Business Travel from the Traveller’s Perspective: Stress,Stimulation and Normalization

For growing numbers of businesspeople, managers and public officials, work involves travel. This study investigates what business travel means to travellers. What are their experiences of travel and what are the consequences of travel for their professional and personal lives? Qualitative interviews with frequent business travellers and corporate travel managers show that travel may be both stressful and stimulating. It may be associated with physical and psychological strain, increased workloads and difficulties in balancing work and private life, but also with enriching experiences, social and professional status and a cosmopolitan identity. It may also promote travellers’ professional careers. However, in some respects, an ongoing normalization of travel seems to have moderating effects on both stress and stimulation among travellers. This normalization occurs on three different levels: the societal, organizational and individual.     

An Integrated Analysis of Social,Economic, and Environmental Indicators’ Effects on Public Health and Health Inequality Globally: From the Perspective of Vulnerability

Social Indicators Research - Public health and health inequality have been widely researched as they are essential for human development and social justice. Although factors influencing public...     

The Relationship Between Physical Activity and Perceived Health Status in Older Women: Findings from the Woman’s College Alumni Study

Using data collected from the Woman’s College (WC) Alumni Study, the purpose of this study was to determine whether perceived health status is related to physical activity in older women. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between amounts of physical activity and self-reported health status. The results of the current study reveal that the level of physical activity is significantly correlated with perceived health status. The findings of this study have implications for the assessment of older individuals’ health and may lead to interventions that are tailored to increase physical activity among older women.     

French People’s Positions Regarding National Policies About Illicit Drugs: A Preliminary Study

French people’s positions regarding actual and potential drug policies were examined. Adults (N = 225) aged 18–81 were presented with 28 vignettes that were composed according to a three within-subject orthogonal factor design: (a) demand for drugs in the country, (b) information campaigns regarding their dangerousness, and (c) current state policy regarding soft and hard drugs, from “laissez faire” policy for all drugs to complete prohibition of all drugs. Participants rated the level of acceptability of each policy. Three clusters were identified. The first one (32 % of participants) was called “Radical Constructionists” because participants considered that all policies were unacceptable. The second one (26 %) was called “Prohibitionists” because only one drug policy was considered fully acceptable: Complete prohibition with the condition that information campaigns are conducted. The third cluster (42 %) was called “Regulationists” because only one drug policy was considered as fully acceptable: Complete state regulation (with the same condition). In all clusters, the “laissez-faire” policy was always judged as the least acceptable one, even when it was just about soft drugs. The strongest opposition observed was not between prohibition and regulation but between “laissez-faire” on the one hand and regulation and prohibition on the other hand. Methodological implications and implications for decision-makers are discussed.     

Mothers’ Sexual Identity and Children’s Health

Sexual minority women face a plethora of structural, socioeconomic, and interpersonal disadvantages and stressors. Research has established negative associations between women’s sexual minority identities and both their own health and their infants’ birth outcomes. Yet a separate body of scholarship has documented similarities in the development and well-being of children living with same-sex couples relative to those living with similarly situated different-sex couples. This study sought to reconcile these literatures by examining the association between maternal sexual identity and child health at ages 5–18 using a US sample from the full population of children of sexual minority women, including those who identify as mostly heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, regardless of partner sex or gender. Analyses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N?=?8978) followed women longitudinally and examined several measures of their children’s health, including general health and specific developmental and physical health conditions. Analyses found that children of mostly heterosexual and bisexual women experienced health disadvantages relative to children of heterosexual women, whereas the few children of lesbian women in our sample evidenced a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. These findings underscore that to understand sexual orientation disparities and the intergenerational transmission of health, it is important to incorporate broad measurement of sexual orientation that can capture variation in family forms and in sexual minority identities.

