Quality of College Life (QCL) of Students: Further Validation of a Measure of Well-being

This paper reports a study designed to further validate a measure of quality of college life (QCL) of university students (Sirgy, Grzeskowiak, Rahtz, Soc Indic Res 80(2), 343–360, 2007). Two studies were conducted: a replication study and an extension study. The replication study involved surveys of 10 different college campuses in different countries. The results of the replication study provided additional nomological (predictive) validation support of the measure based on a theoretical model mapping out the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction with college life. With respect to the extension study, the focus was to further test the nomological validity of the QCL measure by arguing and empirically demonstrating that the consequence of QCL is life satisfaction. The extension study involved a survey of three college campuses in different countries. The results were also supportive of the nomological validity of the QCL measure.     

Economic Growth and Social Cohesion: Evidence from the Organization of Islamic Conference Countries

This study contributes in the literature by investigating the impact of social cohesion on economic growth using a panel data of 44 OIC countries over the period 1986–2010. The study has employed a comprehensive measure of social cohesion that covers a large number of social indicators such as inequality, trust, terrorism, and social conflicts. Our study finds out that the growth effect of social cohesion is positive and significant in the Muslim world. Finding of the study are shown to be robust to different control variables, different specifications, econometric techniques and outliers.     

Regional variation in acceptance of Indonesia's family planning program

Indonesia's family planning program is regarded as a major success.Survey data from 1997 reveal that rates of contraceptive use vary dramatically amongIndonesia's 27 provinces, from a high of 67 percent of ever married women currently using contraceptives in the province of North Sulawesi, to a low of 19 percent current users in East Timor and28 percent in Aceh. This study uses both a quantitative analysis of the 1997 Indonesia Demographic and Health Survey, and a qualitative study carried out in July of 2000 to understand regionalvariation. The study identified a small number of factors that show a clear relation with levels of contraceptive use. Media exposure and education are the strongest and most consistent predictors of levels of contraceptive use, and appear to be the surest strategies for promoting family change. But the study also showed that the process of social change is subjectto culturally and historically specific local factors whose presence and importance is difficult to predict. Our study of regional variation in contraceptive use illustrates the range and complexityof obstacles faced by Indonesia's leaders in attempting to forge a single nation fromsuch a diverse and far-flung population. Although the creation of Indonesia in the space of just half a century is a monumental achievement, the project is clearly not yet complete.     

Integration within a transgender social network and its effect upon members' social and political activity

The purpose of this study is to examine the male to female transgender social networks and how they influence social and political activity. Four Transgender organizations within Northeast Ohio were contacted for this study. Members were asked to complete a questionnaire and to mail it back. Few of the network elements were useful in predicting social and political activity. Network size has a positive effect upon a person's social and political activity, as did meeting attendance. This study suggests the importance of social networks for Trans-people.     

The social structure of social problems in New York state

A comparative study of the 52 upstate New York counties replicated a previous state level study that did a principal components analysis of social problems and attempted to predict them by aspects of social structure. In the New York counties the percent Democrat predicted various welfare measures. Population density predicted health and crime problems, and affluence. When population density was controlled, affluence related only to crimes of property. Contrasting with the state study, political competitiveness (per cent voting) was related to few variables.     

Connectivity and Resilience: A Multidimensional Analysis of Infrastructure Impacts in the Southwestern Amazon

Infrastructure is a worldwide policy priority for national development via regional integration into the global economy. However, economic, ecological and social research draws contrasting conclusions about the consequences of infrastructure. We present a synthetic approach to the study of infrastructure, focusing on a multidimensional treatment of indicators of connectivity and resilience. As our study case, we adopt a tri-national frontier in the southwestern Amazon being integrated by a highway, and use survey data for rural leaders to evaluate the relationship of community connectivity to market towns and social-ecological resilience. The findings show varying relationships among different dimensions of connectivity and resilience, which bear implications regarding indicator approaches to the study of infrastructure impacts.     

Gender as a Moderator of the Relation Among Social Support Functions and Life Satisfaction in Older Malaysians

The aim of this study was to examine the moderating role of gender on relations among social support functions and life satisfaction in older Malaysians. The study sample was 1,800 older residents in a community; all were at least 60 years old. This study was a cross-sectional and corelational survey, and the data were collected by multistage stratified sampling. This study revealed that fewer social support functions, and therefore less life satisfaction, were available for females than for males. The results of moderated regression analyses demonstrated that gender interacted only on the relationship between positive social interaction support and tangible support with life satisfaction. Specifically, at a high tangible support level, females had lower life satisfaction when compared to a low tangible support level. There may be a need for new programs and services to provide other aspects of social support to older female adults to improve and maintain life satisfaction in later life.     

