The International Child Poverty Gap: Does Demography Matter?

According to the Luxembourg Income Study data, the U.S. child poverty rate is the second highest among 15 high-income nations. The present work reveals that 55% of all American children living in a household headed by a single female with no other adult present live in poverty-the highest rate for any of the five living arrangements in the 15 countries examined in this study. While previous analyses have focused on market forces and governmental redistribution across households, we question the contribution of demographic factors that place children in family structures with different poverty risks relative to other factors such as differential market opportunities and governmental benefits for adults caring for children in various living arrangements. Applying a classic demographic decomposition technique to the overall poverty gap, we find that the distributional effect of demographic behavior contributes little to the U.S. poverty gap with other nations (and none with respect to the United Kingdom). Overall differences in labor markets and welfare schemes best explain the U.S. child poverty gap, although for some countries, the gap is accentuated by the gradient of governmental transfers, and for most countries, by the gradient of market earnings across living arrangements.     

Health care issues among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) populations in the United States: Introduction

This supplemental issue of the Journal of Homosexuality presents research that explores a variety of health care issues encountered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) population groups in the United States over the 10-year period from 1993 to 2002. Topics include access to health care, utilization of care, training of medical and mental health providers, and the appropriate preparation of clinical offices and waiting areas. Authors used a variety of community-based public health research methods, including participant and provider surveys and retrospective chart reviews of patients, to develop this body of research, providing a recent-historical perspective on the complex health care and health-related needs of sexual and gender minorities. Particularly for transgender and intersex populations, the state of research describing their health care needs is in its infancy, and much remains to be done to design effective medical and mental health programs and interventions.     

Psychosocial Correlates of Interpersonal Sensitivity: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis examines how interpersonal sensitivity (IS), defined as accurate judgment or recall of others’ behavior or appearance, is related to psychosocial characteristics of the perceiver, defined as personality traits, social and emotional functioning, life experiences, values, attitudes, and self-concept. For 215 independent studies reported in 96 published sources, higher IS was generally associated with favorable or adaptive psychosocial functioning. Significant mean correlations were found for 27 of the 40 categories of psychosocial variables; these categories covered many different personality traits, indicators of mental health, and social and work-related competencies. Moreover, many additional studies that fell outside these conceptual categories also showed significant positive relations between IS and numerous other psychosocial variables. Taken together, the results support the construct validity of IS tests and demonstrate that IS is associated with many important aspects of personal and social functioning.

Back to Brit: retired British migrants returning from Spain

Since the seminal research of O'Reilly, Karen [2000. The British on the Costa del Sol. London: Routledge] and King, Russell, Anthony Warnes, Allan Williams [2000. Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean. New York: Berg Publishers] about British citizens on the Costa del Sol there has been a surge in the publication of lifestyle migration papers, books and research. Nonetheless, there is a part of the lifestyle migration process that has been rarely explored: a return move to the country of origin following retirement migration. Research has indicated a broad increase in the number of older British returnees, yet there has been no substantive research on the topic. This paper therefore attempts to fill this gap by using Spanish registry data to examine the number of British retirees since 2009 who have returned to the UK. In addition, the results of an electronic survey to older British people in Spain are presented which suggest that considerable numbers of British citizens aged over 55 living in the Northern Costa Blanca are likely to return in the next few years. These data therefore indicate the relevance of return migration from Spain to the UK as a significant issue to the academic community as well as to British and Spanish policy-makers.     

Relationship between urbanization and bat community structure in national parks of the southeastern U.S.

Urbanization and development are predicted to increase considerably in the United States over the next several decades, and this is expected to result in large-scale habitat loss, fragmentation and loss of wildlife species. Thus, natural parks and preserves are becomingly increasingly important in the conservation of regional biodiversity. We used mist-nets and AnabatII acoustic detectors to survey bats in 10 national parks in the southeastern U.S. and examined the relationship between bat community structure and development in the surrounding 5 km. We predicted that species richness would increase with park size and that species richness and evenness would decrease with development. Species richness was not related to development or any other landscape characteristics including park size. In contrast, species evenness declined with increasing development. Percent Developed land in the surrounding 5 km area was the only variable that entered into the stepwise regression model. The decrease in species evenness in the urban parks was due to the dominance of big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) in these parks. The percentage of big brown bats in our captures was positively related to percent Developed land in the surrounding area. Our data suggest that urban parks may be important for conserving regional bat biodiversity. However, the low species evenness in these parks suggests that some bat species may be susceptible to the effects of urbanization and may be extirpated over time. Thus, management of urban as well as rural parks should strive to conserve as much bat roosting and foraging habitat as possible.     

Construction Safety Risk Modeling and Simulation

By building on a genetic‐inspired attribute‐based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel approach to define, model, and simulate univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at the situational level. Our fully data‐driven techniques provide construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of getting valuable empirical insights from attribute‐based data extracted from unstructured textual injury reports. By applying our methodology on a data set of 814 injury reports, we first show the frequency‐magnitude distribution of construction safety risk to be very similar to that of many natural phenomena such as precipitation or earthquakes. Motivated by this observation, and drawing on state‐of‐the‐art techniques in hydroclimatology and insurance, we then introduce univariate and bivariate nonparametric stochastic safety risk generators based on kernel density estimators and copulas. These generators enable the user to produce large numbers of synthetic safety risk values faithful to the original data, allowing safety‐related decision making under uncertainty to be grounded on extensive empirical evidence. One of the implications of our study is that like natural phenomena, construction safety may benefit from being studied quantitatively by leveraging empirical data rather than strictly being approached through a managerial perspective using subjective data, which is the current industry standard. Finally, a side but interesting finding is that in our data set, attributes related to high energy levels (e.g., machinery, hazardous substance) and to human error (e.g., improper security of tools) emerge as strong risk shapers.     

“A stone wall out of the earth that thundering cannon cannot destroy"? Bastion and Moat at the Castle,Cape Town

Although the urgency with which the Dutch East India Company administration at the Cape built defensive works was a direct result of their fear of attack from both land and sea, there was an additional imperative, for the Castle at Cape Town stood as a symbol of Dutch colonial aspirations. In this paper, we compare written and material texts of one part of the Castle's architecture to show firstly, how the discordances between such sources can reveal an underside of early colonization and secondly, how the Castle moat, in the seventeenth century a stamp of aspirant power, was by the mid‐nineteenth century a dump and a public nuisance.     

Activating adult allies from a rural community on lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, and queer student issues in school using photovoice

Purpose: Many students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) face hostile school environments that can negatively impact their mental health and education. This study involved a photovoice project where high school students from a gay-straight alliance in the rural southeastern United States took photographs that depicted the issues LGBTQ students were facing and then exhibited their photographs and stories to individuals from the school system and local community to promote awareness, dialogue, and action. Methods: Twenty adults who attended the photovoice exhibit responded to an online survey about their experiences with the intervention. Results: Eighty-five percent of adults reported that the intervention made them think about issues they had not previously considered, including the struggles LGBTQ youths face, gender issues, and living in a rural community. Common emotions experienced at the intervention included feeling excited, concern for the youths, and proud of the youths. Furthermore, 81% of the adults indicated that they would take action or behave differently as a result of the intervention, including supporting and affirming LGBTQ students, using gender-neutral and -inclusive language, and confronting bias in themselves and others. Conclusions: Photovoice is a promising strategy for LGBTQ students to activate adult allies in their community.