“It's hard work,believe me!”: Active efforts to optimise housing by people who live with mental illness and access housing assistance

Secure and appropriate housing is critical for the well‐being of people living with mental illness (consumers). Yet it is often difficult to achieve. Housing assistance is available, but is often difficult for consumers to access and negotiate. While the need for support is well‐recognised, little is known about the active part consumers play in finding and keeping appropriate accommodation. This paper addresses the research question: How do consumers who use housing assistance actively manage their housing situations? In‐depth interviews were conducted with 18 consumers who had used housing assistance within the past five years. These were analysed using constant comparative analysis, based on a grounded theory approach. Participants engaged in a range of activities to address six major concerns: working toward my home; following the rules to keep what I have; managing and improving my accommodation; working with housing services; living within my current situation; and finding and using supports. All participants described times when their mental health negatively affected their ability to do these activities. The findings highlight the need for housing services and mental health services to collaborate to develop policies and protocols that place reasonable demands on consumers and support their abilities to actively manage their housing situations.     

Intergenerational Relations between English Students,Graduates Living at Home,and their Parents

Debate about intergenerational relations has become more prominent since the financial crisis of 2007–09, focusing particularly on the difficulties faced by young adults trying to enter the labour and housing markets, whilst often bearing high levels of debt incurred as students. This article reviews the nature of the ‘intergenerational contract’ at both the micro level of the family, and at the macro level between individuals and the state. We then present qualitative, empirical data on the relationship between parents and: (1) their student children; and (2) their graduate children who have returned home. We focus primarily on the financial support provided by parents to the two groups. We explore why support is given, and the nature of similarities and differences in terms of what is given. We find that virtually all parents who were able to support their young adult children financially did so, but to different degrees and with different amounts of tension and anxiety. We suggest that the increased importance of the intergenerational contract at the micro level is likely to contribute to intra‐ rather than intergenerational inequalities.     

First Nations,Métis and Inuit presence in the Newfoundland and Labrador curriculum

This article responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada’s 2015 call for the education of Canadians about ‘residential schools, treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada.’ It is an analysis of the Canadian and world studies curricula and texts in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1 of the 13 provinces and territories of Canada. The analysis is based on academic research and consultations with First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples (FNMI) educators, educational administrators and knowledge holders. Although there is evidence of reform, as a whole the curriculum suffers from silences and lack of context, problematic placement and associations, the intrusion of settler perspectives, contradiction over judgement about issues related to FNMI peoples and inconsistency that undermine efforts at reform. This article provides guidance to curriculum designers, textbook writers, teachers and administrators participating in the decolonization of education in Canada.     

Shedding light on economic opportunity: skin tone and job quality during the Great Recession

A significant body of literature suggests that skin-tone segmentation is a salient characteristic of inter-group economic inequality in the United States. Yet, empirical investigations of this social phenomenon and its impact on labour-market outcomes for worker’s in the United States remains limited or focused on the impact of skin tone on wages. This article examines whether or not phenotypic variability in skin tone among workers influenced levels of job quality experienced during the recessionary era (2007–2012). Data from the Puerto Ricans and the Impact of the Great Recession Survey were used to estimate a Poisson Regression with Endogenous Treatment Effects to consider the impact that variations in skin tone have on levels of job quality experienced by workers. Findings suggest evidence of skin-tone labour-market segmentation, as workers with darker skin shades experienced lower levels of job quality than those workers with lighter skin tones within and across larger racial and ethnic groups. The results also suggest important regional variations in the experience of skin-tone labour-market segmentation in the United States. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the findings for racial economic inequalities and patterns of social stratification in the contemporary United States.     

