Methods for Small Area Population Forecasts: State-of-the-Art and Research Needs

Population Research and Policy Review - Small area population forecasts are widely used by government and business for a variety of planning, research and policy purposes, and often influence major...     

Health and the household

We underscore the close link between the economics of the household and health economics in a framework in which consumers produce their fundamental objects of choice. Health is produced with inputs of market goods and services and the own time of the consumer. Health is demanded not only because it is an argument in the utility function but also because it determines the amount of time available for market and nonmarket production. The latter motive points to health capital as one component of the stock of human capital. The economics of the household has much to say about the determinants of investment in this type of capital. The five health economics papers in this issue of Review of Economics of the Household are connected by an emphasis on the role of time in the production of two aspects of health: obesity and the general health of elderly persons.      

Managing Multisite Nonprofits

Multisite nonprofit systems are organized in a variety of ways, ranging from central control to local control. Regardless of where a system falls along this organizational continuum, inevitable tensions emerge in the relationship between headquarters and the local organization. The purpose of this article is to understand the causes of these tensions and to offer management action that, regardless of the organizational structure, leads to greater system cohesion. Our exploration was facilitated by intense field research at five multisite systems: Outward Bound USA, Planned Parenthood, Habitat for Humanity, SOS Kinderdorf, and The Nature Conservancy. Our investigation suggests that multisite system behavior may be mapped on two dimensions—one that exerts forces toward unit autonomy and the other influencing the degree of organizational affiliation. These forces are associated with a host of organizational functions that are the traditional domains of management to influence and shape and thereby enable a multisite nonprofit to simultaneously optimize the benefits of organizational affiliation and unit autonomy.     

A Narrative Approach to Groups

This paper considers the ways that narratives can be used in groups to create meaning, organize the past, explain the present and consider alternatives for the future. Narratives are formats for self-creation; they can also be used to provide support or education, promote self-understanding and interpersonal effectiveness. Already familiar in self-help groups and reminiscence groups for the elderly, narrative approaches can be useful in many other formats. In this paper I discuss ways of eliciting narratives, understanding their meaning from many perspectives and using them to promote growth and healing in groups. The group leader's role is reconfigured into that of participant observer and manager of the group process. It is up to the leader to provide a context in which multiple accounts can emerge for consideration.     

Pregnancy wantedness and the early initiation of prenatal care

The study examines the impact of the wantedness of a pregnancy on the demand for early prenatal care. Using a cohort of pregnant women in New York City, we estimate a prenatal care demand function in which we control for the probability of giving birth, given a woman is pregnant. We interpret this control as a measure of wantedness. The results indicate that if the black and Hispanic women who aborted had instead given birth, they would have delayed the initiation of prenatal care, on average, more than three-quarters of a month longer than the mean number of months of delay that were actually observed for the women who gave birth. By allowing women to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, induced abortion increases the average use of prenatal care among black and Hispanic women relative to what would have been observed if the women who aborted had instead given birth.     

Body shopping: Maternity and alterity in Mamatoto

ABSTRACT

The products and practices of The Body Shop, both material and rhetorical, can be inserted into a number of competing discourses along the axes of feminist interests in the body and its relation to culture. We focus here on The Body Shop's Mamatoto range as it relates to contemporary Western discursive formations of maternity, alterity, and the vexed constructions of ‘difference’ and ‘globalism’ that emerge from them. Among the meta-products of Mamatoto are discursive formations of the body itself which, while they appear to endorse, even to celebrate, an active engagement with transcultural specificity and difference, actually reinstate the Western, white body of ‘woman’ as the ‘gold standard’ against which the exoticized currency of other women can be classified, appropriated and disowned. Within this framework, maternity itself is deployed by The Body Shop as a richly suggestive trope that serves to represent the problematics of body-as-nature, body-as-culture and body-as-identity that continue to preoccupy feminists across a wide range of political and cultural agendas.     

Preliminary announcement and call for papers

Preliminary announcement and call for papers     

Constitutionalizing Modernity: Forging the Modern American State

Who makes decisions when an essential, constitutional 'handbook' has failed to describe any exceptional situation? Is it fair to place power in the hands of a few specific people to decide? This article illustrates how the US Supreme Court has modernized and reconstituted the US Constitution to make it compatible with an emerging twentieth-century regulatory state and the attendant public functions within the 'state'. The article examines the relationships among legal, social, political, and economic changes in the process of the modern evolutionary state. The paper represents a theoretical attempt to relate constitutional growth and evolution to the development of a constitutionally legitimized 'positive', 'regulatory', or 'welfare' state, and concludes that constitutional fluidity and flexibility are potential sources of empowerment, while incremental constitutionalism with regard to the welfare state is probably the best possible strategy to adopt in American modernity.     

The role of empathy in supervision

Empathy plays an important role in clinical supervision. It is the link between the client whose treatment is being supervised, the clinician/supervisee, and the supervisor. The supervisor uses an empathic capacity as well as theoretical knowledge to understand the clinical work and build the supervisory relationship. Often the progress of a case can be traced through the development of empathic understanding in the supervision. The transmission of empathy requires creativity and openness and is one of the major challenges in supervision. By analyzing the different uses of empathy in clinical supervision we can increase our understanding of the supervisory process.