Pakistan: family planning expands in non-governmental organizations

The Family Planning Association of Pakistan has begun a program of integration of family planning activities with other voluntary welfare agencies. 1 of the more successful projects has been in cooperation with the Family Welfare Cooperative Society of Lahore. Volunteers have provided facilities to very low-income women to help supplement income. At 1st it was knitting, embroidery, and cloth manufacture, but over several years it developed into a complex of several buildings with a comprehensive vocational training center, a showroom, schools for the children of mothers in training, a secretarial school, and a hostel for homeless women there. There is a medical unit, a full-time doctor, and family planning services.     

Measuring cultural bias in a cross-national study

Cross-national research claims increasing attention, due in part to a growing awareness of worldwide interdependence. One of the most intriguing areas of research is the comparison of perceptions about the quality of life. However, even the first attempt to compare cross-national quality of life perceptions (Cantril, 1965) raised a question which still remains unanswered: What do the differences between countries mean? Presumably differences in income, in the objective conditions of the major life domains such as housing, health and employment, and in demographic variables account for some of the difference among countries' reported quality of life satisfaction. But how can these factors be separated from other non-random factors? The term we use for the latter is “cultural bias”. By cultural bias we mean the systematic cross-national differences in quality of life perceptions which are not explained by objective measures of quality of life nor by demographic factors. Ordinarily these culture-specific biases are acquired during the socialization process almost as automatically and unconsciously as one learns one's mother tongue. Cultural bias is manifested in the tendency for members of a particular culture to be optimistic or pessimistic, confident or cautious in evaluating their social and physical environment and in revealing these evaluations to others. Thus, our conception of cultural bias has something in common with the idea of national character, but it is more limited in scope. In this paper we discuss the problem of isolating the impact of cultural bias from the other factors affecting how people perceive their quality of life and measuring it. We describe a method which is capable of doing this and report the results of using it to measure the relative cultural bias between respondents in Springfield, Illinois and Aixen-Provence, France.     

Gender,democracy, development,and overshoot: a cross-national analysis

The crux of sustainability concerns hinges on humanity’s overshoot of our global carrying capacity, which we currently exceed by about 50 %. Overshoot of the earth’s natural resource bases militates against our current and future prospects for sustainability. Despite the theoretical and practical impetus to examine these dynamics, there is a dearth of empirical sociological research that analyzes overshoot. The paper fills this gap by offering a structural equation model of each nation’s relative contributions to overshoot. The model tests key theorizations in the environmental sociology, development, and global political-economy literatures, and adds to them by theorizing and empirically testing ecofeminist positions that the status of women affects and is affected by environmental conditions. Findings support ecofeminist interpretations that resource degradation yields adverse impacts on women and that their representation in government bodes well for the environment. The theoretical, empirical, and policy-based conclusions and implications are treated, as well as future areas of research.     

Development,inequality, health care,and mortality at the older ages: a cross-national analysis

We examine mortality at ages 50 and above in female populations of 38 countries and control for variation in quality of the mortality data. We find that economic development, economic distributional inequality, and basic primary health care have independent cross-national effects on cause of death structures and that these effects are not uniform across the age intervals of interest. As improvements occur in level of living and heath care, age-specific death rates decline except at the oldest ages, at which point they may increase. Our results are interpreted in terms of their relevance for mortality research, theory, and policy.     

The impact of income inequality on self-rated general health: Evidence from a cross-national study

Previous studies report a strong negative association between income inequality and population health at the aggregate level. However, it is still in hot debate whether this ecological association indicates a genuine, causal effect of income inequality on health, as asserted by the Wilkinson hypothesis, or it simply reflects a nonlinear effect of individual income on health, as suggested by the absolute income hypothesis. Drawing data from the 2005 round of the World Values Survey, I analyze the relationship between individual income, income inequality, and self-rated general health in a multilevel framework. Results show no independent detrimental effect of country income inequality on individual self-rated general health. In contrast, self-rated general health is strongly associated with absolute material conditions both at the individual and at the country level. Therefore, this study gives more evidence to the absolute income hypothesis, i.e., the strong ecological association between income inequality and population health is more likely a reflection of the nonlinear effect of individual income on health rather than a genuine effect of income inequality.     

Government involvement in the economy and the distribution of income: A cross-national study

This study explores the effect of government involvement in the economy, as measured by central government expenditures as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), on the distribution of income. It is hypothesized that state spending — in the form of transfer payments to firms and households, government purchases, and military spending — will have a negative influence on income inequality only at high levels of economic development. Multivariate analysis confirms this hypothesis. The results show that government expenditures as a percent of GDP and level of industrialization interact to produce a negative impact on income inequality. This finding, moreover, holds up after additional investigation for possible OLS assumption violations, sample dependence of results, and model misspecification. This paper was presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.     

