“I Am Tired But If I Don't Try to Have Sex,My Wife Will Think I've Been Fooling around in the City”: Work,Migration, and Sex Among Vietnamese Migrant Laborers

Mostly operating from a risk and risk-reduction paradigm, existing research on migrants in Vietnam tends to conceptualize sex and risky sexual behaviors as isolated life domains. This study begins to develop a contextually rich understanding of migrants’ sex lives by examining the relationships among sex, work, and the constant pendulum-like migrating movements of 23 Vietnamese married migrants in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Using data from in-depth interviews, it was found that most participants had no sex in the city; this was followed by visits to the home village, where they had sex with their spouses as often as possible to make up for the “long drought” in the city. Within this sexual schema, sex came secondary, and even peripherally, to migrants’ working lives; thus, exhaustion from work was cited by migrants as the overwhelming factor leading to their sexual problems. This study suggests that migrants’ intimate lives are more strongly linked to their working lives than has previously been recognized, and that their sexual behaviors should be viewed in tandem with the hardships of their working lives.     

Changes in the quality and regulation of social work education: Confronting the dilemmas of workforce planning and competing qualifications frameworks

The Modernising Social Services agenda seeks to raise the quality of service outcomes through regulation. Because attaining quality outcomes for service users is related to better training of providers, a parallel modernising agenda seeks to raise the quality of education and training through regulation. With the demise of the CCETSW, responsibility for regulating social work education is under debate. Workforce planning is a critical issue, as are trends towards separate qualifications, genericism, and specialism. Two agencies, the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency, responsible for higher education qualification frameworks) and the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Agency, responsible for work-based qualification frameworks) have established their separate qualifications frameworks, but have not worked out the transferability and equivalence of educational and work-based awards across the separate frameworks. Until consonance is established, a seamless ladder of progression from work-based social care awards to educationally based social work awards is not possible, thereby limiting workers' expertise and career opportunities. This paper argues that change must involve reconciling separate frameworks and resolving issues of transferability, specialism, and genericism. Social work education's partnerships between universities and employers provide lessons for bridging the divide between work-based and educational awards. Women, part-time workers, ethnic minorities, and people with a disability will benefit from accessible transparent frameworks.     

A Further Evaluation of Response Cards: Teaching Direct Care Staff Basic Behavioral Principles

Numerous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of response cards for teaching students in educational settings; however, the effectiveness of response cards has yet to be examined in organizational settings where such strategies may be very useful (i.e., in staff training). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the utility of response cards during in-service training to teach basic behavioral principles to direct care staff working in a human service setting. Results indicated that individuals who received the response card training participated more during training and were able to retain more information over time relative to those who received a standard in-service training.     

Global Agro-Food Corporations and the State: The Ferruzzi Case

The relationship between transnational corporations (TNCs) in the agro-food sector and the nation-state in the context of global post-Fordism is examined through a case study of recent events involving the Ferruzzi transnational corporation. TNCs have a complex and contradictory set of relations with the state that are affected by competition among TNCs, by TNCs' internal disagreements, and by the fragmented nature of the state. The state assists TNCs through formal and informal channels. In this specific case, the informality of the system is underscored by the openly illegal arrangement that was operated for years by Ferruzzi officials and members of the officialdom of the state. However, the state also has the capacity to counter the actions of TNCs and to enforce the interests of subordinate groups.     

Bayes and admissibility properties of estimators in truncated parameter spaces

For the problem of estimating a parameter θ when θ is known to lie in a closed, convex subset D of R^k, conditions are given under which estimators δ of θ cannot be Bayes estimators, as well as conditions under which δ is inadmissible. The estimators considered are so-called “boundary estimators”. Maximum-likelihood estimators in truncated parameter spaces are examples to which our results often apply. For the special case when k = 1 and D is compact, two classes of estimators dominating the inadmissible ones are constructed. Some examples are given.     

Mapping the environment: an operational environmental analysis model

While most theorists and practitioners realize the importance of environmental analysis today, model-building emphasizes scanning and assessment. It is also important, however, to predict the future state of the environment. This prediction forms the basis for formulating a strategy which will maximize the firm's position in the future environment. This paper introduces a model which covers the important stages of environmental analysis: scanning, assessment and prediction. The model also includes a new classification system for external variables and an outline for analyzing these variables. It is an attempt to provide an operational guideline to be used by practitioners.     

Some finite-sample-size properties of rosenblatt density estimates

The results of a Monte Carlo study of the sensitivity of Rosenblatt density estimates to the scale factor are presented.     

Suitability for practice guidelines for students: A survey of Canadian social work programmes

This paper reports on the development of a 'suitability for practice' policy in a large Canadian school of social work. Pertinent gatekeeping issues are reviewed and the results of a survey on suitability polices in Canadian social work schools are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the University of Calgary's Faculty of Social Work Suitability Policy. This policy integrates current research on gatekeeping, the results of the Canadian schools survey and input from primary stakeholders: the students, faculty members, the professional association and the community.