Male-to-Female Transgender Individuals Building Social Support and Capital From Within a Gender-Focused Network

ABSTRACT

The literature on male-to-female transgender myriad problems such individuals face in their day-to-day lives, including high rates of HIV/AIDS, addiction to drugs, violence, and lack of health care. These problems are exacerbated for ethnic and racial minority MTFs. Support available from their social networks can help MTFs alleviate these problems. This article explores how minority MTFs, specifically in an urban environment, develop supportive social networks defined by their gender and sexual identities. Using principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), 20 African American and Latina MTFs were recruited at a community-based health care clinic. Their ages ranged from 18 to 53. Data were coded and analyzed following standard procedure for content analysis. The qualitative interviews revealed that participants formed their gender and sexual identities over time, developed gender-focused social networks based in the clinic from which they receive services, and engaged in social capital building and political action. Implications for using CBPR in research with MTFs are discussed.     

Three transvestites under hypnosis 1

Abstract

Interviews with the wives of forcible rapists and incest offenders at Atascadero State Hospital indicated that, among other things, the wives were more highly educated than their husbands. The women appeared to gain considerable satisfaction from the offenses of their husbands, perhaps because it put them in the role of martyrs, a role that may have been originally involved in their marriages to persons “inferior” to themselves. The wives, despite obvious cues, reported being surprised at their husbands' offenses, and not one indicated that her marriage had suffered as a consequence of her husband's behavior. The study concludes that, for this sample, rape and incest by the husbands served as a particular useful lever by which wives can further build positions of moral and social dominance.     

The Extended Skew-Exponential Power Distribution and Its Derivation

We consider an extended family of asymmetric univariate distributions generated using a symmetric density, f, and the cumulative distribution function, G, of a symmetric distribution, which depends on two real-valued parameters λ and β and is such that when β = 0 it includes the entire class of distributions with densities of the form g(z | λ) = 2 G(λ z) f(z). A key element in the construction of random variables distributed according to the family is that they can be represented stochastically as the product of two random variables. From this representation we can readily derive theoretical properties, easy-to-implement simulation schemes, as well as extensions to the multivariate case and an explicit procedure for obtaining the moments. We give special attention to the extended skew-exponential power distribution. We derive its information matrix in order to obtain the asymptotic covariance matrix of the maximum likelihood estimators. Finally, an application to a real data set is reported, which shows that the extended skew-exponential power model can provide a better fit than the skew-exponential power distribution.     

A WEIGHTED RANK MEASURE OF CORRELATION

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is not entirely suitable for measuring the correlation between two rankings in some applications because it treats all ranks equally. In 2000, Blest proposed an alternative measure of correlation that gives more importance to higher ranks but has some drawbacks. This paper proposes a weighted rank measure of correlation that weights the distance between two ranks using a linear function of those ranks, giving more importance to higher ranks than lower ones. It analyses its distribution and provides a table of critical values to test whether a given value of the coefficient is significantly different from zero. The paper also summarizes a number of applications for which the new measure is more suitable than Spearman's.     

Using census data to study elderly migration: problems and possibilities

Although the elderly are the fastest growing of all age groups in developed countries, their migration remains little studied. Elderly migration differs in several fundamental ways from that of other age groups, but many of the data collection and analysis procedures, as well as basic concepts used in censuses, have been developed with the working population in mind and are of limited utility in studying elderly migration. This article discusses some of the problems using census data to identify movers among the elderly population, and to analyze the characteristics of movers and the causes of migration. The author concludes that it is clear that what is needed with respect to census data on elderly migration is not necessarily new questions to be included. Instead, more appropriate decisions need to be made at the stages of deciding what variables to code and what categories are to be included. In addition, at the stage of determining tabulation programs there needs to be greater sensitivity to finer age breakdowns among elderly migrants and to the selection of cross-tabulation variables which are more relevant to issues and problems of the aged. Hugo suggests that an authoritative agency convene a working group to establish guidelines which address the following issues. 1) What are appropriate age breakdowns? 2) What are appropriate variables for detailed cross-tabulations? 3) Exactly what is an appropriate form for migration data to be prepared for multi-regional analysis? 4) What is the most appropriate way of formatting public use sample tapes to make analyses for assisting in the study of elderly migration? 5) How should the institutional population among the aged be dealt with? Another recommendation which arises out of the issues raised here is that, analysts should give a clear indication of what movers are actually missed by census data and which types of movers are included. Awareness of the limitations of particular data sources is of critical significance to meaningful interpretation of results if one is seeking a better understanding of the causes and consequences of important social phenomena.     

Assessing ‘empowerment’ as social development: goal and process

ABSTRACT

Empowerment is a concept widely used in several policy documents and is presented, in social work and social care professional universes, as an operative process to reduce vulnerability and to increase the power, or capabilities, of individuals and groups to make choices and to transform these into actions and results. However, to move beyond rhetoric and paternalistic practices, we need to understand what empowerment really means and implies in different contexts, and especially, how to evaluate what has changed (outcomes) or is changing (processes), both on an individual and a collective level.