Aging and Gender Health Gap: A Multilevel Analysis for 17 European Countries

Social Indicators Research - The European population is aging and their declining capacity makes older Europeans more dependent on the availability of care. Male and female health needs at older...     

Ensuring Parliamentary Gender Equality Through a New Zipper Method: An Application to Finland

Gender equality constitutes a crucial objective for a successful societal development. Although research has found that the differences are shrinking, parliamentary composition is not gender balanced in most areas of the world. Henceforth, recent literature has undertaken important efforts aimed at developing different initiatives to promote parity in democratic parliaments, especially through the use of quota systems. Prior initiatives, although leading to an improvement of gender parity, do not manage to ensure an optimal gender-egalitarian parliamentary composition. Thus, this paper presents a method to organize closed and blocked lists of candidates that guarantees the achievement of gender-balanced representation in parliamentary elections. Specifically, parity is sought globally, in each party and also in each electoral constituency. Furthermore, the method is applied to the elections held over the last two decades in Finland. Results reveal that parity in gender representation increases at global, party, and constituency levels throughout all the parliamentary elections in Finland, even approaching optimal numerical parity (i.e. 50 % for each gender) in most of the cases.     

Materialism in Pedagogy Students in Chile

Many studies have used Richins and Dawson’s (J Consum Res 19: 303–316, 1992) Material Values Scale (MVS), applying it to different types of populations that exhibit a particular psychometric behavior, and showing little stability in their factorial structure. In the present study, 1,070 pedagogy students from the northern, central and southern regions of Chile answered the MVS. This sample was randomly divided in two. Using the first sub-sample (N = 539), an exploratory factorial analysis was carried out, from which a structure of nine items was grouped into two factors called “Social Success” and “Personal Happiness”, which presented adequate reliability. Later, with the second sub-sample (N = 531), the factorial structure indicated above was put to the test through a confirmatory factorial analysis. The data from the model show that the scale contains 8 items in total, grouped into two dimensions. The factorial loads are significant at the level of 1 %, which indicates that the 2-factor structure can be confirmed. Finally—using the proposed structure—the presence of the students’ material values was evaluated.     

Puerto rican drug users’ experiences of physical and sexual abuse: Comparisons based on sexual identities

This study integrates the results of quantitative and qualitative methods to elucidate the association between sexual identity and physical and sexual abuse among Puerto Rican drug users. A structured questionnaire was administered to 800 subjects in New York and 399 in Puerto Rico. A total of 93 subjects (7.9%) self‐identified as homosexual or bisexual. Gay males were significantly more likely than heterosexual males to report first occurrence of physical abuse by a family member in childhood. Both gay and bisexual males were more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to report first experiencing unwanted sex in childhood and intimate partner physical abuse later in life. Lesbians were more likely than female heterosexuals to report unwanted sex in childhood. Qualitative data were collected through in‐depth life histories with 21 subjects and suggest that gay and lesbian subjects perceive antihomosexual prejudice on the part of family members as one cause of childhood physical and sexual abuse.     

The Ranking of the Regions With Regard to Their Sports Facilities to Improve Their Planning in Sport: The Case of Spain

Sports facility planning by the public authorities should be considered to be one of the main policies to have an indirect influence on the aim of ensuring a healthy population, as well as reducing its physical inactivity. Our research aims to study and compare the state of sports infrastructures in the regions of Spain, using a synthetic indicators. Our results should serve not only to detect the vast imparity between different regions, which has come about because of varying investment and management with regard to sports infrastructures, but also to redirect building planning and sports management policies onto the right path, and also give food for thought.     

On-line bin packing with restricted repacking

Semi-on-line algorithms for the bin-packing problem allow, in contrast to pure on-line algorithms, the use of certain types of additional operations for each step. Examples include repacking, reordering or lookahead before packing the items. Here we define and analyze a semi-on-line algorithm where for each step at most k items can be repacked, for some positive integer k. We prove that the upper bound for the asymptotic competitive ratio of the algorithm is a decreasing function of k, which tends to 3/2 as k goes to infinity. We also establish lower bounds for this ratio and show that the gap between upper and lower bounds is relatively small.     

Occupational and industrial contextual indicators in income determination models for Australia

Contextual variables, such as average education, gender composition, ethnicity and unionization, influence individual incomes differently when aggregated to occupations and to industries. Discriminatory effects exerted on income by ethnic and gender segregation in occupational labor markets are in some cases counterbalanced by segregation in industrial labor markets. Employment in different industries influences income irrespective of individual characteristics of the employees and irrespective of aggregate characteristics of their occupations. This impact of industrial location is also independent of organizational characteristics of the industries, even if the choice of characteristics is determined by the economic segmentation theory.     

Multigaussian models: The danger of parsimony

Summary MultiGaussian models have the intrinsic property of imposing very little continuity to extreme values. If the variable that is being modeled is hydraulic conductivity and the processes being studied are groundwater flow and mass transport, the absence of continuous paths of extreme values will have a retardation effect in the computed travel times. In the case of radionuclide release of nuclear waste from a deep geological repository, underestimation of travel times may lead to unsafe decision making. To demonstrate the impact of the low continuity of extreme value implicit to multiGaussian modes, travel times are computed in a site similar to Finnsj?n-one of the sites in crystaline rock studied in Sweden-using two stochastic models with the same histogram and covariance, one of them is multiGaussian, and the other is not and displays high connectivity of extreme high values. The results show that the multiGaussian model leads to less conservative results than the non-multiGaussian one. Invoking the parisimony principle to select a multiGaussian model as the simplest model that can be fully described by a mean value and a covariance function should not be justification enough for such selection. If there is not enough data to characterize the connectivity of the extreme values and therefore distriminate whether a multiGaussian model is appropriate or not, less parismonious models must also be considered.