Barriers to play: accounting for non-participation in digital game play

Playing a digital game is considered to be a leisure activity; therefore playing or not playing is typically viewed as an autonomous choice motivated by individual preferences for how one spends their time not occupied by other obligations. While a growing body of interventionist literature documents new entry points for girls and women into playing or making games, investigations are primarily focused on joining rather than why someone might ultimately leave. To address this gap whereby the study of former and non-players remains under explored, I bring together two disparate areas of academic investigation: leisure studies, specifically the study of barriers and access to leisure spaces, and critical feminist games scholarship. Taken together, these two areas of investigation provide a framework to account for why women might leave a game or never begin playing in the first place. Rather than assuming that playing or not playing is exclusively about choice or interest, I argue that there is much to be learned by asking women about what games they do not play and their reasons for quitting or never purchasing or downloading a particular game in the first place.     

1990 census round: meeting users' needs is seen as key to successful dissemination

"Dissemination and marketing of census products were...major topics at the Thirteenth Population Census Conference of census directors from the Asian-Pacific region, held in Honolulu in December 1990. Drawing upon papers presented at the conference,...this article describes technological developments and marketing techniques being used in the region to increase the demand for census information."     

Researching to Transgress: The Need for Critical Feminism in Gerontology

SUMMARY

This article defines “empowering research and argues the need for a critical gerontology” informed by feminist and postmodern theories which focus on the connections between language, self, and social action. The author calls for feminist gerontology which evokes critical consciousness on the part of the researcher and participants. Feminist gerontologists are encouraged to engage in self-reflection and self-critique in regards to their own attitudes toward aging and to include personal criticism in their scholarly writings. Examples of feminist research on aging which illustrate these characteristics are provided.     

Support for new mothers and fertility in the United Kingdom: Not all support is equal in the decision to have a second child

Low fertility across Europe highlights the need to understand reproductive decisions in high-income countries better. Availability of support may be one factor influencing reproductive decisions, though within high-income countries availability varies between environments, including socio-economic environments. We test whether receiving higher levels of support, from different sources (informal and formal) and of different types (practical and emotional), is positively correlated with second births in the United Kingdom (UK) Millennium Cohort Study, and whether these relationships differ by socio-economic position (SEP). Our hypothesis is only partially supported: receiving emotional support correlates with higher likelihood of second birth, but the opposite is true for practical support. Availability of different types of support varies across SEP, but relationships between support and fertility are similar, with one exception: kin-provided childcare increases the likelihood of birth only among lower-SEP women. Our results highlight that not all support is equal in the decision to have a second child.     

Inverse Projection and Back Projection: A Critical Appraisal,and Comparative Results for England, 1539 to 1871

Inverse projection and back projection are two methods for exploiting long historical series of births and deaths to produce estimates of population size and age structure, net migration, and vital rates. While inverse projection requires extraneous information on population size at scattered dates, back projection does not. In this paper I argue that back projection attempts an impossible task, and can only arbitrarily select one demographic past from among an infinite set of equally plausible and acceptable ones, which are also consistent with the input data. Inverse projection, on the other hand, is more modest in its goal, but is robust and straightforward. In an important and outstanding book, Wrigley and Schofield use back projection to reconstruct English demographic history from 1539 to 1871. In this paper, inverse projection is used to replicate their reconstruction under assumptions that are in important respects weaker, although these estimates are contingent on independent population size estimates for 1541 and 1696. The results buttress Wrigley and Schofield's reconstruction. However, it is argued that their data and reconstruction cannot offer independent evidence for the general levels of population before the mid-eighteenth century; rather, they help us to interpolate among benchmarks for which we have extraneous evidence, and contingent on these benchmarks, fill in the rich details of the demographic past.     

A practical approach to using Multiple-Race response data: A bridging method for publicuse microdata

Revised federal policies require that multiple-race responses be allowed in all federal data collection efforts, but many researchers find the multitude of race categories and variables very difficult to use. Important comparability issues also interfere with using multiple-race data in analyses of multiple data sets and/or several points in time. These difficulties have, in effect, discouraged the use of the new data on race. We present a practical method for incorporating multiple-race respondents into analyses that use public-use microdata. Our method is a modification of the regression method developed by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which uses multiple-race respondents' specific combination of races, as well as other individual-level and contextual characteristics, to predict the respondents 'preferred single race. In this paper we (1) apply the NCHS-generated regression coefficients to public-use microdata with limited geographic information; and (2) provide a downloadable computer program with which researchers can apply this practical and preferable method for including multiple-race respondents in a wide variety of analyses.