Working with the Experts: collaborative research with people with an intellectual disability

This paper reports on part of a wider study concerned with the collaborative efforts of an inquirer and six people with an intellectual disability, to develop a grounded theory explaining the processes by which these informants manage the relationships within their personal communities. The study was conducted through a series of in-depth interviews with each informant; a process characterised by information sharing, tentative theory development and elaboration, and informants' checking the accuracy of the emerging theory. This inductive approach allowed not only an insight into the lives of each informant, but recognised the informants' expertise in matters concerning their own lives and thus facilitated the emergence of theoretical elements of relevance to the informants themselves. The focus of the paper is on the collaborative or partnership approach adopted. The outcomes of the research partnership are detailed and implications drawn for the role of research in the lifestyles of people with an intellectual disability.     

Dressing and Undressing the House

Based on anthropological fieldwork within a museum collection, this article discusses the changing nature of the rural household in central Romania. Through a detailed examination of its interiors, it provides an understanding of local perspectives on traditional households. Tracing the historical process of undressing and remaking this space, the article highlights the shifting local attitudes toward domesticity and different sentiments toward the house voiced by source communities and museum professionals. It aims to illuminate the contrasting time-spaces in which rural households are embedded and to provide a context for rethinking this material in the museum setting.     

Wage Inequality and Structural Change

Social Indicators Research - Income inequality in the context of large structural change has received a lot of attention in the literature, but most studies relied on household post-transfer...     

Explaining welfare recidivism: what role do unemployment and initial spells have?

The question of high welfare re-entry rates has attracted great attention from economists and policymakers. Using a very rich administrative data set for the minimum income program of the Madrid Government (over 50,000 spells), this paper aims to broach various questions arising from the issue of welfare re-entry. We try to identify what factors determine observed differences in the durations of the first off-welfare spell. We analyze the combined effects of the length and type of exit of the first spell, unemployment, and sociodemographic characteristics. The experience of the first spell and, to a lesser extent, employability can contribute toward lengthening the time spent outside the program. Our results also show that off-welfare spells of households leaving the program in periods of low economic growth will be longer than those that do so during economic expansions. With the exception of unemployment effects, our estimates yield very similar results to those obtained in the U.S. studies, suggesting that U.S. welfare policies and analyses are not entirely irrelevant for European discussions of welfare policies.     

Emotional intelligence competences of three different ethnic groups in Indonesia

This study attempts to provide a portrayal of emotional intelligence (EI) of the Indonesians, one of the fourth most populous countries and multiethnic societies in the world, specifically across the 404 Bataks, 430 Minangkabau, and 479 Javanese ethnics. The result indicated that the Indonesian version of the EQ-i is invariant across the three ethnic groups. The findings also showed that the three ethnic groups have some shared characteristics in terms of interpersonal, assertiveness, empathy, social responsibility, flexibility, and problem-solving competences. We found significant main effects of ethnicity and gender as well as the interaction effect on EI competences. Cross-ethnic comparison showed that the Minangkabau assessed in this study are the most underdeveloped group in terms of social and emotional capabilities. We recommend replications of this study for other Indonesian ethnic groups to draw a more valid conclusion and to support the development of society.     

The imagined ‘other’ and its shifts: politics and identifications in Turkish Cyprus

This article addresses the puzzling case of shifting identity constructions in northern Cyprus, from ethnic to civic–territorial in 2003 and back to ethnic in 2009. It is argued that these shifts occurred when external factors (EU and Turkey) opened/closed windows of opportunity for internal elites’ reconfigurations. It then explains societal responsiveness to these nation-building changes sustaining that, over time, a process transforming the perception of the ‘other’ took place from below and a civic–territorial identity layer (Cypriotness) developed along the ethnic-Turkish layer. These coexist and fluctuate depending on the given context of choice.     

Three categories of urban green areas and the effect of their different management on the communities of ants,spiders and harvestmen

Urban green areas have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation in cities. However, land use and the different management practices applied to these areas determine their effectiveness as biodiversity refuges within cities. In our study, we compare the biodiversity of three bioindicator groups of arthropods (ants, spiders and harvestmen) found in eleven urban green sites in Warsaw (Poland). The studied sites represent three categories of management: botanical gardens, public parks and urban woodlands. Our aim was to determine the effect of the type of management (as urban green categories) on arthropod communities in urban areas.

     

Some properties of the generalized TTT transform

Recently Li and Shaked [2007. A general family of univariate stochastic orders. J. Statist. Plann. Inference 137, 3601–3610] introduced the generalized total time on test (GTTT) transform with respect to a given function ?$?$. In this paper we study some properties of it which are related with stochastic orderings. A concept of Lehmann and Rojo [1992. Invariant directional orderings. Ann. Statist. 20, 2100–2110] is applied to a new setting and the GTTT transform is used to define invariance properties and distances of some stochastic orders. Iterations of the GTTT transforms are also studied and their relations with exponential mixtures of gamma distributions are established.     

Between the market and the hard place: neoliberalization and the Polish LGBT movement

ABSTRACT

Whilst the fall of state socialism in 1989 opened up a space for the Polish LGBT movement to emerge and develop, over the last three decades the process has taken place against the backdrop of material and ideological constraints of neoliberalization, a point that has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on the Polish LGBT movement. Informed by interviews with Polish LGBT activists this article explores the contradictory ways in which processes of neoliberalization and market logic influence and often constrain the Polish LGBT movement. The argument is that neoliberalization and its logic profusely affect what is possible and desirable for the Polish LGBT movement on a personal, local as well as a national level. The contradictory effects of the processes of neoliberalization combined with the political climate, with minimal or no state support for LGBT organizing, result in a movement that is at the mercy of the market-like environment, under-resourced, dependent almost entirely on voluntary labor and spatially scarce.