The psychosocial meaning of menopause: women's experiences

This paper reports on a qualitative study of womens' experiences with menopause from a psychosocial perspective. Women give voice to the impact of menopause upon their sense of self and significant relationships in their lives. This study raises questions about the meaning of the reluctance of women and others to discuss menopause in a helpful, meaningful way.     

中美两国城市贫困区位化比较研究

通过对中美两国城市贫困区位化的原因、发展趋势和影响的比较研究,可以发现,影响两国城市贫困异同的主要因素是产业结构,文化传统和制度体系。这一研究将为中国城市的反贫困工作起到参考作用。     

The Development and Validation of Stakeholder-Based Scale for Measuring University Social Responsibility (USR)

Universities are an important member of the society that are trusted with shaping future, nurturing individuals, fostering ethics, and making people more responsible towards both the corporations they work for and the society they live in. Researches that explicitly focus on measurement of social responsibility of universities are scarce. The research intends to develop and validate a measurement scale for university social responsibility (USR) by capturing the key determinants that best define the social responsibility of a university. Using systematic scale development process, the study involved both literature and focus group discussions to generate the require items. 383 respondents filled the questionnaires out of which 329 were usable. The study found that USR has seven dimensions namely: operational responsibilities, research/development responsibilities, stakeholder responsibilities, and legal responsibilities. These four responsibilities were categorized as survival level responsibilities. Intermediate responsibility included ethical responsibility while voluntary responsibilities included philanthropic and community engagement. The scale developed in the study will help to specifically look for the presence of social responsibility in universities/higher education institutions. Hence it can be important to study how well universities respond to needs of the society. There is a significant lack of research into development of a reliable and valid scale of USR. This study clearly highlights the factors that make up USR and provides a detailed scale to measure of social responsibility performance by higher education institutions.     

The behaviour towards malaria care—a multinomial logit approach

This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characteristics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. The individual patient characteristics form a set of social indicators which can be used to discriminate or put into groups patients with respect to their choice of provider.The study confirms the popular use of self-medication as a first choice of action in treating malaria. The choice of malaria care providers is found to be influenced by facility price, travel time, waiting time for treatment, education, age, sex and quality of care measured in terms of drugs availability. We further find that as income increases, the odds are in favour of self-medication when people get malaria.     

Keeping the ball in the air: contact in long-distance friendships

As people continue to be more mobile, maintenance behaviors for long-distance friendships will continue to be a part of the relocation experience. In this qualitative study, 25 women age 45 and over, who had relocated a number of times, were asked to talk about how their friendships had transitioned to being long-distance relationships and what current maintenance behaviors entailed. Communication was a major theme involving electronic mail (e-mail), Christmas cards, telephone calls, and visits. Results from the current study suggest that maintaining the perception of the existence of a well-connected social support system could be accomplished with a single, annual contact. Further, the long-distance friendship biographies explored in this study provided characteristics of friendship maintenance behavior that could be grouped into three main categories forming a proposed typology of long-distance friendship maintenance.     

回顾与展望:三十年来我国老年学研究述评

自20世纪80年代老年学在我国建立,学术界就对其进行了较为全面的研究。三十年来学术界对老年学的研究主要集中在比较老年学、基础理论建构以及学科建设三个方面。在发展的过程中,学术界将老年伦理学、老年体育学、老年教育学、老年法学和老年哲学等新内容纳入到研究中。展望未来,中国老年学的发展需要在创新基础理论的基础上,加快推进学科建设和专业人才培养。     

Fuzzy Measures of Longitudinal Poverty in a Comparative Perspective

In this paper we present a methodology for the study of longitudinal aspects of monetary and multi-dimensional poverty, and apply this in a multi-country comparative context. The conventional poor/non-poor dichotomy is replaced by defining poverty as a matter of degree, determined by the place of the individual in the income distribution. The same methodology facilitates the inclusion of other dimensions of deprivation into the analysis: by appropriately weighting indicators of deprivation to reflect their dispersion and correlation, we can construct measures of non-monetary deprivation in its various dimensions. An important contribution of the paper is to identify rules for the intersection and union of fuzzy sets appropriate for the study of poverty and deprivation. These rules allow us to meaningfully study the persistence of poverty and deprivation over time. We establish the consistency of the approach when applied to a time sequence of any length. We can thus study longitudinally over time a whole range of indicators of poverty and deprivation, from cross-sectional monetary poverty rates to multi-dimensional indicators of deprivation: in particular, we propose the new “Fuzzy At-persistent-risk-of-poverty rate”, and compare it with the corresponding Laeken indicator adopted by Eurostat.     

