Stigma, HIV/AIDS and prevention of mother-to-child transmission in Zambia

This report evaluates the extent of perceived and enacted HIV/AIDS-related stigma in a rural setting in Zambia. Stigmatisation is abundant, ranging from subtle actions to the most extreme degradation, rejection and abandonment. Women with HIV and pregnant women assumed to be HIV positive are repeatedly subjected to extensive forms of stigma, particularly once they become sick or if their child dies. Despite increasing access to prevention of mother to child transmission initiatives, including anti-retroviral drugs, the perceived disincentives of HIV testing, particularly for women, largely outweigh the potential gains from available treatments. HIV/AIDS related stigma drives the epidemic underground and is one of the main reasons that people do not wish to know their HIV status. Unless efforts to reduce stigma are, as one peer educator put it, “written in large letters in any HIV/AIDS campaign rather than small”, stigma will remain a major barrier to curbing the HIV/AIDS pandemic.     

How Welfare Policies Affect Adolescents' School Outcomes: A Synthesis of Evidence From Experimental Studies

Using data from 8 random assignment studies and employing meta‐analytic techniques, this article provides systematic evidence that welfare and work policies targeted at low‐income parents have small adverse effects on some school outcomes among adolescents ages 12 to 18 years at follow‐up. These adverse effects were observed mostly for school performance outcomes and occurred in programs that required mothers to work or participate in employment‐related activities and those that encouraged mothers to work voluntarily. The most pronounced negative effects on school outcomes occurred for the group of adolescents who had a younger sibling, possibly because of the increased home and sibling care responsibilities they assumed as their mothers increased their employment.     

The symmetric and asymmetric Choquet integrals on finite spaces for decision making

In this paper, we give a mathematical analysis of symmetric and asymmetric Choquet integrals in the view of decision making in a finite setting. These integrals present two ways of dealing with negative integrands. The analysis is done with the aid of the Möbius and interaction transforms, this last one having an interesting interpretation in multicriteria decision making (MCDM). The last part of the paper shows the application of these two integrals in MCDM.     

Social choice with analytic preferences

Arrow's axioms for social welfare functions are shown to be inconsistent when the set of alternatives is the nonnegative orthant in a multidimensional Euclidean space and preferences are assumed to be either the set of analytic classical economic preferences or the set of Euclidean spatial preferences. When either of these preference domains is combined with an agenda domain consisting of compact sets with nonempty interiors, strengthened versions of the Arrovian social choice correspondence axioms are shown to be consistent. To help establish the economic possibility theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed. Received: 4 July 2000/Accepted: 2 April 2001     

Understanding Gender Differences in Context: Implications for Young Children's Everyday Lives

This article reviews recent UK‐based research that has prioritised children's accounts of their experiences of their daily lives, and focuses on gender differences in these accounts of family life, friendships, use of public space, use of out‐of‐school care, popular culture and consumption, and children's views of gender differences—drawing mainly from research with children in middle childhood. It then discusses some of the implications for practice and training for a range of professionals working with children. The article suggests that a re‐evaluation of theories of gender differences in practitioner textbooks could usefully be undertaken to integrate more sophisticated, contextual notions of gender identities based on children's experiences. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

The free circulation of Individuals between the European Community member states: The practical implications for social security schemes

Freedom of movement in an integrated European Economic Area created the need to coordinate social security legislations by means of complex regulations. Improving their application calls for innovative solutions based on the experience of ISSA member institutions, ILO standards and the initiative of non-governmental organizations. These solutions are also of interest to institutions in states — even non-European states — linked to the Community by bilateral or multilateral conventions. The main objective is to simplify and speed up administrative procedures, notably for the award of pensions to migrants, given the desirability of identifying them and reconstructing their working careers at the earliest opportunity. Teleprocessing must gradually replace the international circulation of forms, facilitating in particular the provision of medical care during a temporary stay. Recipients'effective access to benefits can also be improved through the personal intervention of liaison offices, the use of migrants'own language and the aid of social services.     

Interplay between Friends' Aggression and Friendship Quality in the Development of Child Aggression during the Early School Years

The aim of this study was to investigate the unique and combined role of friendship quality and friends' aggression in regard to the persistence of young children's physical aggression from kindergarten to grade 2. The sample included 1555 children (808 girls) assessed annually using teacher ratings. Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., the social learning and the social bonding perspectives) served as frameworks to guide the analyses and interpret the results. In line with the social learning perspective, friends' aggression was related to a significant increase in children's physical aggression. However, in line with the social bonding perspective, good friendship quality played both a compensatory and a protective role, by, respectively, reducing children's initial level of physical aggression and by mitigating, albeit marginally, the associations between friends' and children's physical aggression. These results suggest that fostering a positive relationship between friends in the early school years may decrease physical aggression even if the friends are aggressive.     

Parents’ perspectives of social support and social cohesion in urban contexts of diversity

Although provisions for young children are increasingly considered as ideal places to foster an inclusive and socially just society by embracing issues of social support and social cohesion, there is no in-depth understanding of the role these provisions can play in enabling supportive and cohesive encounters in contexts of diversity. Even more striking is the absence of parents’ voices in this discussion. Based on an analysis of qualitative interviews with 18 parents who use childcare services in urban contexts of diversity, our findings show the relevance of ephemeral contacts with diverse people that could offer bridging opportunities in terms of social connectedness to familiarise within diversity while decoding the other in urban contexts of diversity. However, neither bonding nor bridging contacts appear as self-evident. Our research shows that the role of childcare services might be vital in creating light and temporal communities as the prerequisite for social cohesion to flourish, in both individual as well as collective dimensions.