Indirect measures of child mortality: Overview and application to Brazil, 1980

Mortality rates in the early childhood years are valuable indicators of a population's standard of living, especially in high mortality countries in the developing world. This study summarizes the logic of indirect techniques of mortality estimation, and applies the methods to sample data from the 1980 census of Brazil. The results for metropolitan areas show that children in affluent households have an average expectation of life that is around ten years higher compared to the children of the poor. Multivariate analysis using the mortality ratio proposed by Trussell and Preston found that mother's education was the most important determinant of child mortality, followed by the effects of running water in the house, father's schooling, membership in the social security system and region of the country. Given the potential usefulness of the indirect methods to a wide range of researchers outside of the field of demography, the study presents detailed examples of the computational steps required of the various techniques.     

Invisible elbow

Compared to standards of efficiency or intention, social interaction entails incessant error followed by error-correction. Most order in social structures and processes therefore results not from rational action but from constraints on the correction of errors. Analytically but not concretely we can separate those constraints into culture (historically accumulated shared understandings and their representations) and previously established social relations. Counterfactual accounts, which are crucial to social explanation, acquire their validity from the accurate mapping and explanation of changes in culture and social relations, including their impact on error-correction. Revised version of address to the TillyFest, University of Toronto, October 6–8, 1995.     

The ambivalent image of jews in the minds of christian fundamentalists

This paper discusses the varied ways Christian fundamentalists think about Jews and Israel in their theology and in their daily lives. Topics include the continuing significance for fundamentalists of Jewish responsibilities for the death of Jesus, the place of the Holocaust imagery and especially the importance of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the instrumental role fundamentalists believe Jews play in the end- time story leading up to the return of Jesus to Mount of Olives and the making of a new Jerusalem and the beginning of the millennium. The paper suggests that in these ambivalent images lies much social distress in the form of anti- semitism, distortion of our Middle East policy, and the erosion of efforts to create a human ecumenism.An earlier version of this paper appeared in translation as Das zweitdeutige Bild des Juden in Bewusstsein christlicher Fundamentalisten, inBrennpunkte des gegenwartigen Antisemitismus, a book published by the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, Free University of Berlin.     

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the race problem in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern race relations in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by race. A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.     

Adult day care participation among impaired elderly

This study evaluates 35 impaired elderly clients of a social day care center and compares them with 116 impaired persons taken from a random sample of community elderly using the Duke Older Americans Resources and Services (OARS) functional assessment instrument. Multiple discriminant analysis is used to determine if factors exist which predict use of adult day care facilities. Results indicate that three domains distinguish day care participation; social resources, economic, and mental health. Discussion and implications center on the conclusion that day care clients are more likely labeled as dependent by their families than are impaired community elderly.Charles M. Barresi is Professor of Sociology and a Fellow in the Institute for Life Span Development and Gerontology at the University of Akron at Akron, Ohio. He earned his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests include ethnicity in aging, gender differences in widowhood and patterns of family care-giving. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Ethnic Dimensions of Aging.Donna J. McConnell is a graduate of the University of Akron, Department of Sociology. She holds the degree of M.A. Specialist in Gerontology, and Donna is currently serving as rehabilitation counselor for the Mahoning County Transitional Homes in Youngstown, Ohio.Direct all correspondence to: Charles M. Barresi, Department of Sociology, The University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325.Revision of a paper presented at the 37th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, San Antonio, Texas, November 16–20, 1984. The authors would like to thank John Allen, Ronald Huiatt, and the Summit Senior's Team Corporation, for making the PISCES Project data available. Dennis Byrne and Geoffery Greer provided helpful suggestions with the analysis.     

A Non-radial DEA Index for Peruvian Regional Competitiveness

In this paper, we propose a method to measure competitiveness performance at the subnational level, with an application to Peruvian regions. For this, we propose a benefit-of-the-doubt composite index that summarizes the information of several indicators that characterize competitiveness. It is based on an optimization approach, using data enveloping analysis (DEA) techniques, so that each indicator is weighted in an endogenous way, and each unit is evaluated in the most favourable light. Our proposed index is a non-radial variant of the typical DEA scores, which avoids the traditional pitfalls of DEA-based composite indices, such as unreasonable weights. Additionally, we propose a meta-frontier approach in order to compare the competitiveness performances across different periods of evaluation. Our assessments of the Peruvian regions’ competitiveness performance improve on the results of traditional DEA methods, which award high marks to regions with very heterogeneous performance (i.e., regions with very high scores in some indicators, and very poor in others). Additionally, the comparison of the performance across time shows a general decrease in the average competitiveness between 2008 and 2014 of the Peruvian regions.