Living Environment Preferences of the Inhabitants of Istanbul: A Modified Hierarchical Information Integration Model

This paper presents a two-stage research to model the different priorities and expectations about living environment preferences of the inhabitants of Istanbul, Turkey's largest metropolitan with a population of 10 million. In the first stage, a modified hierarchical information integration approach was used to estimate the utilities of different attributes for each individual sampled from the inhabitants of Istanbul. This is a decompositional approach and involves measuring individual preferences. In this study, not only aggregate results are reported but also a segmentation study is carried out to explore the heterogeneity in respondents' preferences. Identification of such segments would help planner offer different planning options to groups with different preferences. Thus, the second stage of this study consists of identifying distinct groups of inhabitants with different preference structures by using cluster analysis. The resulting information is believed to be more useful especially to understand diverging demands of inhabitants of Istanbul.     

Examining the Relationship Between Race, Ethnicity, Foreign-Born Status, and Social Capital Among Women on Public Assistance

The purpose of this research study was to examine the relationship between race, ethnicity, foreign-born status, and social capital among single women who use welfare. It was hypothesized that the utilization of various types of social capital would vary by group. This study analyzed Wave 2 (2005–2007) data from the Making Connections Cross-Site Survey database. 1,428 women with no spouse/partner present in the household who indicated use of a TANF/welfare office in the last 12 months were selected for inclusion in the study sample. Structural equation modeling was used to answer this study’s research question. Black women had a higher level of bridging, support giving, and support receiving social capital. Hispanic women had a lower level of bridging social capital. Foreign-born women had a higher level of bonding and value sharing social capital. Implications for policy, social work practice, and research are discussed.     

Keeping the Ball in the Air: Contact in Long-Distance Friendships

ABSTRACT

As people continue to be more mobile, maintenance behaviors for long-distance friendships will continue to be a part of the relocation experience. In this qualitative study, 25 women age 45 and over, who had relocated a number of times, were asked to talk about how their friendships had transitioned to being long-distance relationships and what current maintenance behaviors entailed. Communication was a major theme involving electronic mail (e-mail), Christmas cards, telephone calls, and visits. Results from the current study suggest that maintaining the perception of the existence of a well-connected social support system could be accomplished with a single, annual contact. Further, the long-distance friendship biographies explored in this study provided characteristics of friendship maintenance behavior that could be grouped into three main categories forming a proposed typology of long-distance friendship maintenance.     

Investigating Adolescent Health-Related Quality of Life: From a Self-Identity Perspective

The aim of the study was to investigate the relation between self-identity and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in adolescence. This study assumed that four aspects (i.e. personal, social, ability, and academic identity) of identity firmness could predict adolescent’s HRQOL more than four aspects of identity importance. Meanwhile, this study also hypothesized that psychological and social relationships domains of HRQOL could be largely explained by the concept of identity firmness. One hundred and ninety-eight female adolescents participated in this study. Each participant completed a booklet containing the measures of the Questionnaire of revised edition of identity importance (QII-R), the Questionnaire of revised edition of identity firmness (QIF-R), the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version, and Visual-analogue HRQOL items. This study administered multiple regression analyses to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrated the concept of identity firmness could predict adolescent’s HRQOL more than the concept of identity importance. The results also supported our hypotheses that psychological and social relationships domains of HRQOL could be largely explained by the concept of identity firmness. In general, this study supported our hypotheses that the concept of identity firmness is a crucial predictor to adolescent’s HRQOL.     

From the Editor

The purposes of this study were to examine medication adherence in older women with coronary heart disease and to identify barriers and facilitators of medication adherence. Methods: The study used a semistructured interview guide and established measures to examine medication taking 3 months after hospital discharge. Results: Thirty-two women completed the study: 65.6% were adherent to medications, but others were less adherent and self-modified their therapy. Over half (52.1%) suffered side effects, 71.9% had experienced psychological barriers, and all had economic barriers. Facilitators included a pillbox system (85%) and discharge medication counseling (90%). Conclusion: Tailored interventions to improve adherence in older women are needed.