Adoption of technology by the low-income population segment: The low-cost hot water heater case

The employment of means for efficient use of water and energy are being increasingly incentivized, in relation to the sustainability of buildings. In Brazil, there is much concern regarding the difficulty of getting low-income segments of the population to adopt energy-saving technologies. This study provides guidelines for the inclusion of manufactured, low-cost solar water heaters (LCSWH) in low-income housing in combination with environmental education of this segment of the population. Therefore, a group of dwellings located in a low-income community in Campinas SP, Brazil, was selected for installation of LCSWHs, which were assembled and installed by the study population itself, who also participated in environmental awareness workshops. Particularly apparent in the results obtained, was a tendency to reduce energy consumption by using the LCSWH, attributable in part to behavioral changes from environmental awareness; and that the planning, application or organized systematization of knowledge is feasible in low-income housing, provided it is not promoted solely by dependency culture, since the objective is to provide an instrument for self-discovery, mobilization and participation by the population.     

Sexual Orientation and Sex in Women's Lives: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Use of such categorical terms as heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian is widespread, yet research indicates that sexuality is a multidimensional phenomenon. Sexual behavior, identity, and desire are not highly intercorrelated for women, and this has implications for new ways of conceptualizing sexual orientation. Furthermore, the multifaceted nature of sexual orientation has implications for conceptualizing sexual activity and sexual desire for women. Some methodological issues are presented for future research on female sexual orientation, including a better understanding of gender and a more multifaceted approach to sexual orientation.     

Small area estimation of expenditure means and ratios under a unit-level bivariate linear mixed model

Under a unit-level bivariate linear mixed model, this paper introduces small area predictors of expenditure means and ratios, and derives approximations and estimators of the corresponding mean squared errors. For the considered model, the REML estimation method is implemented. Several simulation experiments, designed to analyze the behavior of the introduced fitting algorithm, predictors and mean squared error estimators, are carried out. An application to real data from the Spanish household budget survey illustrates the behavior of the proposed statistical methodology. The target is the estimation of means of food and non-food household annual expenditures and of ratios of food household expenditures by Spanish provinces.     

How can research contribute to the implementation of sustainable development goals? An interpretive review of SDG literature in management

Organizations often face challenges in incorporating the sustainable development goals (SDGs) into their strategic agendas. Despite the availability of guidelines from leading practitioners, such guidance often lacks the scientific insights provided by academia. In this study, we examine the integration of scholarly management literature into practical guidelines for achieving the SDGs. To do so, we first examined nine practitioner guidelines offered by well-reputed consulting firms, multilateral organizations and non-profits, from which we identified four underlying general processes: prioritizing SDGs to the most relevant strategic goals of firms, contextualizing the SDGs to firms’ geographical and industrial contexts, collaborating with other organizations and stakeholders to make more impactful progress and innovating via business process remodelling. Using these four processes as an overarching framework, we then conducted an interpretive literature review to mine highly cited sustainable development-related papers in the management field covering an 11-year period (2010–2020). From these studies, we derived novel connections to all four stages to offer a more robust and scientifically informed process-based framework for SDG adoption. We discuss multiple scholarly implications, including the importance of enhancing knowledge about the various phases of the SDG adoption model, developing research on understudied SDGs, and expanding theoretical and methodological approaches to SDG research. Additionally, we provide a more grounded SDG adoption model with significant practical implications.     

Scoring rules: A cooperative game-theoretic approach

In this work we define the game of the alternatives for each preference profile, and establish relations between scoring rules and cooperative solution concepts for that game, such as the family of semivalues and the family of least square values. Received: 17 March 1997/Accepted: 12 May 1998     

What do adolescents think and feel about the different female subtypes? An application of the stereotype content model (SCM) / ¿Qué sienten y piensan los/las adolescentes acerca de diferentes subtipos de mujer? Una aplicación del modelo del contenido de los estereotipos

Women continue to face discrimination due to stereotypes that place them at a disadvantage compared to men. However, not all women are stereotyped alike; instead, they are categorized into three main subtypes: traditional women (e.g., housewives), non-traditional women (e.g., career women) and sexy women. This study applies the stereotype content model (SCM) to examine how a sample of adolescents perceives the three subtypes of women in terms of status and competition, the content of the stereotypes and the emotions they feel towards the subtypes. The sample consisted of 221 adolescents, which was reduced to 163 participants (53.7% girls) between the ages of 12 and 18. Results show that sexy women are the most undervalued of the three. Likewise, housewives and career women are perceived more positively than in previous research with the adult population.     

The Production of Difference and Maintenance of Inequality: The Place of Young Goan Men in a Post‐Crisis UK Labour Market

This article examines the ways in which young migrant men are constructed as potential employees in a British town where service sector employment, often on a casual or precarious basis, dominates the bottom end of the labour market. Low‐wage jobs in many British towns are now constructed as feminized, low waged and demanding personal skills of empathy and servility. In this context, young men, and especially young men of colour, including recent in‐migrants, are at a disadvantage, constructed by employers, agencies, co‐workers and customers as less eligible workers than ‘locals’. We use the experiences of young men from Goa as a lens though which to trace the ways in which expectations and experiences when looking for employment produce a hierarchical division of labour in precarious jobs at the bottom end of the service sector.     

Approaching the bench: accessing elites on the judiciary for qualitative interviews

Qualitative research with political elites provides unique opportunities to access intimate details regarding the perceptions and opinions of key decision-makers; yet limited scholarly attention has been directed at the difficulties involved in recruiting these groups for interviews. In this article, I outline a series of targeted strategies aimed at successfully recruiting members of the political elite for qualitative research, using examples from a successful recruitment process in a study of U.S. state court judges. Recruitment strategies tailored to elite populations are described, including utilizing multiple modes of contact, crafting a compelling presentation of the study, highlighting participation benefits, preemptively alleviating concerns, and elegantly navigating gatekeepers. These techniques extend common recruitment approaches used with non-elite populations to political elites and provide guidance in managing the unique power dynamics associated with accessing members of the elite to improve interview participation rates.     

Extended and updated tables for the Friedman rank test

The Friedman's test is used for assessing the independence of repeated experiments resulting in ranks, summarized as a table of integer entries ranging from 1 to k, with k columns and N rows. For its practical use, the hypothesis testing can be derived either from published tables with exact values for small k and N, or using an asymptotic analytical approximation valid for large N or large k. The quality of the approximation, measured as the relative difference of the true critical values with respect those arising from the asymptotic approximation is simply not known. The literature review shows cases where the wrong conclusion could have been drawn using it, although it may not be the only cause of opposite decisions. By Monte Carlo simulation we conclude that published tables do not cover a large enough set of (k, N) values to assure adequate accuracy. Our proposal is to systematically extend existing tables for k and N values, so that using the analytical approximation for values outside it will have less than a prescribed relative error. For illustration purposes some of the tables have been included in the paper, but the complete set is presented as a source code valid for Octave/Matlab/Scilab etc., and amenable to be ported to other programming languages.