Nutrition and Fertility in Bangladesh: Breastfeeding and Post Partum Amenorrhoea

From 1975 to 1980 a prospective study a nearly 2,500 married, fertile women was conducted in Matlab, Bangladesh at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Women were interviewed at monthly intervals to collect information on nutritional and reproductive status, in order to study the factors associated with natural fertility. The median duration of amenorrhoea for women with no child deaths was 15.5 months, with older women and those of higher parities recording longer durations than younger women or those of lower parities. Median duration of amenorrhoea for women with six or more years of education was 8.4 months compared to 16.4 months among women with no education. When classified by weight at pregnancy termination, average duration of amenorrhoea of women weighing less than 38 kg was 17.6 months compared to 13.6 months among women weighing more than 44 kg. Proportional hazards analyses show that mother's education, parity, month of birth, supplementation practices and nutritional status were significantly associated with the probability of resuming menstruation.     

Licensed house manager skills/competences and the management development process in Bass Taverns

The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of critical licensed house management skills within Bass Taverns. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which these are viewed as being concerned with 'soft' (behavioural) or 'hard' (technical) aspects of management. The focus of the research is on the 'shared understanding' of the importance of licensed house managerial skills. It is concerned with the identification of coherence and tensions in the criticality of certain managerial skills as perceived by the company's senior and licensed house managers. It presents the findings of surveys conducted at both senior and licensed house manager levels within the company to establish the extent to which interhierarchical consistency exists in the areas of critical skills/competences and whether these are seen as being specific to the organization or considered as generic. The research reports a general harmony regarding the nature of the skills required by licensed house managers and evidence of a focus on people-oriented skills, which are seen as being particularly important for achieving business success. Licensed house managers rated the critical skills as 'generic' rather than 'specific' to the taverns context, drawing attention to the need for the organization to address the manner in which these skills are developed.     

Evaluating U.S. Medical Schools' Efforts to Educate Faculty Researchers on Research Integrity and Research Misconduct Policies and Procedures

This paper examines how well U.S. medical school institutions are doing to promote research integrity. It is an important question to ask in order to determine whether there are sufficient and adequate protections in place to protect the U.S. Public Health Service's (PHS) resources devoted to medical research. This paper focuses on 5,100 medical school researchers' knowledge of what constitutes research misconduct as well as their willingness to report it to the research integrity officer (RIO) and educate their Ph.D. trainees. We learned that 5.6% of researchers could correctly distinguish seven or more of the nine scenarios that depicted likely research misconduct, as defined by the PHS regulations, from scenarios describing other ethical issues. Instead, researchers had expansive definitions and often inappropriately identified infractions such as conflicts of interest, Institutional Review Board (IRB) violations, and other breaches in ethical standards to be research misconduct. In addition, researchers who correctly identified four instances of likely research misconduct in the test items were highly unlikely to report their observations to a RIO. Researchers also provided insight on the factors they believe influence their decision making process of whether to report research misconduct. In addition, this paper also reports on the guidance that faculty said they provided their trainees on research misconduct issues. We conclude with a discussion and recommendations on what institutional leaders might consider doing in order to enhance their research integrity efforts and protect their institution's reputation.     

Who uses public childcare for 2‐year‐old children? Coherent family policies and usage patterns in Sweden,Finland and Western Germany

European countries have increased their public childcare provision for children under age 3. However, it is unclear if and how usage patterns differ across countries. This study examined the relationship between the socio‐economic characteristics of mothers and the use of childcare for 2‐year‐old children. Using European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for the years 2005–2008, we analysed the characteristics of mothers and usage patterns in Sweden, Finland and Western Germany. To single out the effect of maternal employment, working and non‐working mothers were investigated separately. Our findings showed that, in Sweden, a country with strong support for dual‐earner families, usage was largely independent of mothers' characteristics. However, in Western Germany, where more support is given to male breadwinner families, and in Finland, a country with pluralistic family support, highly educated mothers were found to be more likely to use childcare than were mothers with lower levels of education.     

Market characteristics and regionalisation patterns

This study seeks to map out the regionalisation patterns of the world’s largest and most efficient multinationals against regional market characteristics. Re-examining the findings in the regionalisation–globalisation literature that show a general bias among firms towards home region markets, this cross-sectional study determines that home market size and home regional market concentrations heavily influence emergent regionalisation patterns. Implications on theory-building within the sphere of the regionalisation–globalisation debate are explored, with a particular focus on measure development.     

Cognitive Ability and Post-Retirement Asset Decumulation

Post-retirement asset decumulation decisions are complex and may be affected by cognitive abilities. Estimating uncertainties such as life expectancy and medical costs, and incorporating them effectively into decumulation decisions may be especially difficult as retirees face age-related changes in cognition. This may result in rates of decumulation that are contradictory to the goals that motivated accumulation, leading to potentially large utility losses. We investigated the relevance of cognitive ability to asset decumulation decisions within our sample. We found that cognitive ability was a significant predictor of the rate of asset decumulation, and that those with lower levels of cognitive ability were decumulating at a significantly lower rate. We also showed that the level of cognitive ability influenced the effects of expected longevity, market returns, and medical costs. While the estimates for these factors were consistent between those with high and low cognitive ability, there were significant differences in how the estimates were incorporated into the asset decumulation decisions of the two groups.     

Through their eyes: seeing experiences of settlement in photographs taken by refugee background youth in Melbourne,Australia

Although ‘refugees’ are frequently represented in visual media, it is predominantly as the central subject matter and rarely are they positioned as the photographers of their own journeys. In this article, we present photographic images that have been taken by refugee background youth portraying their experiences of the first years of settlement in Australia. We consider how, in our longitudinal research conducted with 120 refugee background youth, visual materials can provide equally important yet different insights in comparison to written or spoken narratives on the experiences of refugee settlement. Through an examination of the photograph’s visual content, we explore the ways in which they portrayed their early experiences of external suburban settlement environments and their depictions of interior spaces and home-making practices. We discuss how these visual insights capture an alternative way of seeing the experiences of becoming at home as the youth become emplaced post-resettlement in Australia. We argue that the photographs taken by these refugee background youth illustrate how visual methods and materials can provide equally important but often overlooked insights into early settlement experiences. Importantly, the photographic images offer a way of portraying the people, places and sentiments that are central to the everyday lives of refugee background youths in ways that oral and written narratives cannot.     

Ethnic Identity and Offending Trajectories Among Mexican American Juvenile Offenders: Gang Membership and Psychosocial Maturity

We examined the association of joint trajectories of ethnic identity and criminal offending to psychosocial maturity, gang membership, and Mexican American affiliation among 300 Mexican American male juvenile offenders from ages 14 to 22. There were two low‐offending groups: one was the highest in ethnic identity and changing slightly with age and the other was the lowest in ethnic identity and stable with age. A third group displayed moderately declining offending and moderately stable ethnic identity. A fourth group displayed high‐offending individuals with moderate, but increasing, levels of ethnic identity, who were initially lower in psychosocial maturity and more likely to be gang members. The findings highlight the need to contextualize theories of ethnic identity development.