Household dynamics and fuelwood consumption in developing countries: a cross-national analysis

Previous research has suggested a link between household dynamics (i.e., average household size and number of households) and environmental impacts at the national level. Building on this work, we empirically test the relationship between household dynamics and fuelwood consumption, which has been implicated in anthropogenic threats to biodiversity. We focus our analysis on developing countries (where fuelwood is an important energy source). Our results show that nations with smaller average households consume more fuelwood per capita. This finding indicates that the household economies of scale are, indeed, associated with the consumption of fuelwood. In addition, we found that number of households is a better predictor of total fuelwood consumption than average household size suggesting a greater relative contribution to consumption levels. Thus, insofar as declining average household sizes result in increased number of households and higher per capita consumption, this trend may be a signal of serious threats to biodiversity and resource conservation. We also found further support for the ??energy ladder?? hypothesis that economic development reduces demand for traditional fuels.     

Cohort change and the diffusion of environmental concern: a cross-national analysis

This study explores value change across cohorts for a multinational population sample. Employing a diffusion-of-innovations approach, we combine competing theories predicting the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and environmentalism: post-materialism and affluence theories, and global environmentalism theory. The diffusion argument suggests that high-SES groups first adopt pro-environmental views, but as time passes by, environmentalism diffuses to lower-SES groups. We test the diffusion argument using a sample of 18 countries for two waves (years 1993 and 2000) from the International Social Survey Project. Cross-classified multilevel modeling allows us to identify a nonlinear interaction between cohort and education, our core measure of SES, in predicting environmental concern, while controlling for age and period. We find support for the diffusion argument and demonstrate that the positive effect of education on environmental concern first increases among older cohorts and then starts to level off until a bend point is reached for individuals born around 1940 and becomes progressively weaker for younger cohorts.     

Population and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: a mediating perspective and a mixed-method analysis

As progress is made in understanding the dynamics of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC), arguments that view population pressure as one of the major factors affecting forest destruction continue to be framed. Following the advances in the field of population-environment studies, this paper contends that a full account of the complex web of drivers involved in tropical deforestation needs to go beyond demographics per se. This paper examines the contribution of the ??population factor?? as a cause of deforestation in Machadinho D??Oeste, Rond?nia, Brazilian Amazonia, an area with significant small-scale farming. Conceptually, the paper shows that socioeconomic status and mediating factors (i.e., education, managerial skills, previous rural experience, integration into the local, and regional contexts), and attitudes and behaviors toward the land parcel development mediate migrants?? relationships with the local environment. The analysis combines multiple data sources (i.e., demographic census, household survey, land-cover maps, in-depth interviews) and analytical approaches (i.e., fuzzy sets statistics, remote-sensing/GIS analysis, interpretivist qualitative assessment) to examine the complex interrelationships between LUCC and human population.     

When the grass is greener: Fertility decisions in a cross-national context

In research and policy discourse, conceptualizations of fertility decision-making often assume that people only consider circumstances within national borders. In an integrated Europe, citizens may know about and compare conditions across countries. Such comparisons may influence the way people think about and respond to childrearing costs. To explore this possibility and its implications, we present evidence from 44 in-depth interviews with Polish parents in the United Kingdom and Poland. Explanations of childbearing decisions involved comparisons of policy packages and living standards across countries. Individuals in Poland used richer European countries as an important reference point, rather than recent conditions in Poland. In contrast, migrants often positively assessed their relatively disadvantaged circumstances by using the Polish setting as a reference. The findings could help explain why, despite substantial policy efforts, fertility has remained at very low levels in poorer European countries, while migrants from those countries often have higher fertility abroad.     

Family planning and deforestation: evidence from the Ecuadorian Amazon

Despite an abundant literature exploring the relationship between population growth and forest cover change, comparatively little research has examined the forest cover impacts of family planning use—a key determinant of population growth rates in many developing countries. Using data from a panel survey of farms in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, this paper explores whether family planning use affects changes in forest cover. After controlling for household life cycle effects, family planning use among female heads of farm households did not have an independent effect on deforestation, reforestation, or net forest loss between 1990 and 2008. Rather, shorter-term drivers of forest change tend to be associated with household life cycles and shifts in production and consumption. However, family planning will continue to improve development and health outcomes for women by reducing unwanted fertility and may offer longer-term environmental benefits.     

Production,Reproduction, and Education: Women,Children, and Work in a British Perspective

This article reviews findings of studies by the author and colleagues on relationships between women's work and the reproduction of the British population based on data for female birth cohorts 1922–70. The studies address three questions: (1) How do children affect women's paid work and lifetime earnings? (2) How does women's employment affect the quantity of children born? (3) How does women's employment affect the “quality” of children? The answers are affected by the woman's educational attainment. On question 1, childrearing may often halve lifetime earnings, but seldom for the well educated. By contrast, any effects from employment to childbearing are most apparent in the late motherhood of the well educated. Child quality, as assessed by indicators of child development, benefits from maternal education and suffers little from maternal employment. The economic advantages for children in dual‐career families are thus unabated. A widening gulf between mothers will tend to polarize the life chances of their children, unless there are more options to combine employment and childrearing, especially including good‐quality child care for those who cannot afford the market price. Education is a powerful influence, but does not alone solve all issues of equity, whether between families or between sexes.     

