Married Women in Jobs

This article examines the association of personal and family factors with double job holding by married women in Great Britain in 1974. The author first considers reasons for double job holding and then examines data on the subject from the General Household Survey. The literature on the incidence and causes of second-job holding in Great Britain is extremely small.1 To the best of the present author's knowledge there have been no studies in any country which attempt to explain the decision to hold two jobs in terms of family behaviour. Most studies are interested in asking people general questions about why they have two jobs rather than investigating contingent factors which may be responsible for the decision to hold a second job. The present paper attempts to discover why married women have two jobs using data from the 1974 General Household Survey. The topic is one of importance as the advent of two-job wives may have a variety of implications for family role structure and public policy.     

The discursive construction of dyslexia by students in higher education as a moral and intellectual good

Interest in dyslexia as a topic of discussion in education, and in the media, runs through peaks and troughs. Dyslexic students in higher education must navigate their way through the possible meanings attached to the label, appropriating some and rejecting others, yet needing the label as a means to access support. The aim of this article is to explore the ways in which dyslexic university students constructed dyslexia and being dyslexic as moral issues during two focus group conversations. These conversations were discursively analysed with reference to Gee and Willig. Three key themes emerged following analysis: the interaction between the power of the grade as a marker of worth and the status of the dyslexia label; the tensions between acknowledging difficulties with writing and the construction of high literacy as morally aspirational; and the uncertain, yet persistent, construction of dyslexia as a valuable label and a moral good.     

The elephant in the room is awake and takes things personally: The North Korean nuclear threat and the general public's estimation of American diplomacy

The general audience for a global crisis can become a grassroots force in the ultimate fate of policy decisions. Focusing on the North Korean nuclear crisis case, certain contingent factors (dominant coalition characteristics, external threat, and external public characteristics) were overall strong predictors for public estimation about the government stance. Further, perception of situational factors (external threat and external public characteristics) was a stronger predictor for the participants’ stance estimation than perception of predisposing factors (dominant coalition characteristics). Implications for international diplomacy were discussed.     

Proportional quota weighted voting system hierarchies

We investigate achievable and unachievable hierarchies in weighted voting systems where the quota is a proportion of the total weight. This extends work of Bean et al. (Theory Dec 65:285–302, 2007) where simple majority achievable hierarchies were characterized. In particular we resolve the question of which hierarchies are possible with common quota rules other than simple majority, such as 2/3-majority or 3/4-majority, and offer a conjecture about proportional quota achievable hierarchies in general.     

Montessori-Based Activities as a Trans-Generational Interface for Persons with Dementia and Preschool Children

Montessori-based activities for persons with dementia have been used to successfully provide opportunities for programming between older adults and preschool children in shared site. intergenerational care programs. Such intergenerational programming allows older adults with dementia to fulfill roles of teacher or mentor to younger children or as collaborative workmates for persons with more advanced dementia while providing children with positive one-on-one interactions with older adults. We review several studies using this approach, describe characteristics of the programs, participants and results obtained and provide recommendations for those interested in extending this line of work.     

Participation by Health Professional Students in Tuberculin Screening

Abstract

The author reports on a study of the liquid nitrogen treatment of warts at the Rutgers University Student Health Center. He demonstrates that liquid nitrogen therapy is a safe, effective treatment method, appropriate for use by nurses and other primary providers in a college health setting.     

Marital Fertility Control Among the Qing Nobility: Implications for Two Types of Preventive Check

Demographers, as early as Malthus, have assumed that the preventive checks, delayed marriage and celibacy, were absent in traditional China. In this paper on the Qing (1644–1911) imperial lineage, we demonstrate that, instead, there may have been a different, more ‘modern’ preventive check: fertility control within marriage. Marital fertility of lineage couples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was low to moderate. Such low fertility was the product of three behavioural mechanisms: late starting, early stopping and, most significantly, long spacing. Couples apparently regulated their fertility according to their economic resources and the sex of their surviving children. Moreover, they did so, we suggest, by regulating their coital frequency. Deliberate fertility control, in other words, was already within the ‘calculus of conscious choice’ for some Chinese well before this century. The speed of contemporary sinitic fertility transitions may accordingly be attributed to the fact that they did not require a change in attitudes, only the diffusion of new incentives and effective technologies.     

Regional Computable General Equilibrium models: A review

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are very popular for analyzing a wide range of policy issues. CGE applications vary from estimating the welfare impact of tax reform and alternative energy policies to the effect of foreign trade reforms, labour markets and employment. CGE models are commonly developed at the country level; however, modified versions of CGE, so called Regional CGE (RCGE) models, can be used at subnational disaggregation to examine impacts studied at the national counterparts on a specific region. RCGE models have grown in popularity as an alternative to the Input-Output (I-O) models, which are regularly used for regional analysis. RCGE models can provide comprehensive information, which make them more desirable analytical models for many researchers. Yet, RCGE models have not yet become a “go-to” for governmental policy practitioners when they are developing regional public policies. This paper reviews the current state of regional CGE models, describes their features, contributions and limitations and surveys some applications of the main three classes of RCGE models: region-specific, bottom-up, and top-down models. This paper concludes that the applications of RCGE are quite variable and flexible, with a new and more complex type of application to be developed with the advancement of computation economics. The paper offers recommendations on the micro, meso and macro conditions that are necessary to increase policy practitioners’ utilization of RCGE models.