Elderly health care: diverse cultural implication

ABSTRACT

Cultural diversities, histories, communities and nations are intricately intertwined with experiencing old age. Individual and/or household culture, norms and expectations precede the decision-making process for health-seeking behaviour that influences elderly people’s choice and use of health-care services. This study addresses the understanding of this issue among migrant Bangladeshi elderly women from culturally and linguistically diverse background, residing in North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. Accordingly, data were collected through purposive sampling from 104 elderly women, all aged above 65. Processed data highlighted inconvenience – related to (language) pronunciation, socio-economic status, traditional health beliefs, understandings and practices, and reliance on alternative medical amenities.     

Asymptotic theory of estimation of parameters in autoregressive models under general set-up of the roots

In this paper the asymptotic distribution of the least square estimator of the oarameters of a pth order autoreqressive process with stationary φ -mixing error variables having uniformly bounded fourth order moments has been considered. (That the error variables are also Gaussian has been assumed for the explosive case). A comoo-nent-wise break up of the process with respect to the roots has been made and the limiting distribution of each comoonent obtained by using the invariance principle of φ-mixing processes. The main aim of this paper is to reflect on the explosive case where a refinement of Anderson's technique (1959) has been made.     

Beating the monochrome: emerging market multinationals and the bricoleur approach to embracing heterogeneity

ABSTRACT

The research aims to analyse the social identities of emerging multinational corporations from India. It looks at whether the difference of geography and ethnicity can be overcome with a multi-dimensionality or bricolage approach as a managerial paradigm – where the manager, as bricoleur, adopts a socially efficient hybrid approach of changing the arrangement of socio-historical rules through negotiation of both past and present practices, rather than assuming a revolutionary or disruptive engineering approach. We present thematic and discourse analyses of the communication (interviews, blogs, press releases, and public statements) made by the top and middle management of 15 Indian MNCs. The findings reflect the strategies adopted by the firms to fit their public image to a particular culture or audience, and the ways firms migrate to a transnational image with changes in its geographical identities.     

Bird species assemblages across a rural urban gradient around Kolkata,India

Urban development leads to changes in habitat structure and resource base. Bird communities are known to respond sharply to such changes. Our result from study of bird community along urbanization gradient around Kolkata metropolitan city clearly separated the urban bird community from the rural and rural 3 habitats in terms of species diversity and foraging groups. Rural and rural 3 sites had more number of rare species and higher percentage of unique species as compared to the urban habitats. Functional group analysis showed higher abundance of granivores in urban habitats and absence of insectivore and carnivorous species that were found in the rural and rural 3 habitats. The bird species assemblage along the gradient was significantly nested where bird species recorded in urban areas were subset of the species rich rural areas. There was no difference in individual counts between urban and rural habitats, therefore nullifying the hypothesis that rural areas are more species rich because of higher population size. Bird community in the urban areas was less even as compared to the rural areas due to the dominance of omnivorous guild. Bird diversity was negatively correlated to the density of house lots.     

SOCIAL DRINKING VERSUS ADMINISTERING ALCOHOL

Alcohol consumption tends to make some people (unwillingly) tell the truth, hence social drinking can serve as a signal in social contact games. We provide empirical evidence which shows that social drinking can serve as a trust facilitating mechanism. Liver cirrhosis mortality and the rate of abstainers are used to construct a novel index of moderate alcohol consumption, which correlates with trust levels in a cross‐country analysis.(JEL L14, D82, D71)     

Bayesian analysis for a stress-strength system under noninformative priors

Noninformative priors are used for estimating the reliability of a stress-strength system. Several reference priors (cf. Berger and Bernardo 1989, 1992) are derived. A class of priors is found by matching the coverage probabilities of one-sided Bayesian credible intervals with the corresponding frequentist coverage probabilities. It turns out that none of the reference priors is a matching prior. Sufficient conditions for propriety of posteriors under reference priors and matching priors are provided. A simple matching prior is compared with three reference priors when sample sizes are small. The study shows that the matching prior performs better than Jeffreys's prior and reference priors in meeting the target coverage probabilities.