Voices from Vietnam: experiences of children and youth with disabilities,and their families,from an Agent Orange affected rural region

This study examines the experiences of young people with disabilities from ethnic minorities, and their families, in central Vietnam. The study is set in an area contaminated by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Data were gathered from interviews with youth with disabilities and interviews and focus groups with mothers who had children with disabilities. Respondents expressed confronting multiple barriers to inclusion, education, health and well-being similar to other persons with disabilities and their families from around the world. Participants sought broad-ranging human rights as they described experiencing stigmatization and marginalization from negative social reaction toward disabilities and by residing in a location known for dioxin contamination. The participants’ voices are not only important in informing program responses to support implementation of Vietnam’s new National Law on Persons with Disabilities, but also timely as the US government considers proposed legislation providing material support for Vietnamese nationals affected by Agent Orange.     

Multidimensionl Poverty and The Role of Social Capital in Poverty Alleviation Among Ethnic Groups in Rural Vietnam: A Multilevel Analysis

This paper empirically examines the disparities over time across six dimensions of poverty (monetary, education, health, housing, basic services, and durable assets) between ethnic minority and majority households in rural Vietnam. Using the five-wave panel data of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) 2008–2016, we observe improvements in most non-monetary dimensions of poverty for both ethnic groups, while the monetary dimension shows the highest degrees of deprivation and the lowest rate of decrease during the studied period. Health is the only dimension in which ethnic minority households are not only better off than those of majority households during the studied period, but also report improvement. We further explore the role of social capital in ethnic minorities and non-minorities at household and community levels in multiple dimensions of poverty by employing multilevel models. Our study reports the significant effects social capital have at the community level on reducing poverty in the monetary, education, housing, and basic services dimensions for ethnic minorities, while social capital at the household level shows significant effects on monetary, basic services, and durable assets. These findings indicate that policy makers ought to consider the role of social capital when designing poverty alleviation strategies for the country.

     

Implications of dispositional and process views of traits for individual difference research in leadership

This article assesses the conceptual and methodological limitations associated with traditional dispositional approaches to personality and leadership, and it proposes that more process-oriented approaches will better enable leadership research to explore emergent leadership phenomena such as perception and effectiveness. By reconceptualizing the structure of the self as a dynamic, but stable entity, we maintain that an explicit focus on events as a fundamental level of analysis is needed, which will help reduce the inaccuracies of aggregate retrospective leadership measures that collapse across different situations and time. Event-level research methodologies can also help account for the effects that situational contingencies have on leader behavioral flexibility, the development of leadership skills, and leadership emergence within shared or distributive leadership structures.     

Predictive Intervals for Age-Specific Fertility

A multivariate ARIMA model is combined with a Gammacurve to predict confidence intervals for age-specificbirth rates by one-year age groups. The method isapplied to observed age-specific births in Norwaybetween 1900 and 1995, and predictive intervals arecomputed for each year up to 2050. The predictedtwo-thirds confidence intervals for Total Fertility(TF) around 2010 agree well with TF errors in oldpopulation forecasts made by Statistics Norway. Themethod gives useful predictions for age-specificfertility up to the years 2020–2030. For later years,the intervals become too wide. Methods which do nottake account of estimation errors in the ARIMA modelcoefficients underestimate the uncertainty for futureTF values. The findings suggest that the marginbetween high and low fertility variants in officialpopulation forecasts for many Western countries aretoo narrow.     

Drivers of Economic Reform in Vietnam's Provinces

Allowing provinces to find their own way forward was central to Vietnam's progress in institutional and economic development. This article examines who drives this process of economic reform and finds that, in those provinces making the most progress, the private sector played an important role, not against, but with government. Both national and foreign enterprises played a role, but small enterprises tended to be marginalised. Some of the best insights come from comparing provinces and observing how different alignments of interest influenced the reform process.     

Robust Inference for the Bivariate Bifurcating Autoregressive Model

Cell lineage data consist of observations on quantitative characteristics of the descendants of an initial cell, recorded as a tree so that the relationships between the cells may be determined. The bifurcating autoregressive model of Cowan & Staudte (1986) has been used previously to model univariate characteristics of cell linkage data. Here we extend this model to analyze bivariate cell data. Both maximum likelihood and robust estimators are derived for both balanced and unbalanced cell lineage trees and are applied to a real dataset to estimate the correlation between cell lifetime and final cell diameter.     

Investigation of mixed model repeated measures analyses and non‐linear random coefficient models in the context of long‐term efficacy data

The longitudinal data from 2 published clinical trials in adult subjects with upper limb spasticity (a randomized placebo‐controlled study [NCT01313299] and its long‐term open‐label extension [NCT01313312]) were combined. Their study designs involved repeat intramuscular injections of abobotulinumtoxinA (Dysport®), and efficacy endpoints were collected accordingly. With the objective of characterizing the pattern of response across cycles, Mixed Model Repeated Measures analyses and Non‐Linear Random Coefficient (NLRC) analyses were performed and their results compared. The Mixed Model Repeated Measures analyses, commonly used in the context of repeated measures with missing dependent data, did not involve any parametric shape for the curve of changes over time. Based on clinical expectations, the NLRC included a negative exponential function of the number of treatment cycles, with its asymptote and rate included as random coefficients in the model. Our analysis focused on 2 specific efficacy parameters reflecting complementary aspects of efficacy in the study population. A simulation study based on a similar study design was also performed to further assess the performance of each method under different patterns of response over time. This highlighted a gain of precision with the NLRC model, and most importantly the need for its assumptions to be verified to avoid potentially biased estimates. These analyses describe a typical situation and the conditions under which non‐linear mixed modeling can provide additional insights on the behavior of efficacy parameters over time. Indeed, the resulting estimates from the negative exponential NLRC can help determine the expected maximal effect and the treatment duration required to reach it.     

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

An “inhabited” approach to the study of institutions examines how organizational actors produce locally distinctive meaning in response to similar institutional forces. Adopting inhabited institutionalism to the study of campus sexual life, this study draws on interviews with 54 undergraduate women at two four‐year universities in the United States—Ivy U and State U—to show campus cultures unique to a university inform women's decisions to engage in hookups and/or relationships. For women attending Ivy U, an elite institution where pressure to succeed is palpable, both hookups and long‐distance relationships alike are posited as advantageous for the time‐crunched, preprofessional student. At State U, a public school with a party reputation, women explain their engagement in hookups as part of the “fun” of college life, while women seeking or involved in committed relationships are obligated to negotiate the effects of the party culture in their partnerships. This study challenges the notion of a monolithic sexual culture across university settings by showing how campus cultures cultivated at the local level create unique organizational conditions within which undergraduate women forge and explain their engagement in hookups and relationships alike.