Physical exercise,employee fitness and the management of health at work

Abstract

This paper presents some recent data on why organizations invest in exercise and physical fitness programmes for their stiff. These data suggest that, owing to a lack of evaluation studies, organizations act mainly on the basis of assumption and belief. However, from a subsequent review of the available literature on the personal and organizational effects of such programmes, it appears that these assumptions and beliefs are not altogether unfounded. The paper concludes by discussing the ways in which exercise and employee fitness programmes might help die individual and their organization in terms of the management of health at work.     

Unobserved heterogeneity and the analysis of longitudinal spatial choice data

This paper tackles the problem of handling uncontrolled heterogeneity due to unobserved influences on the decision process of spatial choice. It concentrates upon a discrete-time/‘random-effects’ approach to the problem of unobserved heterogeneity and documents parametric and non-parametric methods of specifying and estimating models which can cope with unobserved heterogeneity.     

Sex selection with biased technologies and its effect on the population sex ratio

Current biomedical research on sex selection techniques may soon offer couples the opportunity to choose the sex of their children with greater certainty. A technique planned for marketing by mid-1978 can increase the probability of bearing a son to as much as 0.90. However, couples who wish to improve their chances of bearing a daughter have no such opportunity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, a decision-making model is provided which describes how couples should choose among alternative sex-selection methods so as to maximize the probability of bearing their desired number of sons and daughters. Second, the effect of the widespread use of sex-selection techniques on the population sex ratio is explored. It is shown that even if populations have unbiased sex preferences, or sex preferences biased towards daughters, the use of biased sex-selection technologies may result in very high population sex ratios.     

Pregnant women's attitudes toward the abortion of defective fetuses

A survey asked 190 pregnant women their opinions on whether a hypothetical other woman would be justified in having an abortion under ten different circumstances, four of which related to abnormalities of the fetus. They were then asked whether they would be justified in having an abortion under these same circumstances. Also assessed were these women's views concerning the justifiability of abortion for a specific group of fetal abnormalities, neural tube defects. Respondents were more likely to view abortion as justifiable for a hypothetical other than for themselves. However, there was no evidence that pregnant women's views about abortion are more conservative than those of the general public. The majority of respondents considered abortion of a defective fetus to be justified, both for themselves and for others. The best predictor of abortion attitudes was respondent's views about the ideal number of children in a completed family.This research was supported by a grant from Maternal and Child Health Research, Bureau of Community Health Services, DHHS. Reprint requests should be sent to Dr. Ruth Faden at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, Division of Health Education, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205.     

Children, death and ageism

The position of children in the social order can be seen as an ambiguous one. On the one hand, they are highly valued, at a rhetorical level at least, as the basis of the future generation. On the other hand, however, they can be seen to be marginalized and disenfranchised, protected from more aspects of social life than is strictly necessary. This paper explores some of the important issues relating to children's disenfranchised social position, with specific reference to issues relating to death, dying and bereavement.     

Education, sex and leisure: ideology, discipline and the construction of race among South African servicemen during the Second World War

During the Second World War (1939-1945), South African military authorities employed various regimes to mould white South African soldiers as citizens of a particular type. These coincided broadly with traditions of racial statehood identified by David Goldberg, and included attempts at ideological control – through the liberal Army Education Scheme, a compulsory adult education project – as well as disciplinary interventions, which concentrated on soldiers' sexuality. The ways that ordinary soldiers responded to these divergent discourses reminds us that whiteness in a racial state was elaborated not just from above, but also below. This observation raises some cautionary points for the writing of 'post-social' history, and just as it demands that ordinary servicemen's actions, experiences and ideologies need to be related to the state and other modes of power, it reaffirms Geoff Eley's appeal for a 'new history of society'.Lines of investigation that explore attempts to educate, discipline and control white soldiers begin to challenge some of the conventional periodizations of SA history, particularly the notion that South Africa's 1940s represented an optimistic 'world of possibilities'.     

Dwelling Space: Expectations and the Housing System

The average person-per-room ratio in Australia is low by international standards. But there are marked inequalities in the distribution of dwelling space, and the question is examined of whether the current allocation of dwelling space within the housing system constitutes a social problem on a national scale. The examination is based partly on an analysis of published census data, partly on existing literature, and partly on raw data derived from two recent housing surveys.     

Sex similarities in occupational status attainment: Are the results due to the restriction of the sample to employed women?

Research on sex differences in occupational attainment suggests that working men and working women attain essentially the same mean level of occupational attainment and do so through quite similar processes. A possible explanation for these similarities is that the sample of working women contains an overrepresentation of successful women, since women who can afford not to work will stay out of the labor force unless they find a job commensurate with their education. This we define as a censoring problem. By extending a technique developed by Heckman, we can estimate the structural parameters for all women, regardless of current employment status. This procedure allows us to assess the impact of the censoring problem on women's occupational attainment equations.