Is Part‐time Employment Here to Stay? Working Hours of Dutch Women over Successive Generations

The Netherlands combines a high female employment rate with a high part‐time employment rate. This is likely to be the result of (societal) preferences as the removal of institutional barriers has not led to higher working hours. We investigate the development of working hours over successive generations of women using the Dutch Labour Force Survey 1992–2005. We find evidence of a strictly increasing propensity to work part‐time and a decreasing propensity to work full‐time for the generations born after the early 1950s. Our results are in line with results of studies on social norms and attitudes. It seems likely that without changes in (societal) preferences part‐time employment is indeed here to stay.     

Green Care Farms Promote Activity Among Elderly People With Dementia

In the Netherlands, an increasing number of green care farms are providing day care to community-dwelling elderly people with dementia. Currently, it is unknown whether activities, activity participation, and facility use of elderly people with dementia at green care farms differ from those at regular day care facilities. The authors performed group and individual observations at 11 green care farms and 12 regular day care facilities. Activities of elderly people at green care farms were more frequent, occurred outdoors more often, were of a higher physical intensity, and more often were aimed at individuals than activities at regular day care facilities. Therefore, the green care farms’ environment may be more beneficial for elderly people with dementia than the regular day care facility environment.     

Social Work,Social Policy and the Journal

There are problems associated with mainstream sociological and criminological research into youth violence. Conventional frameworks ignore the interpretive component of violence and thus fail to treat youth violence as a form of action in which motivations, moral impulses and feelings are constitutive of the action. Young people historically have had little opportunity to enter into dominant discourses about violence. This paper reports on the accounts of 29 young people who have been directly involved in violence. Those young people were asked to define violence and describe what personal and collective meanings they attach to their actions.     

Work orders: Analysing employment histories using sequence data

The analysis of employment histories has been facilitated recently by advances in survey methodology, statistical processes and computing power. While much work has focused on transitions between states and time spent in one state, the potential of analysing a series of states (i.e. careers) has largely been ignored. A concentration on movement between two states, whilst allowing relevant contextual covariates to be controlled for, often ignores valuable data both prior to and after the episode in question. Analysis of extended sequences of employment states is better able to describe employment trajectories. Furthermore, comparison of sequences permits either allocation to theoretical categories, or the identification of latent groupings using cluster analysis. The resulting typology of careers can then be used in inferentially based analyses. This paper explores sequence analysis using Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). OMA is explained in relation to one broad substantive issue: the relationship between employment trajectories and gender.     

Beyond Performance Enhancement: Polypharmacy among Collegiate Users of Steroids

Abstract

The extremely low prevalence of steroid use among college students makes it virtually impossible to conduct analyses on any single college campus. By studying a cohort of 58,625 college students from 78 institutions that administered the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey in 1990 and 1991, a critical mass of 175 users on which it was possible to conduct statistical analyses was identified. Compared with a randomly selected group of nonusers, the steroid users reported consuming dramatically more alcohol and demonstrated higher rates of binge drinking. In addition, a significantly higher percentage of steroid users reported using tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, sedatives, hallucinogens, opiates, inhalants, and designer drugs. A higher percentage of steroid users than nonusers also reported experiencing negative consequences as a result of substance abuse, and a greater percentage of the steroid users reported family histories of abuse of alcohol and other drugs. Implications from the standpoint of student development are discussed.     

IMAGINING 'ASIA-PACIFIC': FORGETTING POLITICS AND COLONIALISM IN THE MAGICAL WATERS OF THE PACIFIC. AN AMERICANIST CRITIQUE

This essay offers a critical genealogy of US imperial dynamics in the Pacific in the context of examining the discursive tactics of APEC and the emerging hegemony of transnational capital in the region. Moving from Honolulu to Taipei and Canberra in focus, it tracks the dynamics of globalization and localization under which Asia-Pacific is being constructed into postcolonial if not post-political identity as a coherent region of teleological belonging. Literary and cultural producers are invoked, to the contrary, in order to wrest Asia/Pacific into critical self-consciousness of regional unevenness, alternative possibility, spatial contestation, and desublimated otherness. Asia/Pacific can thus become the signifier for a cultural studies in which opposition, location, indigeneity, and alternative discursive framings of the region can come into contemporary critical play.     

Strict Positive Definiteness of a Product of Covariance Functions

Positive definiteness represents an admissibility condition for a function to be a covariance. Nevertheless, the more restricted condition of strict positive definiteness has received attention in literature, especially in spatial statistics, since it ensures that the kriging system has a unique solution. Most known covariance functions are isotropic but there are applications where isotropy is not appropriate, e.g., space-time covariance functions. One way to construct non-isotropic covariance functions is to use a product or a product-sum. In this article, it is given a necessary as well as a sufficient condition for a product of two covariance functions to be strictly positive definite. This result is extended to the well-known product-sum covariance model.     

A simple approximation relation between the symmetric generalized logistic and the students t distributions

In this paper, we obtain a new approximation of the Student's t distribution by using the symmetric generalized logistic (SGL) distribution function. The error of this approximation is shown to be 0(1/n² )where nis the degrees of freedom of thetdistribution. In comparison to similar approximations by George and Ojo and George et al. (1986), this new approximation is much simpler and more accurate. It is also shown that under some conditions, the tdistribution is a good approximation of the SGL distribution. Therefore, the complicated expressions for the cumulants and moments of the SGL can be approximated by those of the t, distribution. Finally, numerical results are given.     

Nonparametric forecasting: a comparison of three kernel-based methods

In this paper the use of three kernel-based nonparametric forecasting methods - the conditional mean, the conditional median, and the conditional mode -is explored in detail. Several issues related to the estimation of these methods are discussed, including the choice of the bandwidth and the type of kernel function. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the three nonparametric methods is investigated using 60 real time series. We find that there is no superior forecast method for series having approximately less than 100 observations. However, when a time series is long or when its conditional density is bimodal there is quite a difference between the forecasting performance of the three kernel-based forecasting methods.