Explaining cross-national differences in marriage, cohabitation, and divorce in Europe, 1990-2000

European countries differ considerably in their marriage patterns. The study presented in this paper describes these differences for the 1990s and attempts to explain them from a macro-level perspective. We find that different indicators of marriage (i.e., marriage rate, age at marriage, divorce rate, and prevalence of unmarried cohabitation) cannot be seen as indicators of an underlying concept such as the 'strength of marriage'. Multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses are estimated with countries as units and panel regression models are estimated in which annual time series for multiple countries are pooled. Using these models, we find that popular explanations of trends in the indicators - explanations that focus on gender roles, secularization, unemployment, and educational expansion - are also important for understanding differences among countries. We also find evidence for the role of historical continuity and societal disintegration in understanding cross-national differences.     

Women,Aging, and Cancer

Women over 65 bear high risk for developing cancer. The risk for developing most cancers grows'with increasing age. Of the 1.13 million people estimated to develop cancer in 1992,362,000 (32 percent) will be women over 65 years old (American Cancer Society, 1992). The few early detection and prevention programs that have focused on this age group have found that the women often have problems with utilization, misconceptions, and plain lack of correct information. Treatment for women over 65 with cancer may differ from that for younger women because of age bias, comorbidity, stage of disease at time of diagnosis, and a lack of research on women of this age. Even quality of life and survivorship for the woman over 65 become issues due to the lack of knowledge about how women over 65 view these concepts. The Healthy People 2000 Report has developed goals for a healthier society by the year 2000. The priority areas in relation to cancer include reduction in cigarette smoking, dietary changes, greater utilization of early detection mechanisms, and decreasing exposure to occupational and environmental carcinogens. Implementation of these goals should affect future generations in terms of healthy aging: however, specific programs do need to focus on the woman over 65 and her present needs which will impact current and future health status.     

Women,Aging, and Schizophrenia

SUMMARY

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder of unknown etiology that typically has an onset in early adulthood and persists for the remainder of the life span. For most affected individuals, the illness is recurrent with psychotic symptoms that tend to be episodic in nature. The illness has pervasive and disruptive effects on many life domains; for example, women with schizophrenia are less likely to marry, bear children, and raise their own children than are women in the general population. The age of onset of schizophrenia is later on average in women than men, and women are overrepresented among those who develop the illness after the age of 45. Among younger patients with schizophrenia, women tend to have less severe symptoms than men and better outcomes; however, there are fewer gender differences among older patients with schizophrenia. Older women with schizophrenia are vulnerable to problems of both schizophrenia and aging. Schizophrenia symptoms typically continue in later years and include ongoing psychotic symptoms. Problems of aging such as cognitive decline and chronic medical conditions may be exacerbated by schizophrenia and the disorder is associated with premature mortality. Older women with schizophrenia are at risk for neglect of psychiatric and other health needs that are further compounded by limited social support and low socioeconomic status. More research and clinical attention is needed for the problems of older women with schizophrenia.     

Women, aging, and schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder of unknown etiology that typically has an onset in early adulthood and persists for the remainder of the lifespan. For most affected individuals, the illness is recurrent with psychotic symptoms that tend to be episodic in nature. The illness has pervasive and disruptive effects on many life domains; for example, women with schizophrenia are less likely to marry, bear children, and raise their own children than are women in the general population. The age of onset of schizophrenia is later on average in women then men, and women are over-represented among those who develop the illness after the age of 45. Among younger patients with schizophrenia, women tend to have less severe symptoms than men and better outcomes; however, there are fewer gender differences among older patients with schizophrenia. Older women with schizophrenia are vulnerable to problems of both schizophrenia and aging. Schizophrenia symptoms typically continue in later years and include ongoing psychotic symptoms. Problems of aging such as cognitive decline and chronic medical conditions may be exacerbated by schizophrenia and the disorder is associated with premature mortality. Older women with schizophrenia are at risk for neglect of psychiatric and other health needs that are further compounded by limited social support and low socioeconomic status. More research and clinical attention is needed to the problems of older women with schizophrenia.     

Apprehensive about retirement: Women,life transitions,and relationships

Understanding women’s attitudes toward retirement is crucial for being able to help women adjust to this transition. The present study uses interviews and questionnaires to understand retirement ambivalence and the role that close relationships play in women’s retirement experiences. Findings indicate that women have mixed feelings about retirement; they are both excited and fearful. They particularly enjoy the freedom and control this transition brings but are also moderately fearful of retirement, especially about shifting relationships. A better-quality relationship correlates with greater satisfaction and less fear. Such insights can be used to help women prepare for this major transition.