Inclusiveness,power sharing and critical enquiry: intercultural programme model for new settlers

Migrants and refugees settling permanently in a new country face significant social, linguistic and cultural challenges. However, they also bring intercultural strengths and skills which, if acknowledged and enhanced, can support successful settlement and inclusion in a pluralistic society. This paper describes the underpinning rationale and salient features of an intercultural settlement programme piloted in New Zealand with a group of recently arrived settlers from refugee backgrounds. The programme was designed to enhance the settlement process for newcomers through the development of critical thinking, problem-solving and intercultural skills. The pedagogical approach was rights-based and incorporated facilitated discussions within an environment of power-sharing, inclusiveness and critical enquiry. This paper discusses the implementation of the programme as well as findings from a preliminary research project which sought to explore the effectiveness and the extent to which the programme achieved its aims. The findings indicate that this approach can constitute good practice in an education programme designed to support interculturalism and successful integration.     

Accountability and the fairness bias: the effects of effort vs. luck

According to the principle of accountability a person’s fair allocation takes into account the input-relevant variables she can influence, like effort, but not the variables she cannot influence, like luck. We study redistribution behavior in a real effort-task experiment, where luck influences production in three versions that differ in their effort-relatedness: luck comes either as wage luck, endowment luck or payment luck. We confirm that in a base treatment, i.e., in absence of luck, subjects base their allocation decisions largely on effort. When luck is present behavior changes. While we find that redistribution behavior of high performers in the real effort-task is affected by wage luck, we find that endowment luck affects mostly redistribution behavior of low performers. Furthermore, when introducing payment luck, i.e., redistribution of certain versus probabilistic payments, we find that allocations are more selfish for probabilistic payments.     

Introduction to Special Issue: Restoring the Florida Everglades—Balancing Population and the Environment

Population and Environment -     

Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911.     

The FACES Project: an academic-community partnership to improve end-of-life care for families

This article reports on a research partnership between a community-based hospice and a graduate school of social work. The purpose of the collaboration was to design and test a tool for assessing caregiver strain and resources in families caring for older adults receiving hospice home care services. Eighteen hospice home care social workers interviewed 162 caregivers for the study and provided their own assessment of the tool's clinical utility. Both strengths and challenges of the collaboration are evaluated and implications are discussed for social work practice and research, particularly academic-community research partnerships.     

Health education evaluation and beliefs and practices in rural Tamil Nadu. 2. Family planning and antenatal care

This paper, which reports on the effect of health services in Kanniambadi block, is a continuation of a previous paper on knowledge, attitude and practice surveys in 3 blocks in North Arcot District, Tamil Nadu. It was found that knowledge of family planning is poor, especially for temporary methods, even in the service area. However, both attitudes and practice showed a definite improvement in the service area. Knowledge of antenatal care was also poor, with only slight improvement in the service area. The influence of different factors on family planning and implications for health education are discussed. More use of group methods, and more education about temporary methods is recommended, as well as close linkage between health and development programs.     

Emigration from Zimbabwe: Migrant Perspectives

This article explores migration from Zimbabwe to the UK and South Africa and the experiences of the receiving countries from the perspective of the migrants. It provides a critical examination of the impact of structural barriers in both the UK and South Africa on the economic experiences of migrants. The effects of immigration status, due to the exclusion of asylum‐seekers in the UK and the presence of undocumented migrants in the UK and South Africa, is explored in relation to employment and remittance activities. The clear evidence of the deskilling taking place among the majority of Zimbabwean migrants – and its impact on remittances and other forms of transnational support – is also examined. The article concludes that any real commitment to alleviating global poverty on the part of the world's migrant receiving countries must include a re‐examination of barriers to employment, education and the use of skills, since these barriers not only have a short‐term impact on remittances to the sending country and fiscal capacity to contribute in the receiving country, but will also impact on longer‐term development should the migrants return to their country of origin.     

Advancing Risk‐Informed Decision Making in Managing Defense Nuclear Waste in the United States: Opportunities and Challenges for Risk Analysis

An omnibus spending bill in 2014 directed the Department of Energy to analyze how effectively Department of Energy (DOE) identifies, programs, and executes its plans to address public health and safety risks that remain as part of DOE's remaining environmental cleanup liabilities. A committee identified two dozen issues and associated recommendations for the DOE, other federal agencies, and the U.S. Congress to consider, as well as other stakeholders such as states and tribal nations. In regard to risk assessment, the committee described a risk review process that uses available data, expert experience, identifies major data gaps, permits input from key stakeholders, and creates an ordered set of risks based on what is known. Probabilistic risk assessments could be a follow‐up from these risk reviews. In regard to risk management, the states, in particular, have become major drivers of how resources are driven. States use different laws, different priorities, and challenge DOE's policies in different ways. Land use decisions vary, technology choices are different, and other notable variations are apparent. The cost differences associated with these differences are marked. The net result is that resources do not necessarily go to the most prominent human health and safety risks, as seen from the national level.     

The impact of related party transactions on earnings management: some insights from the Italian context

Related party transactions have become a key issue as a result of recent financial scandals. This study examines whether firms use related party transactions for earnings management, and then, whether they try to minimize detection through the format of related party transactions disclosure. Firstly, we analyze the association between related party transactions structure (types and parties involved) and the probability of reporting small earnings increase. Related party transactions may have significant impact on, and implications for, earnings management. According to the agency theory, related party transactions are used opportunistically, while the efficient transaction hypothesis argues that related party transactions meet the economic needs of the business. We next investigate the association between the probability of reporting small earnings increases through related party transactions and disclosure quality. Disclosure quality should be studied in relation to impression management and investor attention; this approach takes account of the idea that earnings management behavior may influence the quality of disclosure as a possible way of lowering conflict of interest. In line with the agency theory, our findings show that revenue related party transactions are more likely to be used to manage earnings than other types of transaction; related party transactions with ultimate parents are associated with lower probability of reporting small earnings increases compared to operations with other related parties. Lastly, our results confirm that the decision to engage in earnings management is related to lower disclosure quality.