Mobility and security: the perceived benefits of citizenship for resettled young people from refugee backgrounds

In recent decades, the meaning and value of formal state citizenship has shifted dramatically. In the same period, scholarship on citizenship has drawn attention to the proliferation of alternative forms of sub-, supra- and transnational citizenship, at times obscuring the ongoing importance of formal state citizenship. For refugees, however, formal state citizenship remains a critical and widely shared goal. Drawing on interviews with 51 young people from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the intersecting themes of mobility and security that were identified by participants as the most important benefits of acquiring formal state citizenship in the country of resettlement. In contrast to the insecurity of forced migration, formal state citizenship provides a privileged mobility that enables refugee-background youth to maintain and create transnational identities and attachments and to be protected while doing so, while also granting a secure status within the nation state and insurance against further displacement in an uncertain future. In offering these forms of mobility and security, formal state citizenship contributes to a sense of ontological security among refugee-background youth, providing an important foundation for building national and transnational futures.     

A best case scenario? Non-manual part-time work and job-sharing in UK local government in the 1990s

Local authorities in the UK have been described as “model employers” of part-time and job-share employees, with the needs of employees themselves, particularly women with family responsibilities, acting as the primary driver for the use of reduced hours working patterns. To investigate how far this “exemplar” label applied in practice, and to what extent this overcame the well-known drawbacks of reduced hours working patterns, the causes and consequences of working reduced hours amongst professional, managerial and administrative staff were investigated in a London borough in the mid-1990s. It was found that the “model employer” label was applicable, but it was under threat from an emerging emphasis on a demand-led, service-driven use of reduced hours work. It is argued that there is a strong business case for making more creative use of reduced hours work synthesising “supply-side” and “demand-side” needs, and that this change in approach will therefore be counterproductive.     

Special considerations in conducting bereavement focus groups

Focus groups conducted with grieving people pose special challenges. However, this method can be successfully used in bereavement research especially when group interaction is central to the research aim. This article builds on key articles discussing ethical, methodological, logistical, and analytical issues in conducting focus groups with vulnerable populations (Owen, 2001; Seymour, Bellamy, Gott, Ahmedzai, & Clark, 2002). For bereaved people, vulnerability stems from heightened potential for harm by virtue of participation in sensitive, personal exploration of death-related experiences. We discuss reasons for selecting focus group methods and our experiences with planning and implementing focus groups with bereaved people. Issues found to be highly salient in our work include: team composition, participant recruitment, creating the environment, starting and ending the group, language and listening, managing emotional discussions and time, and analytic considerations. Recommendations are made for effectively using focus groups to generate new knowledge in bereavement research.     

Educational Inequalities among Latin American Adolescents: Continuities and Changes over the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s

The goal of this paper is to examine recent trends in educational stratification for Latin American adolescents growing up in three distinct periods: the 1980s, during severe recession; the 1990s, a period of structural adjustments imposed by international organizations; and the late 2000s, when most countries in the region experienced positive and stable growth. In addition to school enrollment and educational transitions, we examine the quality of education through enrollment in private schools, an important aspect of inequality in education that most studies have neglected. We use nationally representative household survey data for the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. Our overall findings confirm the importance of macroeconomic conditions for inequalities in educational opportunity, suggesting important benefits brought up by the favorable conditions of the 2000s. However, our findings also call attention to increasing disadvantages associated with the quality of the education adolescents receive, suggesting the significance of the EMI framework-Effectively Maintained Inequality-and highlighting the value of examining the quality in addition to the quantity of education in order to fully understand educational stratification in the Latin American context.