     

Family Planning and Women’s and Children’s Health: Long-Term Consequences of an Outreach Program in Matlab, Bangladesh

We analyze the impact of an experimental maternal and child health and family planning program that was established in Matlab, Bangladesh, in 1977. Village data from 1974, 1982, and 1996 suggest that program villages experienced a decline in fertility of about 17 %. Household data from 1996 confirm that this decline in “surviving fertility” persisted for nearly two decades. Women in program villages also experienced other benefits: increased birth spacing, lower child mortality, improved health status, and greater use of preventive health inputs. Some benefits also diffused beyond the boundaries of the program villages into neighboring comparison villages. These effects are robust to the inclusion of individual, household, and community characteristics. We conclude that the benefits of this reproductive and child health program in rural Bangladesh have many dimensions extending well beyond fertility reduction, which do not appear to dissipate rapidly after two decades.     

Worry and Bother: Factors in Rural Women’s Health Decision Making

This exploratory study examined older rural women’s health decision making. Thirty-three rural women were recruited to participate in semistructured qualitative interviews. Major themes emerged that focused on rural women’s comments regarding their concerns about not worrying or bothering their children with personal health matters. Themes were discussed in the context of an ethic of care. Results suggest that it is important for mental health professionals, family physicians, social workers, and other practitioners to be aware of the sense of worry and concern for others that older rural women bring to bear in decision making about personal health issues.     

Iran’s Multi-ethnic Mosaic: A 23-Year Perspective

In this study, we embark on measuring inequality in Iran. We compute three measures of group-based inequality (Group-weighted Coefficient of Variation, Group-weighted Gini, and Group-weighted Theil) for the following outcomes: education, assets, income, and expenditure per capita. The groups are defined based on gender, ethnicity/language (Persian, Azeri, and other ethnic minorities), and region (urban versus rural and capital city versus other places) using 23 years of annual Household Expenditure and Income Surveys from 1990 through 2012. Inequality between groups based on religion (Muslim, non-Muslim), citizenship (Iranian, non-Iranian) are also studied using the 2006 census. Our analysis of the trend of horizontal inequality reveals substantial reduction in between-group inequalities over the 1990–2012 period. Yet, gender based income inequality remains high. The implications and underlying reasons for these results are discussed.

     

Forgiving Perpetrators of Violence: Colombian People’s Positions

Colombian people’s positions regarding the granting of forgiveness to persons who have been more or less actively involved in the violence that ravaged the country during the past 60 years were examined. Four hundred lay people living in Bogota were presented with 48 concrete cases in which a former perpetrator of violence (a member of the guerillas, the paramilitary, the military or a drug cartel) asked for forgiveness from a victim’s family. These cases were constructed using a three-factor orthogonal design: Degree of Responsibility × Severity of the Negative Acts Committed × Apologies. Four basic positions were found. The most common one, which was shared by nearly 40 % of the sample, mostly people from the wealthier segments of society, was “no forgiveness under any condition”. Eighteen percent of the participants, mostly from the poorest segments of society, considered that forgiveness could be granted each time the former perpetrators expressed true repentance (and, in the case of former organizers, if they have offered adequate compensation and had not committed very severe crimes). This was the most frequently observed attitude when perpetrators were former members of the paramilitary. Fifteen percent of the participants considered that forgiveness should be systematically granted. Finally, 28 % of the participants were undecided about the issue.     

Disasters,migrations, and the unintended consequences of urbanization: What’s the harm in getting out of harm’s way?

Under many circumstances, the global rural-to-urban migration trend may be increasingly adopted as a short-term coping strategy to shifting ecologies and natural disasters. While offering certain benefits from macro-level economic and public health perspectives, these migrations may also have unintended psychological consequences that are not easily understood through traditional disaster studies or cost–benefit analyses. If the goal of disaster and climate change research is to promote successful adaptation, then the long-term psychological well-being of people who have survived disaster and either adapted in situ or migrated into urban environments, is paramount. This article integrates research on disasters and climate change-induced migration with emerging perspectives from environmental psychology and the psychology of natural disasters to consider the potential costs of particular migration scenarios. We apply this analysis to the case of Shishmaref, Alaska, a rural Iñupiat community on the northwest coast of Alaska facing habitual flooding disasters linked to climate change. Findings from Shishmaref illustrate the cultural vitality of subsistence landscapes and the potential health risks of compromised human–ecological relationships due to migration and/or displacement. Recommendations for policy makers and researchers are offered for promoting long-term well-being among affected individuals and communities.     

