Mapping vulnerability to climate change-related hazards: children at risk in a US–Mexico border metropolis

There are significant human impacts associated with climate change. This paper introduces a model for identifying small area risks associated with children’s vulnerability to climate change-related hazard exposures, which is transferable to other regions and adaptable to varied population and exposure scenarios. The cross-national El Paso-Ciudad Juárez (US-Mexico) metropolis serves as the study area for model implementation, which involves mapping social vulnerability, hazard exposure, and cumulative climate change-related risks. This study addresses two limitations of extant fine-scale climate change vulnerability mapping studies. First, rather than focusing on one exposure variable, it assesses the combined risks of multiple exposures (extreme heat, peak ozone, and floods) and, thus, offers a model for mapping neighborhood-level cumulative climate change exposure risks. Second, it provides a model for small area spatial analyses of climate change vulnerability within low-/middle-income countries and in contexts where climate change risks (and appropriate responses) are cross-national in scope.     

Power in families,communication, and fertility decision-making

Decisions on family size and fertility regulation are made within the household, and yet little research has focused on the effects of power relationships within families on demographic decisions. To clarify the situation, the paper presents an original framework, linking bases of power between husbands and wives, resulting communication processes, and decision-making outcomes. The framework is applied to decision-making regarding contraceptive use or abortion, which can be a passive decision, a unilateral decision made openly or surreptitiously by one partner, or a joint decision between husband and wife, depending upon the particular power relationship pre-dominating in the family: coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert, or informational power. To illustrate the utility and viability of this framework, available data from fertility surveys and anthropological studies conducted in Latin America are reviewed and analyzed, as well as policy implications for the design of family planning delivery programs.The author wishes to thank Kurt W. Back, Mead T. Cain, Michele G. Shedlin, Joanne Spicehandler, and J. Mayone Stycos for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Luis de la Macorra for his permission to cite data collected by PROFAM-PIACT de México. Requests for reprints should be directed to Paula E. Hollerbach, The Population Council, Center for Policy Studies, One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, New York 10017.     

Facilitators and barriers to disclosing abuse among women with disabilities

An anonymous audio computer-assisted self-interview (A-CASI) designed to increase awareness of abuse was completed by 305 women with diverse disabilities. Data were also collected about lifetime and past year abuse; perpetrator risk characteristics; facilitators and barriers to disclosing abuse; abuse disclosure to a health provider, case manager, or police officer; and whether a health provider had ever discussed abuse or personal safety. A total of 276 (90%) women reported abuse, 208 (68%) reported abuse within the past year. Women who reported the most abuse experiences in the past year and the most dangerous perpetrators endorsed fewer facilitators and more barriers, but were also more likely to have ever disclosed abuse. Only 15% reported that a health provider had ever discussed abuse and personal safety.     

Afraid to care; unable to care: A critical ethnography within a long-term care home

This paper describes the findings of a critical ethnographic research study conducted in an urban long-term care home. While our intention was to learn more about the culture of care, specifically as it relates to mental health care provision, the participants in the study consistently spoke with us about (what we have labeled as) a culture of compliance. In a context where new long-term care legislation is being implemented along with new, standardized resident assessment instruments, gaining a deeper understanding of the (un)intended consequences of government's efforts to ensure a high quality of care is of paramount importance. This research demonstrates how policy-driven structural mechanisms can (re)produce conditions that result in frontline staff being afraid and unable to care, and thus contributes to a better understanding of the lived experience of frontline long-term care staff who find that their caregiving responsibilities are displaced by caregiving accountabilities.     

Managing Risk as a Duality of Harm and Benefit: A Study of Organizational Risk Objects in the Global Insurance Industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm–benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk‐transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co‐constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm–benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade‐offs between harm–benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.     

Inference of Signs of Interaction Effects in Simultaneous Games With Incomplete Information

This paper studies the inference of interaction effects in discrete simultaneous games with incomplete information. We propose a test for the signs of state‐dependent interaction effects that does not require parametric specifications of players' payoffs, the distributions of their private signals, or the equilibrium selection mechanism. The test relies on the commonly invoked assumption that players' private signals are independent conditional on observed states. The procedure is valid in (but does not rely on) the presence of multiple equilibria in the data‐generating process (DGP). As a by‐product, we propose a formal test for multiple equilibria in the DGP. We also implement the test using data on radio programming of commercial breaks in the United States, and infer stations' incentives to synchronize their commercial breaks. Our results support the earlier finding by Sweeting (2009) that stations have stronger incentives to coordinate and air commercials at the same time during rush hours and in smaller markets.     

The role of management attorneys in union organizing campaigns

We examine the role and effect of management attorneys in union organizing campaigns by conducting in-depth interviews with a number of management and union attorneys, union organizers, and NLRB administrators. Hypotheses are developed for future empirical testing.