A demographic perspective on the Muslim world

A demographic perspective is relevant to understanding the position of Muslims in today’s world. This paper examines the size and growth of Muslim populations, and whether most Muslims live in overwhelmingly Muslim countries. It also examines indices of poverty and human development for Muslimmajority countries, and the growth of the youth population; finally, it examines the key components of population growth: mortality and fertility. Mortality has declined sharply over the past 15 years in many Muslim countries, though not in all, and Muslim countries are no longer prominent among the ‘outliers’ with higher mortality than expected on the basis of their income levels. Fertility rates are also declining sharply in a number of major Muslim-majority countries, raising interesting issues about attitudes of different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, village-level religious leaders and ordinary Muslims towards contraception and abortion, as well as the role of socio-economic development and family planning programs in fertility declines. Despite these declines, past high fertility in many Muslim-majority countries leaves as a legacy a rapidly growing adolescent population and a burgeoning, inadequately educated labour force.     

The relation of psychological,social, and economic variables to fertility-related decisions

To test a recent model of social behavior, a questionnaire was designed and administered to 270 married women in a midwestern city. A stratified random sample was obtained, comprising a 2 × 3 factorial design (Catholic vs. Protestant and high vs. middle vs. low socioeconomic status). It was hypothesized that an individual’s intention to engage in a fertility-related behavior would be highly correlated with (a) her beliefs about the consequences of performing that behavior weighted by the value of those consequences, and/or (b) her beliefs about what relevant others think she should do and her motivation to comply with those others. The data strongly supported this hypothesis for each of three different behaviors. Analysis of variance revealed a significant religious differential for intentions to have a two-child family (Catholics were less likely to intend to have a two-child family than Protestants). This differential was further examined in terms of the proposed model of behavior.     

CEO successor compensation: outside versus inside successions

We propose that outside CEO candidates will have greater bargaining power than insiders. As a result, outside CEO successors will likely receive greater total compensation than inside CEO successors. Outside successors, meantime, pose more risk to the hiring firm than inside successors due to higher information asymmetry. As a result, outside successor compensation packages are tilted towards more performance-related pay-at-risk, while inside successor packages have a higher percentage in salary. In addition, outside successors may want to utilize the structure of their compensation at their previous firm in their new contracts. Using a sample of 99 firms with outside successors who were not CEO in their prior firms, matched by industry and size to firms that hired inside candidates, we find evidence supporting these hypotheses.     

Zelda Foster and her contributions to social work in end-of-life care

This article is both a memoir of one social worker's professional collaboration with Zelda Foster and a tribute to Zelda's legacy in the form of an educational resource on end-of-life care. It reviews achievements of Zelda Foster in social work practice and teaching related to death and dying. Resources presented in this article were supported by the Soros Foundation's Project on Death in America, a funded grant project to which Zelda contributed. The end-of-life care education, training and informational tools discussed in this article are examples of ongoing efforts in the social work profession to improve the lives of the dying and bereaved.     

Estimating likelihoods for spatio-temporal models using importance sampling

This paper describes how importance sampling can be applied to estimate likelihoods for spatio-temporal stochastic models of epidemics in plant populations, where observations consist of the set of diseased individuals at two or more distinct times. Likelihood computation is problematic because of the inherent lack of independence of the status of individuals in the population whenever disease transmission is distance-dependent. The methods of this paper overcome this by partitioning the population into a number of sectors and then attempting to take account of this dependence within each sector, while neglecting that between-sectors. Application to both simulated and real epidemic data sets show that the techniques perform well in comparison with existing approaches. Moreover, the results confirm the validity of likelihood estimates obtained elsewhere using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.     

Development Tracks: The Theory and Practice of Community Development

It was and is an important text, and looking back, it becomesclear how in many ways New Zealand was advanced in its thinkingon Community Development. The language and the concepts wereexpressed differently from today, but that is a comment nota critique. The editor, Ian Shirley, with a history as a community workerand later an academic had produced other writings on communitydevelopment, but little of the standing of this work had beenwritten either before or since on the theory and practice ofcommunity development in New Zealand. Twenty-three years on,this book is still read by students and teachers of communitydevelopment. So, has it that stood the test of time or is therenothing to take its place? The book does not     

Fighting Battles with History: The Novelist Louis Golding and the Story of the 'Doomington Wanderer'

This article explores the writing of Louis Golding in the context of existing scholarship on the Anglo-Jewish novel. It assesses the importance of Golding's background and beliefs in shaping his fiction. Golding's views bridge the cultural gap between eastern European Jewish schtetl life and interwar British society. On one hand, he was a militant supporter of Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriage, of secular Judaism and religious freedom. At the same time his writing reveals a sustained belief in Jewish 'race' and Jewish spirituality. Golding's writing on 'race' will receive particular attention. Like so many other British Jews in the period, the author seems to have been caught between his desire to fight the racism of the Third Reich and his own confused 'racial' attitudes.     

Vacillating and Mixed Emotions: A Conceptual-Discursive Perspective on Contemporary Emotion and Cognitive Appraisal Theories Through Examples of Pride

Gavin B. Sullivan and Kenneth T. Strongman, Vacillating and Mixed Emotions: A Conceptual-Discursive Perspective on Contemporary Emotion and Cognitive Appraisal Theories Through Examples of Pride, pp. 203–226.
Vacillating and mixed emotional experiences are often difficult to explore and understand because they confront the limits of our language's ability to capture private experiences in extreme or abnormal circumstances. In this paper, we build upon remarks by Wittgenstein (1953) to present a conceptual-discursive perspective based on naturalistic examples of individuals vacillating between pride and other emotions. This perspective is used to show how relevant emotion theories contain conceptual errors of the sort identified by Wittgenstein. The "assembled reminders" of shifts between pride and other emotions are presented in contrast to analyses that focus on people's identification of causes of emotions, an approach which leads to theoretical speculation about underlying appraisal set changes or discussion of the empirical justification of cognitive ontology. We bypass a direct confrontation on these issues by examining how people's talk about the content of vacillating and mixed emotional experiences (i.e., aspect shifts) augments a shared "emotionology" with creative expressions and poetic comparisons. This last point is illustrated by the emotional instability experienced by individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Support for the conceptual-discursive perspective is provided by the success of a particular therapeutic approach, the Conversational Model, in ameliorating the developmental disruption of BPD by encouraging participation in empathic conversations. We conclude that a conceptual-discursive perspective undermines the cognitive appraisal "picture" of vacillating emotions and adds to our understanding.     

PREVALENCE OF FAMILY THERAPY MODELS: A RESEARCH NOTE

A survey was undertaken to assess the prevalence of family therapy models utilized by a sample of members in the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy. Frequencies and rankings of widely recognized therapeutic frameworks are reported. Brief discussion centers on the highest ranking choice, the notion of eclecticism, and cautious interpretation of the data.