Religion,Volunteerism and Health: Are Religious People Really Doing Well by Doing Good?

While the religion-health connection has been accumulatively established by research findings in one hand, the contribution of volunteering to health is well confirmed empirically on the other hand. Nevertheless, although religion has been long accepted as a feeder system and source of volunteerism, paucity of research has attempted to investigate religious effects on health benefits through the mediation of volunteering. In this study, I examined religious effects on the health outcomes of mental and physical health and life satisfaction through the mediation of other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering based on a statewide representative sample of general adults in Texas. Results showed that both other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering significantly mediated the relationships between participants’ religiosity and health outcomes, but more robust indirect effects through other-oriented volunteering were noted by bootstrap estimates. In addition, the direct effects of religiosity on health outcomes were significantly remained even taking the mediation of volunteering into account, connoting the distinctive role of religion in health that cannot be explained away by secular pathways. Implications of the findings, limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.     

Beyond Homonegativity: Understanding Hong Kong People’s Attitudes About Social Acceptance of Gay/Lesbian People,Sexual Orientation Discrimination Protection,and Same-Sex Marriage

This study examined attitudes about social acceptance, discrimination protection, and marriage equality for gay/lesbian people with a representative sample of 1,008 Hong Kong Chinese adults via a telephone survey. Despite majority endorsement of homosexuality (52.29% positive vs. 34.12% negative) and discrimination protection (50.72% favorable vs. 14.64% opposed), attitudes toward same-sex marriage diverged (32.79% favorable vs. 39.41% opposed). There was a sharp distinction in accepting gay/lesbian people as co-workers (83.57%) and friends (76.92%) versus relatives (40.19%). Having more homosexual/bisexual friends or co-workers contributed to greater endorsement of social acceptance and discrimination protection but not same-sex marriage. Age, religion, political orientation, and homonegativity consistently predicted attitudes toward social acceptance, discrimination protection, and same-sex marriage, whereas gender-role beliefs, conformity to norms, and cultural orientations had varying impacts. This article informs theory and advocacy by disentangling homonegativity from attitudes about gay/lesbian issues and highlighting the centrality of family-kinship and relative-outsider delineation in Chinese societies.     

Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2011 National Economic and Social Development

National Bureau of Statistics of China February 22,2012 General Outlook In 2011,the gross domestic product(GDP) [2] of the year was 47,156.4 billion yuan,up by 9.2 percent over the previous year.Of this total,the value added of the primary industry was 4,771.2 billion yuan,up by 4.5 percent, that of the secondary industry was 22,059.2 billion yuan,up by 10.6 percent and the tertiary     

Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2012 National Economic and Social Development

February 22,2013 In 2012, faced with the complicated and severe international situation and arduous tasks of domestic reform, development and stability, under the firm leadership of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council,the people of all nationalities of China, taking the scientific development as the theme and the transformation of economic development mode     

Media Representation of Tongxinglian in China: A Case Study of the People’s Daily

Over the past few decades, the worldwide lesbian and gay movements have diversified and increased their rights claims. The achievement of gay rights claims in society is the result of an interplay among various social factors and forces. Media is one of most influential players in building homosexual images and promoting mutual understanding. Chinese homosexuals were not treated as criminals or mental illness patients anymore in 1997 and 2001, respectively, after decriminalization and depathologization. Thus this article aims to explore how homosexuals were portrayed in the official media of China, particularly the People’s Daily, to illustrate the changing perception of homosexuals in China’s political and social spheres. It argues that representation of homosexuals in the People’s Daily changed gradually from a negative perception to a more positive one with less discrimination and prejudice as shown by the article’s quantitative and qualitative results.     

Correction to: Iran’s Multi-ethnic Mosaic: A 23-Year Perspective

Social Indicators Research - The article Iran’s Multi-ethnic Mosaic: A 23-Year Perspective, written Mahdi Majbouri and Sanaz Fesharaki, was originally published electronically on the...