At Home with the Missoni Family

This article explores narratives of domesticity present within the spaces, services and discourses of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh. It is argued that the hotel employs a series of marketing strategies evoking the Missoni family as a simulacrum of hosts through references to their home, their domestic practices and their lifestyle to emphasize effects of domesticity with the aim to create a sense of closeness and intimacy between the brand and its consumers. The gastronomic offerings of Hotel Missoni Edinburgh also refer to ideas of family and domesticity, elements associated with Italy and its lifestyle but also characteristic traits of the Missoni brand identity. It is further discussed how Hotel Missoni Edinburgh also employs a series of spatial strategies aimed at augmenting the connotations of domesticity of the hotel to recreate the feel of the Missoni household, producing a sort of hybrid space, also in terms of privacy, that is coherent with the Missoni brand ethos and appealing to costumers.     

‘A Hidden Group of Children’: Support in Schools for Children who Experience Parental Imprisonment

Schools have been identified as playing a key role in supporting the children of prisoners. This paper reports on a study, which explored the support provision offered in schools to children who experience parental imprisonment. By interviewing school representatives, stakeholders, parents and children, we illustrate the support available in schools, the issues that arise and ways in which support provision can be strengthened. Our findings indicate that children of prisoners often constitute a ‘forgotten’ group in schools, and we suggest that an awareness of these children and the challenges they face needs to be raised amongst education practitioners and policy‐makers.     

Global human mobility and knowledge transfer: Highly skilled return migrants as agents of transnational learning

Global human mobility constitutes a key mechanism for knowledge transfer. This study examines the micro-dynamics of knowledge transfer in the developed-developing country migratory context. It highlights the agentic role of return migrants in transforming overseas learning into relevant knowledge in their home contexts. Drawing on situated and relational theories of knowledge and learning, the study views knowledge transfer as a relevance discovery process. It looks at a group of highly skilled migrants who had returned from developed countries to Ethiopia. Despite their high skill, the focus of knowledge transfer was mostly in non-technical fields that include a broad range of organizational knowledge and work practices. These were made relevant to the local context through the returnees’ ‘work of reconciliation’, involving ‘engagement’, ‘alignment’ and ‘imagination’. The study challenges the standard assumption of a one-way linear flow of knowledge from developed to developing countries. It sheds new light on the migration-development link by highlighting the ‘aspirational’ aspect of migrant transnational learning.     

Next Steps in Puberty Research: Broadening the Lens Toward Understudied Populations

Decades of puberty research have yielded key scientific discoveries. Building on the field's rich history, we highlight four understudied populations: youth of color, boys, sexual minority youth, and gender minority youth. We explore why scientific study has been slow to evolve in these groups and propose paths forward for exciting new work. For ethnically racially diverse youth, we discuss the need to incorporate culture and context. For boys, we highlight methodological issues and challenges of mapping existing conceptual models onto boys. For sexual and gender minority youth, we discuss unique challenges during puberty and suggest ways to better capture their experiences. With an eye toward a new era, we make recommendations for next steps and underscore the importance of transdisciplinary research.     

Parental child care during and outside of typical work hours

It has been argued that child care should be treated separately from leisure or housework when analyzing time use data. This is because child care has a positive income gradient, whereas leisure and housework do not. Using U.S. data from PSID-CDS, this paper computes parental child care during and outside of typical work hours (TWH) by income quintile for two-parent families. The TWH distinction is important because the opportunity cost of spending time with children is first and foremost in terms of forgone earnings during TWH; outside of TWH, leisure or housework mainly constitute this opportunity cost. Indeed, I find that child care decreases with income during TWH and, hence, behaves similarly to leisure and other household chores. While maternal child care also slightly decreases with income outside of TWH, paternal care increases with income outside of TWH. Also, the discrepancy between paternal and maternal child care is smaller outside of TWH than it is during TWH. This is particularly pronounced in high income families. Theoretical implications are derived in a static framework of time allocation and child quality production encompassing the recent literature on the topic. Variation in child care during TWH can be rationalized by assuming a high elasticity of substitution between leisure, consumption and child quality. This is the standard explanation for the patterns observed in leisure and housework. Within this widely used framework, however, the facts outside of TWH point to systematic differences by income in preferences or productivity. Further exploration of child care patterns during and outside of TWH is needed to inform us about the dimensions in which this widely used framework should be extended.     

Programme form and service user well-being: Linking theory and evidence

Since the early 1990s, the “activation turn” has become a standard welfare orthodoxy at the heart of international welfare systems. Although policymakers talk confidently about the well-being gains of activation interventions and their employment outcomes, a growing body of research has focused instead on questions around “activation process well-being”—the potential well-being effects of participation in activation programmes themselves. The present article makes three main contributions to the theory, knowledge, and policy practice of this activation well-being literature. First, the paper develops an original conceptual framework that newly connects well-being theory, qualitative variation in programmatic form, and empirically testable well-being expectations for participating service users. Second, the paper uses multivariate statistical analyses to examine six conceptually derived hypotheses around variation in programme forms and implications for participating service users' well-being, drawing on the case study of U.K. activation policy. Noteworthy is the paper's unique distributional insights into well-being effects across different types of service users. Third, the paper offers new policy contributions around the relevance of policy form to service user well-being as well as important pointers to key programme features in this regard.     

The Nucleolus Strikes Back*

In a recent paper in Decision Sciences, Barton proposes the MTPD method for finding a unique solution for the nucleolus. We argue that the basis for the MTPD method is flawed because the nucleolus is always unique. Furthermore, the MTPD method is inconsistent and does not exhibit the properties desirable in a cost allocation method.     

Continuity and changes in attitudes toward marriage in contemporary Taiwan

Journal of Population Research - Research on marriage values bears crucial policy implications in a low-fertility context where obstacles to marriage are indicative of fertility barriers,...     

Biostatistics Instruction at Meharry Medical College

In a variety of settings, it is desirable to display a collection of likelihoods over a common interval. One approach is simply to superimpose the likelihood curves. However, where there are more than a handful of curves, such displays are extremely difficult to decipher. An alternative is simply to display a point estimate with a confidence interval, corresponding to each likelihood. However, these may be inadequate when the likelihood is not approximately normal, as can occur with small sample sizes or nonlinear models. A second dimension is needed to gauge the relative plausibility of different parameter values. We introduce the raindrop plot, a shaded figure over the range of parameter values having log-likelihood greater than some cutoff, with height varying proportional to the difference between the log-likelihood and the cutoff. In the case of a normal likelihood, this produces a reflected parabola so that deviations from normality can be easily detected. An analogue of the raindrop plot can also be used to display estimated random effect distributions, posterior distributions, and predictive distributions.