged population. The geographically weighted regression (GWR) is employed to analyze the associations between ASDI and the incidence rate of three prevalent NCDs at district scale. Spatial non-stationary relationships are identified for the three diseases. More specifically, prevalence of the three diseases is all positively correlated with the ASDI. Strength of the associations presents the geography that it generally decreases from the central city to the suburb. These findings suggest that greater possibility of NCDs prevalence would be expected in districts with higher social deprivation. Besides, the impact of social deprivation on NCDs prevalence is much stronger in the central city. The spatial stationarity can facilitate the formulation of location-specific preventive measurements. This paper is believed to provide an innovative insight for social indicators research.     

中国农村医疗保障路在何方

在中国农村合作医疗日趋衰退 ,自费医疗再次在我国农村占主导地位的情况下 ,针对农村的实际情况及其医疗状况呈现的矛盾特殊性 ,提出整改乡村医疗机构 ,高效利用有限的农村医疗福利资源 ,平抑药价 ,以此解决农民的预防保健及小病、小伤问题 ;开展社会医疗互助 ,增强农民共同抵御大病风险的能力 ;鼓励商业医疗保险在农村的发展 ,满足农民多层次的医疗需求 ,共建农村医疗保障体系     

The Quality of the Urban Environment Around Public Housing Buildings in Montréal: An Objective Approach Based on GIS and Multivariate Statistical Analysis

The question of the “insertion” in space of public housing into the surrounding urban environment is not new. It has often been examined from the perspective of the social environment, but more rarely from that of the physical environment and the accessibility of public and private services and facilities. To qualify the immediate urban environment around Montréal’s public housing buildings in its complexity, we are proposing a methodological approach based on the use of several spatial databases in GIS: (1) the Montréal public housing database, (2) individual census data for the Montréal CMA, (3) a satellite image, (4) a land use map, and (5) location data on a series of public and private services and facilities. Use of these spatial data enables us to identify various combinations of advantages and disadvantages within the urban living environment in which Montréal’s public housing buildings have been located, according to three dimensions: the social environment, the physical environment, and the accessibility of services and facilities. Our final results show that only a small proportion of public housing tenants (7%) live in residual spaces, that is, in quite unattractive areas of the city which combine a number of urban disadvantages: a degraded physical environment, a high level of social deprivation, and few or no services and facilities.

Subjective Indicators in the Health Sector and Their Usefulness in Policy Making

A considerable literature produced in the field of social sciences focused in the last 20 years on the importance of subjective indicators of wellbeing as an element of great significance in the analysis of public policies and quality of services, in addition to objective indicators. The health sector is characterized by a particular propensity and special consideration of the role of patients and other persons involved in the care process (family, doctors, nurses, etc.), and therefore of subjective elements. Since the end of the 1980s several studies considered the incongruences between health demand and health service supply and introduced in the debate the need to produce better evaluation methodologies, based on the interaction between objective an subjective data. The consequence was that subjective assessment by users and operators is now an integral part of any health service evaluation activity. The paper shows the evolution of scientific approaches to health services assessment, and the nature of subjective indicators mostly utilized in recent Italian experiences. Special attention is dedicated to an interesting attempt to enlarge the evaluation approach, aim of which is to contribute to the assessment of the social impact of administrative actions and public services stimulating the contribution of social parties and independent experts and involving public authorities and policy-makers.     

Does Female Disadvantage Mean Lower Access to Food?

The literature on gender differentials in nutrition demonstrates that the calorie intake of females is generally as adequate as that of males at all ages. Female disadvantage in micronutrient intake is, however, frequent. Pregnant and lactating women are disadvantaged relative to both men and other women. In South Asia there is evidence that boys are advantaged over girls in food intake at some ages, but the evidence for male advantage in access to health care is far stronger. The authors argue that nutrition interventions are best targeted when the incidence of female disadvantage is better understood and, similarly, that interventions to improve women's status should be focused on objectives other than calorie intake in most communities. However, standards for measuring adequacy incorporate norms for female body size and physical activity that may uncritically accept the notion that females are more physically passive. Maintaining adequacy by these standards could perpetuate low levels of female functioning.     

Health Care Needs and Care Utilization Among Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender Populations in New Jersey

The purpose of this study was to explore prevalent health issues, perceived barriers to seeking health care, and utilization of health care among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations in New Jersey. A cross-sectional online survey was administered to 438 self-identified LGBT people. Results identified health needs, which included management of chronic diseases, preventive care for risky behaviors, mental health issues, and issues related to interpersonal violence. Barriers to seeking health care included scarceness of health professionals competent in LGBT health, inadequate health insurance coverage and lack of personal finances, and widely dispersed LGBT inclusive practices making transportation difficult. There is a need for better preparation of health care professionals who care for LGBT patients, to strengthen social services to improve access and for better integration of medical and social services.     

Children in large families

A summary was provided of issues presented by Dr. Cynthia Lloyd in her chapter on investing in children from the 1994 volume "Population and Development: Old Debates, New Conclusions." Children in large families may miss the opportunities offered in a modernizing society. The possibilities for adverse consequences because of a large size of families include a smaller share of resources (time, income, and/or nutrition) among family members, limited access to public resources (health care and education), unequal distribution of resources among family members, and gender defined roles. Dr. Lloyd's review of the literature exposed the lack of emphasis on the impact of opportunity, equity, and intergenerational transfers on child welfare. Children's smaller share of resources had less impact on child welfare. Later-born and unwanted children were particularly vulnerable in large families. Unwanted children were usually later born or girls. The lack of investments in girl's education not only affected the limited earning power and opportunity to escape from gender restricting roles but also contributed to the perpetuation of the cycle of high fertility and gender discrimination. Family decisions about fertility and investments in children's education and nutrition can not be separated from the social context of culture, class, social custom, and level of socioeconomic development. Disadvantage is not assured in large families, but statistically more probable. Fewer children are more likely to be wanted and to receive better care. Societies should provide high quality family planning services, safe abortion services, and enforcement of primary school education requirements. Measures need to be adopted for promotion of schooling for girls that is sensitive to cultural norms. Laws must protect children's rights to economic support from both biological parents. Gender discrimination against women must be eliminated.