Transparency and Accountability Practices of Local Government Units in the Philippines: a Measurement from the Ground

Public Organization Review - The organizational practices of government personnel are indispensable components of building public trust and confidence. The 56 department heads and 662 personnel...     

Inequality Assessment by Probabilistic Development Indices

Social Indicators Research - This paper analyses the Human Development Index (HDI) time series from 2010 to 2017. An alternative index is studied, which combines the same components of the HDI by...     

Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.     

The intergenerational education spillovers of pension reform in China

Economic theory establishes that pension privatization weakens the link between old and young and so reduces the incentive to invest in public education in an economy with lower return rate of capital than growth rate of wage. However, empirical studies of the link change are few. In this paper, we investigate the effects of pension privatization and the central government’s subsidy to individual accounts on public education spending in a three-period overlapping generation model. And then, we take contemporary pension reforms in a number of Chinese provinces as offering natural experiment conditions. Using a difference-in-difference framework and 282 municipal districts panel data over years 1998–2009, we test the pension-education theoretical link change. Both our theoretical and empirical results confirm that pension privatization is adversely associated with local public spending on education in China. Private pension subsidies, moreover, magnify this effect. Our study supports the theoretical assertion and selective empirical findings of a negative intergenerational effect of pension privatization.     

Hidden Resources and Barriers in Career Learning Assessment With Adolescents Vulnerable to Discrimination

The authors maintain that the social learning theory of career development and counseling has not been applied to diverse populations. To address this gap in the literature, the authors conducted a qualitative analysis of interviews with 21 middle school students in a low‐income, culturally diverse, inner‐city public school. Four themes emerged, reflecting the influence of discrimination on participants' career learning: contextual barriers and resources for learning, and psychological barriers and resources for learning. The authors provide a conceptual framework for assessing resources and barriers and a rationale for why these aspects often remain hidden or unexamined in career assessment with clients who are vulnerable to discrimination.     

Book Review: The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment,by Susan M. Hartmann. Yale University Press,New Haven,CT, 1998

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Development of Parenting Skills in Individuals with an Intellectual Impairment: an epigenetic explanation

Current changes in legislation in the United States support the rights of individuals with an intellectual impairment to marry and have children. Current societal views, however, are heavily influenced by our history of viewing these individuals as inadequate parents. This historical view is based upon the assumption that those with intellectual impairments are genetically inferior. Changing views of development, however, suggest that the issue of how individuals with intellectual impairments develop is somewhat more complex. The epigenetic model is one that proposes that development is the result of the complex transaction between the individual and the environment. This paper applies this model to persons with an intellectual impairment to better understand the parenting skills they display. It is argued that by intervening and changing developmental pathways, the development of parenting skills of those with intellectual impairments can be facilitated.     

The residual effect of a growth-decay mechanism and the distributions of covariance structures

The product of two independent or dependent scalar normal variables, sums of products, sample covariances, and general bilinear forms are considered. Their distributions are shown to belong to a class called generalized Laplacian. A growth-decay mechanism is also shown to produce such a generalized Laplacian. Sets of necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for bilinear forms to belong to this class. As a generalization, the distributions of rectangular matrices associated with multivariate normal random vectors are also discussed.     

Nichts genaues weiss man nicht!?

What do voters really know about party platforms and how do they perceive the contents? Are there any relationships between party election platforms and electoral behavior? Despite of much research on parties, there are hardly any answers to these questions. If political parties devise programmes in order to influence political attitudes or electoral behavior, it will be necessary that these programmes are read by people. But it seems to be unclear if and how people do so. This article shows clearly that voters don’t know much about party manifestoes. Still, programmes are more important for voters than many people believe. Programmes are also an important factor for electoral behavior. But there is still a lack of data to get evident results.     

Suicide Attempts by Adolescent Latinas: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Family Correlates

Epidemiological data show high rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Latinas. Few studies have addressed the psychosocial, cultural and family correlates of suicide attempts among this age group of a rapidly growing population. The authors studied 31 adolescent Hispanic females who were receiving mental health services; 14 girls had attempted suicide in the previous five years and 17 had never attempted suicide. The two groups of girls did not differ significantly with respect to demographic profiles, levels of depression, family type, acculturation, or self-esteem. However, as hypothesized, the mutuality between girls and their mothers was lower among suicide attempters. Maladaptive coping skills of withdrawal and wishful thinking were more commonly used by attempters, and non-attempters used emotional regulation and problem-solving more frequently. Findings are discussed within the context of the empirical and theoretical literature and implications for practice are considered.