India’s ‘Missing Women’ and Men’s Sexual Risk Behavior

Although scholars and policymakers have long been concerned with the ??missing women?? of India, little rigorous research has examined the consequences of India??s sex ratio imbalance for young men??s sexual risk behavior and reproductive health. We use data from the third wave of India??s 2005?C2006 National Family and Health Survey to examine the influence of the community female-to-male sex ratio at ages 10?C39 on men??s likelihood of marrying early in life, of engaging in premarital, multi-partnered, and commercial sex, and of contracting a sexually-transmitted disease. We estimate logistic regression models that control for respondents?? demographic and socioeconomic status and that adjust for the clustering of observations within communities. Net of the effects of other characteristics, the female-to-male sex ratio is positively and significantly associated with the likelihood that men marry prior to age 18 and inversely and significantly associated with the odds that men have had intercourse with a commercial sex worker. However, no significant net associations are observed between the sex ratio and the other outcomes. Education, wealth, religious affiliation, caste, and geographic region emerge as significant predictors of Indian men??s sexual risk behaviors.     

Sodomy’s Penumbra

This article advocates a sodomitical approach to sodomy. Its approach is framed alongside and against three historical glosses on sodomy law: first, that sodomy law instantiates homophobia; second, that sodomy law targets sexual violence against boys; third, that sodomy law reaches assaultive sex against women that did not register as assaultive enough to qualify as “rape” by sexist juries. The first story of sodomy law is mostly wrong. The other two glosses pivot on protection: protection of boys or protection of girls and women. These accounts, tethered to identitarianism, underplay sodomy law’s multiplicity, as a source and symptom of our conflicted understandings of when sex is sex and when sexual violence is rape.

The first part of the article explains my choice of sodomitical sites. The second part complicates the story of sodomy as phobic. The third part complements the historiography of sodomy as protective against boys. The fourth part argues that the gloss on sodomy law as a corrective to disbelieved women is appealing but untrue. The final part makes the case that fellatio matters. The prevalence of forcible oral sex in sodomy cases intimates a cultural pluripotence of oral sex, as well as shifting definitions—in law and life—of sex and rape. This last story of sodomy law remains undetected under an identitarian radar.     

‘Freedom From’ and ‘Freedom To’ Across Countries

It has been over 70 years since Erich Fromm wrote “Escape From Freedom.” He defined two types of freedom: freedom from (negative) and freedom to (positive). Fromm’s masterpiece, however, does not measure the two types of freedom, and this is not surprising—there were no freedom data at the time. Now, there are plenty of data, and Fromm’s concepts of freedom can be operationalized across countries. The two types of freedom, positive and negative, correlate at below 0.5, and such low correlation is surprising—I discuss outliers and point out that freedom is an end in itself, as recognized, for instance, by Amartya Sen. Furthermore, while we acknowledge the importance of freedom from, we forget that freedom from is not fully realized without freedom to: it’s great to be free; but it’s even better to feel free as well.     

The ‘What’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Employee Well-Being: A New Model

This paper examines the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of employee well-being. Beginning with the ‘what’ of well-being, the construct of mental health was explored with the aim of building a model of employee well-being. It was proposed that employee well-being consists of three core components: (1) subjective well-being; (2) workplace well-being and (3) psychological well-being. Following this, the ‘why’ of employee well-being was investigated; that is, why employee well-being should be an important matter for organisations. It was argued that employee well-being is an important precursor to organisational well-being, as indicated by its links to employee turnover and performance. The next section was concerned with the ‘how’ of employee well-being; that is, how well-being can be reliably enhanced. Drawing on two models of strengths and a practice model of psychological assessment, it was asserted that strength-based development can reliably enhance employee well-being. A solid framework for understanding and measuring employee well-being is offered in the hope that it will foster a more integrated approach to assessing and optimising employee well-being.

One Can’t Stride If He Can’t Stand Still

For a lot of the work we do,there is no harvest at first and sometimes no much significant reward can be obtained even after working for a long time.Therefore,many people will be disappointed for not having witnessed vivid compliments and will then stop working hard at their careers. Such people generally have two types of mindsets.One is being too eager to taste the fruits of success and feel anxious and tense on the various roads to success.The other type seems being too philosophical about everything,so the person refuses to spend time on complicated things and gives up working hard,and eventually he can only envy the success of others.     

