Toward a New Conceptualization of Settlements for Demography

It has long been recognized that where people live and work can be a relevant factor in helping to explain demographic behavior, yet the treatment of location in censuses and surveys remains surprisingly crude. Emphasis is still being given to the urban–rural dichotomy based on definitions that most countries around the world introduced 40 to 50 years ago and have modified little since. Given the increase in the complexity of settlement systems in recent decades in less developed as well as in more developed contexts, this simple classification is no longer adequate for examining the role of settlement in demographic processes. The time has come to rethink how settlement should be differentiated in population data collection and analysis. Contemporary technologies and methodologies make it possible to analyze spatially referenced data in ways that are more rapid and sophisticated than could have been imagined when the conventional approach was devised.     

Informal Caregiving and Quality of Life Among Older Adults: Prospective Analyses from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH)

Social Indicators Research - Providing unpaid informal care to someone who is ill or disabled is a common experience in later life. While a supportive and potentially rewarding role, informal care...     

Prostitution as a Male Object of Epistemological Pain

It is not, in the first place, prostitutes’ physical and psychological pain that is examined in this article, but the pain encountered in trying to come to terms with the studying of prostitution. Prostitution upsets consciousness’ efforts and confuses its epistemes of representation. It reveals issues of (male) avoidance and over‐rationalization that apply just as well to how business and organization are (not) studied, as to prostitution. Following Artaud, we examine how, because prostitution is both consciousness (idea, theory, representation) and body (sex, body, the physiology of the brain), it poses the problem of doubling. How can one apprehend both: (i) that one is the physical hyle (materiality) of thought and also (ii) remain aware of the contents of consciousness? Artaud claimed that only in ‘cruelty’ and the ‘scream’ could the mind and body be grasped at once. By contrast, Derrida proposes via the subjectile to glide over the space between consciousness and body, trying to acknowledge but not be stymied by the double. Finally, we turn to Irigaray who has accepted doubling and has made it epistemologically productive.     

Reflexivity and affectivity

The goal of this paper is to explore the reflexivity of the writer in the writing of organizational studies. The self‐reflexive move that tries to account for and/or to understand researcher reflexivity questions the epistemological and ethical prerequisites to the text. Malcolm Ashmore’s (1989 Ashmore, M. 1989. The reflexivity thesis: Wrighting the sociology of scientific knowledge, London: University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar]) exploration of the writer’s reflexivity has long been both a key point of reference and (perhaps) a dead‐end. The theme of the writer’s or the subject’s reflexivity – i.e. her/his role, place or ethics in the text – needs constant inquiry. Michel Henry’s life philosophy, I believe, is a source for such exploration. Henry has analyzed human affectivity as the ground to awareness, sensitivity and aliveness. His phenomenology of life, which is not a phenomenology of perception, will be examined here. For Henry, the basic human affectivity that makes consciousness and the text possible is transcendent. He asserts that the text or the work is primarily self‐creating and not the representational choice of the subject or author. His critique of representation will be evaluated here on the hand of his exemplar: Vasily Kandinsky. And I will argue for a reversal of Henry’s position, in the direction of not‐transcendent affectivity, making use of my exemplar: the Flemish writer Dimitri Verhulst.     

Sexual modes questionnaire: Measure to assess the interaction among cognitions,emotions, and sexual response

The goal of the present article is to present a new measure developed to assess cognitive and emotional factors of sexual function. This instrument was developed especially to test some hypotheses derived from Beck's new theoretical conceptualization (the modes theory; A. T. Beck, 1996). This model, characterized by its systemic and integrated approach, constitutes a remarkable development from a linear to a network perspective of the cognitive‐emotional‐behavioral processes. The new concept of mode, as a composite of schemas (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) interacting together, is theoretically sound and supported by recent research findings from clinical and experimental sets (see A. T. Beck, 1996, for a revision). Our aim is to develop a new measure specifically created to assess these integrated and interdependent processes in the field of sexuality. The Sexual Modes Questionnaire (SMQ; male and female versions) is a combined measure constituted by three interdependent subscales: automatic thoughts, emotions, and sexual response presented during sexual activity. Psychometric studies showed good reliability and validity results in both versions, and high correlations between several dimensions of the three subscales support the concept of mode and its interactional character. Moreover, the capacity showed by the SMQ to discriminate between sexually functional and dysfunctional subjects and its high correlations with measures of sexual functioning emphasize the role of cognitive‐emotional processes on sexual problems, supporting the clinical value of the measure.     

‘You build your house,we'll build ours’: The Attractions and Pitfalls of Dalit Identity Politics

Dalit (ex-Untouchable) movements across Tamilnadu are struggling to achieve equality, justice and an end to caste based discrimination. Over the past decades they have succeeded in entering parliamentary politics in the state. Many of the movements that have contributed to the current profile of Dalit politics organized on the basis of a ‘Dalit’ identity. Increasingly, however, Dalit activists in Tamilnadu have come to stress more parochial and ‘primordial’ identities and adopt ever more specific objectives. The premise of identity politics is that social categories can and should represent themselves and assert their own priorities and agendas, but who defines the category and how representative are they? This paper teases out the contradictory aspects of such mobilization and interrogates the strategies of Tamil Dalit movements before considering whether the discourse of human rights can help transcend the impasse of identity politics.     

Generalized skew-normal models: properties and inference [Statistics 40 (2006) 495–505]

In [H.W. Gómez, H.S. Salinas and H. Bolfarine, Generalized skew-normal models: Properties and inference, Statistics 40(6) (2006), pp. 495–505] introduces a new family of asymmetric distributions that depends on two parameters called, α and β, such as for the particular case β = 0 obtained skew-normal distribution. In this note we give a corrected version for the expression that is used in calculating the moments of such distribution.     

Step-Down diagnostic analysis for monitoring the covariance matrix of bivariate normal processes

ABSTRACT

A comparison among VMIX, VMAX and the adapted step-down Sullivan et al. (SE) tests for covariance matrix under bivariate normal assumption is presented. The type I error and power estimates were obtained by using Monte Carlo simulation under different scenarios with respect to covariance and correlation structures. In general, VMIX was more powerful than VMAX being SE more powerful than both, with few exceptions. SE test is more general since it can be used for normal and non-normal data, with no restriction with respect to the pattern of the covariance matrix shifts, and for larger dimension than the bivariate case.     

Properties and Inference on the Skew-Curved-Symmetric Family of Distributions

In this article, we study some results related to a specific class of distributions, called skew-curved-symmetric family of distributions that depends on a parameter controlling the skewness and kurtosis at the same time. Special elements of this family which are studied include symmetric and well-known asymmetric distributions. General results are given for the score function and the observed information matrix. It is shown that the observed information matrix is always singular for some special cases. We illustrate the flexibility of this class of distributions with an application to a real dataset on characteristics of Australian athletes.