Marketing the Damaged Self: The Construction of Identity in Advertisements Directed Towards People with HIV/AIDS

This paper explores the identities projected in advertisements directed towards HIV positive individuals and people with AIDS. Fifty such advertisements were collected from three popular American magazines for gay men over a period of seven months. Analysis of the ads reveals a paradoxical presentation of people with HIV/AIDS, which offers simultaneous conflicting images of hope and fear, power and weakness, innocence and guilt. An interactive sociolinguistic model through which this contradictory discourse might be understood is presented, drawing on Goffman's insights on stigma management and the presentation of the self in social interaction. Advertisements directed towards people with HIV/AIDS, it is suggested, present a contradictory discourse in which the advertisers are positioned as 'the wise', offering to mediate the conflicting identities of the stigmatized. The identity values enacted in this contradictory discourse are further measured against American conceptions of communication and the self as observed by Carbaugh and others. The possible consequences of these positionings on the roles made available to people with HIV/AIDS in the wider social context are discussed.     

International guidelines and the inclusion of disabled people. The Ugandan story

Uganda has made much progress towards including disabled people in its mainstream development, particularly in the political agenda. The exact process by which this has been achieved and the relationship between this and international guidelines and legislation are not known. This study undertakes to examine this from two specific perspectives: (1) How do international documents relevant to disabled people relate to national legislation in Uganda? (2) What can this comparison, together with the perceptions of stakeholders, tell us about how the legislation and services could improve? International legislation and Ugandan legislation is reviewed and compared. Data from 5 semi‐structured key informant interviews and 6 focus group discussions involving a total of 38 people are collected and analysed. The themes arising from the data are related to the documents, legislation, policies and other relevant literature. The results examine the barriers to service provision; the role of change; the importance of representation; policy and legislation issues; and the effects of devolution. Five specific findings relate to how legislation and services can improve: more resources to increase access for disabled people; strong leadership and collaboration between Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) funding bodies and governments; awareness raising and training; representation from all impairment groups; and raising the profile of disabled people through further legislation.     

Compulsory intergenerational family solidarity shaping choices between work and care: Perceptions of informal female carers and local policymakers in Estonia

Estonians are obliged by law to provide maintenance for family members who are unable to cope by themselves. As a result, 80% of fragile older people receive informal care. Whether this is because the carers themselves feel solidarity and choose informal caring or because they lack alternatives is the question. We applied the cultural approach for explaining the construction of compulsory family solidarity in care provision to older people through the perceptions of informal carers and policy actors. Our interest is in how filial norms framed by individual responsibilities of care provision required by law can influence (i) informal carers’ perceptions concerning their choices between work and care and (ii) impact policy actors’ perceptions concerning eldercare service provision. Analysing the empirical data produced during focus groups with female carers and interviews with policy actors, we demonstrate the triple‐fold pressure to informal caregiving as an expression of compulsory family solidarity. Key Practitioner Message: ? The article demonstrates how the national Family Law Act constitutes a compulsory requirement of family solidarity in society; ? The compulsory family solidarity norm influences local‐level policymaking and inhibits the development of formal care services for older people; ? Informal carers’ choices between work and care are shaped by their personal filial norms, familialistic policymaking, and pressure exerted by older people.     

A solution for two-person bargaining problems

Everyday bargaining problems are often solved by tossing a coin. A solution for two-person bargaining problems is axiomatized, which is a Pareto-optimal generalization of this coin tossing method. The super-additive solution of Perles and Maschler is also shown to be a generalization of this method. Various properties of our solution are studied, including continuity and risk sensitivity, and compared with properties of other solutions discussed in the literature.This study was financed by the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, which is gratefully acknowledged. I like to thank an anonymous referee for useful comments.     

SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF CHURCH CONTRIBUTIONS AND CHURCH ATTENDANCE

In a standard model of household allocation of time and income, church attendance and church contributions are determined simultaneously. There are life-cycle aspects to both attendance and contributions, as Azzi and Ehrenberg (1975) and Ehrenberg (1977) have argued, and contributions behavior is affected by tax treatment and by a potential free-rider problem as well. This paper motivates an econometric specification which recognizes these features and estimates the parameters with a data set of over 2000 Protestant church members.     

Distribution of the cross-correlations of squared residuals in ARIMA models

ABSTRACT The distribution of the cross-correlations of squared residuals from Box-Jenkins models is considered in very general conditions, and the asymptotic distribution is derived. A test for a lagged relationship in volatility for economic time series under instantaneous causality is proposed, and its empirical behaviour is studied. An example involving the international stock market's volatility is studied, and an interesting result is observed.     

Ultrastructural elliptical models

Dolby's (1976) ultrastructural model with no replications is investigated within the class of the elliptical distributions. General asymptotic results are given for the sample covariance matrix S in the presence of incidental parameters. These results are used to study the asymptotic behaviour of some estimators of the slope parameter, unifying and extending existing results in the literature. In particular, under some regularity conditions they are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. For the special case of the structural model, some asymptotic relative efficiencies are also reported which show that generalized least squares and the method of moment estimators can be highly inefficient under nonnormality.     

Modelling the management of underground water assets

Central to the activities of any industry is the modernization of its assets. This paper describes the application of statistical methods to the asset management plan of a large water company. A model for the underground assets is given in detail, and the extensive computations required are illustrated. A Bayesian model shows the consequences of various policy options and provides realistic measures of the uncertainty connected with them.     

History of sexual abuse and parental alcohol misuse: Risk,outcomes and protective factors in adolescents

This study examined the school performance, suicidal involvement, disordered eating behaviors, pregnancy risk and chemical use of teenagers with a history of sexual abuse or parental alcohol misuse and found that they had higher rates of these adverse outcomes than among a comparison group of teenagers without such background risk factors. Adolescents with dual-risk background reported higher levels of suicide risk, disordered eating, sexual behaviors and chemical abuse than teenagers with only one background risk factor. Among index group members, protective factors against these adverse outcomes included a high degree of religiosity and the ability to discuss problems with family or friends. Risk factors that increased the likelihood of adverse outcomes included depression, perceived substance use in school and worries about family financial security.The first author was supported in the preparation of this article by a grant from the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund of New York.     

ALTRUISM, MATCHING, AND NONMARKET INSURANCE

Incomplete market insurance gives rise to nonmarket arrangements for coinsurance. We find that the effort altruistically linked individuals take to avoid an accident increases with the degree of altruism. If the degree of altruism is sufficiently high, an economy with nonmarket insurance yields higher social welfare than an economy without nonmarket insurance. As altruism increases, the equilibrium level of effort approaches the second-best solution without the need for costly monitoring. Coinsurance is above (below) the socially optimal level if individuals place greater weight (less weight) on their own utility than on that of their partners.