Men’s Migration and Women’s Fertility in Rural Mozambique

Labor migration profoundly affects households throughout rural Africa. This study looks at how men’s labor migration influences marital fertility in a context where such migration has been massive while its economic returns are increasingly uncertain. Using data from a survey of married women in southern Mozambique, we start with an event-history analysis of birth rates among women married to migrants and those married to nonmigrants. The model detects a lower birth rate among migrants’ wives, which tends to be partially compensated for by an increased birth rate upon cessation of migration. An analysis of women’s lifetime fertility shows that it decreases as the time spent in migration by their husbands accrues. When we compare reproductive intentions stated by respondents with migrant and nonmigrant husbands, we find that migrants’ wives are more likely to want another child regardless of the number of living children, but the difference is significant only for women who see migration as economically benefiting their households. Yet, such women are also significantly more likely to use modern contraception than other women. We interpret these results in light of the debate on enhancing versus disrupting effects of labor migration on families and households in contemporary developing settings.     

Addictive Substances,Users’ Health,and the Government’s Perceived Responsibility: French People’s Perspective

This paper uses a semiparametric latent variable transformation model for multiple outcomes to examine the effect of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being and proposes a procedure to build a well-being index that is less susceptible to functional form misspecification. We model multidimensional well-being as an unobserved common factor underlying the observed well-being outcomes. The semiparametric methodology allows us to alleviate misspecification bias by combining multiple indicators into a latent construct in an unspecified, data-driven way. Using data from female participants of the 1974–2010 waves of the US General Social Survey, we find that education, intelligence, and maternal education contribute positively to multidimensional well-being. However, the effects of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being declined steadily between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, and have not rebounded since.     

On a ‘Level-Sensitive’ Headcount Ratio: Revisiting Shorrocks’ Poverty Index

It is often argued that indicators of achievement or deprivation should be measured such that they display a property of ‘level-sensitivity’, whereby a given change in the indicator acquires a greater significance the higher (lower) the level of achievement (deprivation) at which the change occurs. In this note, it is shown that a level-sensitive headcount ratio of poverty can be derived from an application of the very useful graphical device called ‘a deprivation profile’ advanced by Anthony Shorrocks (in: Jenkins et al. (eds.) The Distribution of Welfare and Household Production: International Perspectives, 1996).     

On ‘Consistent’ Poverty

The measurement of poverty as ‘consistent’ poverty offers a solution to one of the primary problems of poverty measurement within Social Policy of the last three decades. Often treated as if they were synonymous, ‘indirect’ measures of poverty, such as low income measures, and ‘direct’ measures, such as indices of material deprivation, identify surprisingly different people as being poor. In response to this mismatch, a team of Irish researchers put forward a measure which identified respondents in as being in poverty when they experienced both a low standard of living, as measured by deprivation indicators, and a lack of resources, as measured by a low income line. Importantly, they argued that the two measures required an equal weight. In this paper, I present a reconsideration of the consistent poverty measure from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. In particular, I examine the claim that low income and material deprivation measures should be given an ‘equal weight’. I argue that, from a conceptual perspective, the nature of the indicators at hand means that a deprivation-led measurement approach might be understood to align with the definition of poverty which Nolan and Whelan outline and, from an empirical perspective, that it is the material deprivation measure—and not the low income measure—which is particularly effective in identifying individuals at risk of multiple forms of deprivation. However, I argue that greater attention needs to be given to the question of whether indicators of material deprivation provide a sufficient measure of material poverty and suggest that advancing the measurement of material deprivation beyond its relatively rudimentary state represents an important priority for poverty research.     

China’s Urbanization Strategy

This research develops specific goals,paths and strategies of urbanization in China upon analyzing the Chinese characteristics and future trends of urbanization.Urbanization will become basic national conditions of China’s future social development,which will have significant impacts on the sources and driving forces of future prosperity and development.However,current challenges in China’s urbanization are that population urbanization lags behind industrialization and land urbanization,and urbanization of the household registered population lags behind urbanization of the resident population.China’s urbanization development will be shifted from a pure speed approach to an approach combining speed with quality during the "Twelfth Five-Year plan" period,and the economic reform will enter into a new stage characterized by promoting in-depth urbanization and urban-rural integration.An urbanization model with Chinese characteristics would be developed by taking urbanization as the leading force in deepening the reform,directing at household registration system reform and employment promotion,enhancing urbanization quality,and promoting equalization of rural and urban public services.     

Pet Dogs Benefit Owners’ Health: A ‘Natural Experiment’ in China

This paper reports results from a ‘natural experiment’ taking place in China on the impact of dogs on owners’ health. Previous Western research has reported modest health benefits, but results have remained controversial. In China pets were banned in urban areas until 1992. Since then dog ownership has grown quite rapidly in the major cities, especially among younger women. In these quasi-experimental conditions, we hypothesise that dog ownership will show greater health benefits than in the West. Results are given from a survey of women aged 25–40 in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (N = 3031). Half the respondents owned dogs and half did not. Owners reported better health-related outcomes. They exercised more frequently, slept better, had higher self-reported fitness and health, took fewer days off sick from work and were seen less by doctors. The concluding section indicates how these results may be integrated and suggests further research on the potential economic benefits of pets.