Book Reviews

In censuses and surveys in most African countries it has become the practice to estimate informants' age by the method of the historical calendar. This involves an attempt to relate a remembered historical event, occurring during the subject's childhood, with his age at the time.

This paper attempts a first evaluation of the method with particular reference to the 1961–63 multi-round survey in rural Morocco. It is shown that in practice the method is highly complex and easily misunderstood by interviewers and respondents. An attempt to lay down a precise procedure by means of a very detailed questionnaire appeared to yield at best only marginally more accurate results than the simpler procedure used in an earlier round. The more complex questionnaire did, however, introduce new patterns of misuse by the interviewer. There was evidence that the historical calendar gave somewhat better data than eye estimates, but results were highly defective for both methods.

It is clear that the method is far from perfect. Interviewer training and supervision remain the key to accurate age determination. If the potential benefits of the complex historical calendar method are to be realized, training and supervision need to be even more thorough than where simpler methods are used.     

Property testing for cyclic groups and beyond

This paper studies the problem of testing if an input (Γ,°), where Γ is a finite set of unknown size and ° is a binary operation over Γ given as an oracle, is close to a specified class of groups. Friedl et al. (Proc. of STOC, 2005) have constructed an efficient tester using poly(log|Γ|) queries for the class of abelian groups. We focus in this paper on subclasses of abelian groups, and show that these problems are much harder: Ω(|Γ|^1/6) queries are necessary to test if the input is close to a cyclic group, and Ω(|Γ| ^c ) queries for some constant c are necessary to test more generally if the input is close to an abelian group generated by k elements, for any fixed integer k≥1. We also show that knowledge of the size of the ground set Γ helps only for k=1, in which case we construct an efficient tester using poly(log|Γ|) queries; for any other value k≥2 the query complexity remains Ω(|Γ| ^c ). All our upper and lower bounds hold for both the edit distance and the Hamming distance. These are, to the best of our knowledge, the first nontrivial lower bounds for such group-theoretic problems in the property testing model and, in particular, they imply the first exponential separations between the classical and quantum query complexities of testing closeness to classes of groups.     

Global Political Economy: Power, Labour, Politics

This discussion examines the issue of globalisation in terms of the interaction of economy, politics and power. It begins by considering the claims implied by the language of globalisation. How extensive and inclusive is the global economy? The second section goes on to outline the broad geography of globalisation in terms of a balance of power that is both highly uneven but also subject to marked changes. While the global economy as this developed since the 1970s may have reproduced established patterns of colonial and post‐war economic power, in the current century, power is shifting away from these nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century models to a new balance of regional power in which large Asian economies may dominate. Alongside these patterns of regional and national power, third, the discussion considers the uneven geography of capital and labour captured in models of an international division of labour that is organised by flows of capital investment but also of mobile workers. The final section offers an overview of the architecture of global politics, from the level of international institutions and nation‐states, to non‐governmental bodies that operate across borders to support or resist the workings of a global economy.     

Long-Term Services and Supports for Older Adults: A Review of Home and Community-Based Services Versus Institutional Care

Despite a shift from institutional services toward more home and community-based services (HCBS) for older adults who need long-term services and supports (LTSS), the effects of HCBS have yet to be adequately synthesized in the literature. This review of literature from 1995 to 2012 compares the outcome trajectories of older adults served through HCBS (including assisted living [AL]) and in nursing homes (NHs) for physical function, cognition, mental health, mortality, use of acute care, and associated harms (e.g., accidents, abuse, and neglect) and costs. NH and AL residents did not differ in physical function, cognition, mental health, and mortality outcomes. The differences in harms between HCBS recipients and NH residents were mixed. Evidence was insufficient for cost comparisons. More and better research is needed to draw robust conclusions about how the service setting influences the outcomes and costs of LTSS for older adults. Future research should address the numerous methodological challenges present in this field of research and should emphasize studies evaluating the effectiveness of HCBS.     

Who participates? Socioeconomic Factors Associated with Women's Participation in Voluntary Groups

Participation in voluntary groups is potentially an important way to create health promoting social capital. This paper investigates women's participation in voluntary groups, utilising data from a postal survey of 968 female respondents and in‐depth interviews with 30 women. Logistic regression was conducted to examine factors associated with frequency of women's group involvement. Not working full time, living in a married relationship, and having a university education were all significantly associated with regular involvement. The qualitative data further illustrated some of the ways in which these three factors were linked with women's involvement in groups. We conclude that women who were able to regularly participate were those who already enjoyed levels of social and economic privilege. Policies to promote social capital via participation might focus on identifying what types of group involvement benefit women's health, and increasing the accessibility of such groups to include diverse groups of women.     

Creating egalitarian families among the adult children of Turkish- and Polish-origin immigrants in Sweden

This article analyzes the factors shaping egalitarian family relationships among those with two Swedish‐born parents and those with at least one parent born in Poland or Turkey. We ask: (1) What factors affect sharing domestic tasks and do they also shape the division of child care responsibilities? (2) Do these effects differ, depending on the extent of exposure to Swedish life? We analyze data from a longitudinal survey conducted between 1999 and 2003. Holding egalitarian work–family attitudes affects actual sharing of housework, but much more for those growing up in more socially integrated than in less integrated families.     

Utilization of administrative files in health research

Many authors have suggested that administrative health data files could provide the solution to the well-known research problem of obtaining data about volunteer subjects. However, many authors have failed to achieve satisfactory results because the use of these data files leads to special difficulties. Thus, unless the proper methodology is applied, use of health data files does not produce valuable results. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework which can be used to examine the suitability of health data files. More specifically, five aspects are discussed: (1) research team knowledge and skills; (2) identification and documentation of an accessible file; (3) file adequacy to answer the research question; (4) data quality; and (5) data processing. This conceptual framework should help health policy planners and researchers to better identify the problems they will meet and to find adequate solutions to these problems before embarking on the venture of using public data files.     

Five decades of missing females in China

This paper seeks to explain the dearth of females in the population of China in cohorts born from the late 1930s to the present. We demonstrate that in virtually all cohorts. the shortage of females in comparison with males is revealed when the cohort is first enumerated in a census. Subsequently it barely changes, an indication that female losses occur very early in life. Using the high-quality data from the censuses and fertility surveys in China, we show that many of the births of the girls missing in the censuses were not reported in the surveys because they died very young. The incidence of excess early female mortality (probably infanticide) declined precipitously in the Communist period, but not to zero. The recent escalation in the proportion of young females missing in China has been caused largely by rapidly escalating sex-selective abortion.