Spousal Abuse Among Immigrants From Ethiopia in Israel

This ethnographic study obtains first‐hand information on spousal abuse from Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Data include 23 interviews with male and female immigrants of various ages and 10 professionals who worked with this community as well as observations and documents. The findings, verified by participants, show that during cultural transition, the immigrants’ code of honor, traditional conflict‐solving institutions, and family role distribution disintegrate. This situation, exacerbated by economic distress, proved conducive to women’s abuse. Lack of cultural sensitivity displayed by social services actually encouraged women to behave abusively toward their husbands and destroy their families. Discussion focuses on communication failures in spousal‐abuse discourse between immigrants from Ethiopia and absorbing society, originating in differences in values, behavior, social representations, and insensitive culture theories.     

Block unimodality for multivariate Bayesian robustness

Summary The development of Bayesian robustness has been growing in the last decade. The theory has extensively dealt with the univariate parameter case. Among the vast amount of proposals in the literature, only a few of them have a straightforward extension to the multivariate case. In this paper we consider the multidimensional version of the class of ε-contaminated prior distributions, with unimodal contaminations. In the multivariate case there is not a unique definition of unimodality and one's choice must be based on statistical ground. Here we propose the use of the block unimodal distributions, which proved to be very suitable for modelling situations where the coordinates of the parameter ϑ are deemed, a priori, weakly correlated.     

Rational behaviour: A comparison between the theory stemming from de Finetti's work and some other leading theories

We present some interesting features of de Finetti's decision theory; then we extended the theory. The extended theory has a normative character and is of the expected utility kind, but it is also very adaptable. By comparing it with some leading theories, we find that our theory is compatible with consideration of the whole probability distribution — it can even accommodate Allais' paradox -, while it is not generally compatible with probability weighting. We are mainly interested in the normative point of view.     

Unified Bayesian conditional autoregressive risk measures using the skew exponential power distribution

Statistical Methods & Applications - Conditional Autoregressive Value-at-Risk and Conditional Autoregressive Expectile have become two popular approaches for direct measurement of market risk....     

The Effect of Volunteering for Community Activity on the Social Resources of Low-SES Residents: Differences Between Volunteer Community Activists and Other Residents

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Community interventions seek to increase volunteer activists’ social resources in order to further the establishment...     

Group selection for production yield among k manufacturing lines

Producing qualified items or products is essential to meet the requirement preset by customers. Evaluation and selection of desired manufacturing lines become challenging tasks for decision makers. Production yield is one of the important factors in measuring production performance. The goal of this paper is to screen a group of manufacturing lines and identify the best one with the highest yield. For the production lines with extremely low fraction of defectives, the yield index, S_pk, is an efficient indicator for quality level. This paper considers the production selection problem by using S_pk to compare k (k>2) manufacturing lines. A subset is constructed to contain the production lines with the highest yield. A systematic approach of test order k compares selected pairs of manufacturing lines along with the Bonferroni method is proposed to solve this problem. Each pair of production yields is compared by taking ratio. The paper provides critical values and required sample sizes of the group selection procedure. An application example on evaluating four power inductor productions is presented to illustrate the practicality of the proposed approach.