South African Mixed‐race Children's and Mothers' Judgments and Reasoning about Children's Nurturance and Self‐determination Rights

This study examined the understanding of children's rights in 63 (9‐, 11‐, and 13‐year‐olds) mixed‐race South African children and their mothers. In individual semi‐structured interviews participants responded to hypothetical vignettes in which children's nurturance and self‐determination rights conflicted with parental authority in the home. Participants were required to decide whether they should support the story characters' rights and provide justifications for their responses. Findings indicated that both children and mothers were more likely to endorse children's nurturance than self‐determination rights. In contrast to previous research, no significant differences were found between children and mothers in terms of support for either type of right. In terms of reasoning, both children's and mothers' responses revealed distinct patterns of thinking influenced by the type of right under consideration. The findings are discussed with reference to the available western and non‐western literature on children's understanding of rights. Limitations, implications, and directions for future research are considered.     

Changes in productivity of Spanish university libraries

This paper analyzes productivity growth, technical progress, and efficiency change in a sample of 34 Spanish university libraries between 2003 and 2007. Data envelopment analysis and a Malmquist index are combined with a bootstrap method to provide statistical inference estimators of individual productivity, technical progress, pure efficiency, and scale efficiency scores. To calculate productivity, a three-stage service model has been developed, examining productivity changes in the relationships between the libraries' basic inputs, intermediate outputs, and final outputs. The results indicate a growth in the productivity of the libraries (relationship between basic inputs and intermediate outputs) and in the productivity of the service (relationship between basic inputs and final outputs). The growth in productivity in both relationships is due to technical progress. If the variable representing the use of electronic information resources is removed from the final output, the result is a significant reduction in productivity.     

Men Don't Put on Make-up: Toddlers' Knowledge of the Gender Stereotyping of Household Activities

Toddlers’ knowledge of the stereotyping of traditionally feminine and masculine household activities was examined in two experiments. The experiments used a generalized imitation paradigm which required toddlers (total N = 63) to select a male or female doll to imitate nine masculine, feminine and neutral activities (e.g., shaving, vacuuming, sleeping). In the first experiment, 24‐month‐old girls, but not boys, demonstrated knowledge of both feminine and masculine activities. Results from study 2 indicated that boys possess some knowledge of these stereotyped activities by the age of 31 months. The results of the two experiments suggested that knowledge about the gender stereotyping of familiar activities can be demonstrated in children as young as 24 months.     

Analysing home-ownership of couples: The effect of selecting couples at the time of the survey

The analysis of events encountered by couple and family households may suffer from sample selection bias when data are restricted to couples existing at the moment of interview. The paper discusses the effect of sample selection bias on event history analyses of buying a home by comparing analyses performed on a sample of existing couples with analyses of a more complete sample including past as well as current partner relationships. The results show that, although home-buying in relationships that have ended differs clearly from behaviour in existing relationships, sample selection bias is not alarmingly large.     

The Minimax,the Minimin,and the Hurwicz Adjustment Principle

In this paper the Hurwicz decision rule is applied to an adjustment problem concerning the decision whether a given action should be improved in the light of some knowledge on the states of nature or on other actors' behaviour. In comparison with the minimax and the minimin adjustment principles the general Hurwicz rule reduces to these specific classes whenever the underlying loss function is quadratic and knowledge is given by an ellipsoidal set. In the framework of the adjustment model discussed in this paper Hurwicz's optimism index can be interpreted as a mobility index representing the actor's attitude towards new external information. Examples are given that serve to illustrate the theoretical findings.     

Uniform strong convergence results for the conditional kaplan-meier estimator and its quantiles

We consider a fixed design model in which the responses are possibly right censored. The aim of this paper is to establish some important almost sure convergence properties of the Kaplan-Meier type estimator for the lifetime distribution at a given covariate value. We also consider the corresponding quantile estimator and obtain a modulus of continuity result. Our rates of uniform strong convergence are obtained via exponential probability bounds.     

Sons and daughters of foster carers and the impact of fostering on their everyday life

The paper presents results from a study of sons and daughters of foster carers, and the impact of fostering on their lives. Children and young people participated in focus groups and discussion groups, and 684 answered a questionnaire. Eight were interviewed in‐depth. The results from the study showed that sons and daughters of foster carers were highly involved in the fostering assignment. Most children and young people valued their relationship with foster children, but even though relations to foster children were good, fostering could imply complicated changes of everyday life. Sons and daughters of foster carers may have to cope with conflicts connected to behavioural disorders of foster children, and they gained knowledge about foster children’s problematic lives. Fostering also implied contact with natural parents of foster children. Such contact could challenge children’s and young people’s’ perception of adequate parenthood. For some respondents it was hard to become aware of the dysfunctional parenting, abuse and/or neglect to which foster children might have been exposed. The results of the study provided evidence of the need to acknowledge the contribution to fostering made by sons and daughters of foster carers, and also to recognize the impact fostering may have on their lives.     

Older Peoples’ Descriptions of Becoming and Being Respite Care Recipients

The number of older people in the western world is increasing. Advancing age creates the need for care, including respite care. The aim of this study is to describe the experience of older people of becoming and being respite care recipients. Admission to respite care is a response to a range of practicalities in the home, such as the need to maintain privacy, dissatisfaction with home care, and deterioration in health. However, the participants in this study had little or no involvement in the decision regarding respite care placement. Activities, training, and medical treatment were found to be important to respite care recipients’ satisfaction with their care.