Big fat Assyrian/Syriac weddings: rituals and marriage traditions among Middle Eastern Christians in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Weddings can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ and also as ‘symbolic struggles’ since their glamour appears to be a new indicator of status for many families, especially migrant ones. A mixture of traditional as well as reinvented wedding customs serves a community searching for ethnic identity markers that can help it to embrace all of its descendants. This article presents a case study of how Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and marriage traditions that are being performed and transformed in the migratory context of Sweden over the last 50 years. Among the Middle Eastern Christians, who have been emigrating from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq since the 1960s, and which today numbers 120,000 individuals, marriage is a very serious business – a permanent union between spouses and their respective families. The purpose of the article is to analyse Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and to discuss how they have shaped the modern Assyrian/Syriac identity. It also explores how local marriages connect and reconnect migrants of this ethno-religious group(s) and how it differentiates them from their peers in the surrounding Swedish society – religiously, socially and even aesthetically.     

Moving citizens: citizenship practices among Polish migrants in Norway and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Following post-EU-accession migration, Poles currently form the largest group of foreign nationals in Norway and the second largest group of foreign born residents in the United Kingdom. Given the considerable volume of new arrivals, there is a growing literature on Polish migration to both countries; however, there is little comparative research on Polish migration across different European settings. By exploring how Polish migrants reflect on the possibilities of settlement or return, this paper comparatively examines the effects that permanent and ‘normalised’ mobility has on Polish migrants’ self-perception as citizens in four different cities. In addition to classic citizenship studies, which highlight the influence of a nation-state based institutionalised citizenship regime, we find that transnational exchanges, local provisions and inter-personal relationships shape Polish migrants’ practices of citizenship. The resulting understanding of integration is processual and sees integration as constituted by negotiated transnational balancing acts that respond to (and sometimes contradict) cultural, economic and political demands and commitments. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with a total of 80 respondents, conducted in two British and two Norwegian cities that experienced significant Polish immigration, Oslo, Bergen, Bristol and Sheffield.     

Household structure and labor force participation of black,hispanic, and white mothers

This paper investigates whether the inclusion of nonnuclear adults in a household facilitates the labor force participation of single and married mothers. Results based on a sample of extended and nuclear households show that the extension mechanism facilitates the labor market entry of married mothers, but not of single mothers. Interactions between extended structure, ethnicity, and poverty, however, suggest a complex relationship. For extended family households, the gender and employment characteristics of nonnuclear adults affected the labor force participation of single mothers, but the number of nonnuclear members was inversely associated with the market activity of married mothers. Policy implications are discussed in the final section.     

For the Love of Art? Episodic Volunteering at Cultural Events

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Although episodic volunteering is a popular form of volunteering and has received increasing attention from researchers,...     

Bayesian hierarchical model for the prediction of football results

The problem of modelling football data has become increasingly popular in the last few years and many different models have been proposed with the aim of estimating the characteristics that bring a team to lose or win a game, or to predict the score of a particular match. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to fulfil both these aims and test its predictive strength based on data about the Italian Serie A 1991–1992 championship. To overcome the issue of overshrinkage produced by the Bayesian hierarchical model, we specify a more complex mixture model that results in a better fit to the observed data. We test its performance using an example of the Italian Serie A 2007–2008 championship.     

Robust analysis of variance for a randomized block design

In this paper we study the asymptotic theory of M-estimates and their associated tests for a one-factor experiment in a randomized block design. In this case one natural asymptotic theory corresponds to leaving the number of treatments fixed and letting the number of blocks tend to infinity. The classic asymptotic theory of M-estimates does not apply here, because the number of parameters and the number of observations are of the same order. In this paper we prove the consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimators of the treatment effects. It turns out that the asymptotic covariance matrix of the treatment effects estimators differs from the one derived from the classic theory of M-estimates for the linear model with a fixed number of parameters. We also study a test for treatment effects derived from M-estimates and we compare by Monte Carlo simulation the efficiency of this test with respect to the F-test, the Friedman test and the test based on aligned ranks.     

Practical modeling strategies for unbalanced longitudinal data analysis

In practice, data are often measured repeatedly on the same individual at several points in time. Main interest often relies in characterizing the way the response changes in time, and the predictors of that change. Marginal, mixed and transition are frequently considered to be the main models for continuous longitudinal data analysis. These approaches are proposed primarily for balanced longitudinal design. However, in clinic studies, data are usually not balanced and some restrictions are necessary in order to use these models. This paper was motivated by a data set related to longitudinal height measurements in children of HIV-infected mothers that was recorded at the university hospital of the Federal University in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This data set is severely unbalanced. The goal of this paper is to assess the application of continuous longitudinal models for the analysis of unbalanced data set.