Frontline implementation of welfare conditionality in Norway: A maternalistic practice

Welfare conditionality is both ambitious and ambiguous for the frontline workers who put policy into practice. Since January 2017, the Norwegian frontline service should require social assistance benefit recipients under the age of 30 to participate in some sort of work-related activation, so-called mandatory activation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with frontline workers at local offices in the Norwegian Public Welfare Service (NAV), we investigate how the requirement is implemented in a context of a professionalised social welfare service. Mandatory activation is arguably a paternalistic measure. Drawing on Bernardo Zacka's concept of moral dispositions and Laura Specker Sullivan's concepts of maternalism, our findings indicate that at the frontline, mandatory activation policies are implemented by maternalistic decision making, emphasising the interpersonal relation between trained caseworkers and clients. The caseworkers use their discretionary powers in the implementation of conditionality and sanctions by emphasising care and support as embedded in the strict rules.     

The Rana Plaza disaster seven years on: Transnational experiments and perhaps a new treaty?

This article examines several noteworthy initiatives that were implemented following the deadly 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh. They broke new ground in transnational labour law. The ILO-backed initiatives were largely successful but remain insufficient to achieve lasting change in the ready-made garment industry, where global brands’ supply chain buying practices constrain investment in occupational safety and health. A proposed United Nations treaty on business and human rights now seeks to enhance corporate accountability. Although promising, as part of a smart mix of multi-level public and private solutions, the treaty needs fine-tuning in the light of lessons learned from post-Rana Plaza experiments.     

Coping with climatic shocks: local perspectives from Haiti’s rural mountain regions

Population and Environment - Haiti’s agrarian society is highly sensitive to changes in weather and climate conditions. Little is known about Haitian farmers’ perceptions of...     

Comparing American college and noncollege young adults on e-cigarette use patterns including polysubstance use and reasons for using e-cigarettes

Abstract

Objective: Existing literature on young adults’ e-cigarette and polysubstance use focused on college students. This study examined the differences between college and noncollege groups on prevalence and patterns of e-cigarette and other substance use using data from a national survey. Participants: Adults aged 18–24 from the 2013–2014 Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (n?=?6,608). Methods: Independent sample t-tests and Chi-square tests were conducted to examine group differences. Results: Noncollege young adults had higher prevalence of cigarette, e-cigarette, and marijuana use; college students had higher prevalence of alcohol use. Among current e-cigarette users, college students had higher prevalence of polysubstance use of alcohol and marijuana. College students used e-cigarettes for socializing purposes more. Conclusions: Differences in prevalence and patterns of e-cigarette and other substance use between college and noncollege groups exist. Future interventions should target the social context of college life and reach out to noncollege young adults in workplaces.     

14‐month‐olds exploit verbs’ syntactic contexts to build expectations about novel words

During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14 months of age, infants can track co‐occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expectations about which function words can co‐occur with novel words. Using a habituation paradigm, French‐learning 14‐month‐olds were presented with utterances containing two novel words preceded by function words (either two determiners in the Novel Nouns condition or two pronouns in the Novel Verbs conditions). We found that at test, infants looked longer during trials in which the novel words occurred in an unexpected syntactic context (following a pronoun for infants in the Novel Nouns condition and following a determiner for infants in the pooled analysis of the three Novel Verbs conditions). Hence, our results confirm previous findings on infants’ sensitivity to noun contexts and most importantly demonstrate that their sensitivity to the co‐occurrence of verbs with pronouns begins much earlier than previously understood.     

Estimation of total electricity consumption curves by sampling in a finite population when some trajectories are partially unobserved

Millions of smart meters that are able to collect individual load curves, that is, electricity consumption time series, of residential and business customers at fine scale time grids are now deployed by electricity companies all around the world. It may be complex and costly to transmit and exploit such a large quantity of information, therefore it can be relevant to use survey sampling techniques to estimate mean load curves of specific groups of customers. Data collection, like every mass process, may undergo technical problems at every point of the metering and collection chain resulting in missing values. We consider imputation approaches (linear interpolation, kernel smoothing, nearest neighbours, principal analysis by conditional estimation) that take advantage of the specificities of the data, that is to say the strong relation between the consumption at different instants of time. The performances of these techniques are compared on a real example of Irish electricity load curves under various scenarios of missing data. A general variance approximation of total estimators is also given which encompasses nearest neighbours, kernel smoothers imputation and linear imputation methods. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 65–89; 2019 © 2018 Statistical Society of Canada