Public Attitudes toward Abortion in Israel: A Research Note

Objective . For the first time since the mid-1970s, this study explored sociodemographic correlates of abortion attitudes among Israeli Jews and compared them with those reported by the General Social Survey in the United States. Methods . A survey in the representative sample of Jewish adults living in urban areas across Israel ( N = 546) that included two related items on the attitude toward abortion for nonvital reasons. Results . Using multiple regression, four statistically and socially significant correlates of antiabortion attitudes were identified: Greater religiosity (especially Ultra-Orthodox affiliation), lower than average income, greater number of children, and right-wing political preference. Gender and age did not emerge as significant correlates of abortion attitudes. Whereas American Jews form the mainstay of the prochoice camp, Jews in Israel are clearly divided along the lines of religiosity, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and political views. Conclusions . In both Israel and the United States, the sociodemographic profiles of abortion supporters and opponents have been rather similar and stable over the last 25 years. This may point to the stable patterns of religiosity in both societies, since antiabortion sentiments have mainly been fueled by religious fundamentalism, regardless of formal denomination.     

Finite-Sample Properties of Some Alternative GMM Estimators

We investigate the small-sample properties of three alternative generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators of asset-pricing models. The estimators that we consider include ones in which the weighting matrix is iterated to convergence and ones in which the weighting matrix is changed with each choice of the parameters. Particular attention is devoted to assessing the performance of the asymptotic theory for making inferences based directly on the deterioration of GMM criterion functions.     

A Right to Exist: A Palestinian speaks

This paper links theory with practice. It discusses original video footage of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, filmed by an all-woman crew of Western film-makers and Palestinians, which aims to challenge mainstream Orientalist discourses. The footage was shot in and around Al Aroub refugee camp in the West Bank and distributed through a variety of exhibition platforms. Western representations of Arabs are normally framed in a manner that allows little sympathy and/or understanding of their plight. Research has also shown a lack of knowledge in the West about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Focusing on “ordinary and everyday” aspects of Palestinian life, rendered often “extraordinary” by the circumstances of occupation, the footage attempts to draw connections and similarities for a Western audience and to illustrate that Palestinian daily lives are not “played out” only in opposition to the Israeli regime. The paper explores methods of enabling access to Palestinian voices in their own terms, while eliciting the empathy of audiences more accustomed to dramatised and stereotyped images of Palestinian life in Western news and current affairs footage.     

My Home is Not My Castle: Follow-Up of Residents of Shelters for Homeless Youth

The paper presents a follow-up evaluation of Israel’s first two shelters for homeless youth. The main research questions were: (a) Did the youngsters achieve the shelters’ main goal of reaching a normative and suitable post-shelter residence? (b) How do the youngsters evaluate their stay at the shelter and its impact on them? (c) Is there a relationship between youngsters’ post-shelter residence and their evaluation of the shelter stay? Data on 345 youngsters were collected through follow-up telephone interviews with the youngsters, their parents, and community social workers. The findings indicate that the majority of these youngsters left the shelter to living arrangements that were normative but not necessarily fitting with their wishes and needs. Most of the youngsters were satisfied with the shelter, but no relationship was found between general satisfaction and achievement of the shelters’ declared goal. The discussion focuses on the significance of the findings with regard to the declared and operative goals of shelters.     

Social work in Israel: professional characteristics in an international comparative perspective

This article employs a comparative framework in the analysis of the professional characteristics of social work in Israel. Using the attributes and the power approaches to professions, Israeli social work is analysed according to eight variables: a protected 'trademark', monopoly over social care and delivery of services within state welfare systems, occupational autonomy, length of training and control over training, internal differentiation by levels of expertise and competence, professional organisation, a sanction-backed code of ethics, and material and symbolic rewards. The analysis reveals that Israeli social work has undergone an extensive professionalisation process and that it has characteristics that are not common in other countries. Initial explanations for this process are offered and discussed.     

Quantitative assessment of response shift in QOL research

Two assumptions which characterize the measurements of quality life (QOL) studies, are questioned by the present report: First, the assumption that QOL is the same thing for all subjects, is usually related to health problems and can easily be measured across subjects. Second, when this assumption is given up by introducing subjective base-rates in an intra-subject (before-after) design, researchers still tend to assume that no response shifts occur on the QOL scales, e.g., that these scales maintain the same meaning and values for subjects over time and interventions. In our study we found that QOL had different subjective interpretations [1--4]. While for some certain issues in their family-life determined their quality of life, for others these were issues at their workplace or of their health conditions. Second, when QOL was tested against a subjective base-line (for each individual according to their choices of domains), about eleven percent of the hypertensives and normotensives showed a clear response shift of scale-calibration over the period of one year. When the scores of these subjects were excluded, the significance of certain previously reported results changed. For example, the significant difference between normotensives and hypertensives concerning the change in their subjective evaluation of QOL over the year and their initial depression became more significant, while similar changes in their evaluation of sexual impairment and control at their work-place became insignificant. These results suggest that response shifts have to be traced and quantified, before one can claim any results (or lack of results) in 'before-after' designs, concerning subjective meaningful issues like quality of life.     

Quality and flexibility performance trade-offs between lean and agile manufacturing firms in the automotive industry

Abstract

Firms operating in the automotive industry have traditionally been ascribed with efficiency and high levels of quality, as lean production has been extensively applied within this context, but given the recent dynamics in the automotive sector, there is also a need for high levels of flexibility, widening our attention to agile production. However, when lean and agile production have been explored simultaneously, the quality and flexibility trade-offs have been mixed and unclear. In order to dispel the lean-agile ambiguity, and given that both high levels of flexibility and quality are required within the automotive industry, the purpose of this study was to: (a) Identify the relationship between flexibility and quality; and (b) Explore the quality and flexibility differences between lean and agile production. Primary quantitative data was obtained via a survey and a total of 140 automotive manufacturing firms within the UK returned the survey. Logistic regressions were utilised as the main mode of analysis. Not only was an inverse relationship found between quality and flexibility, but our findings depict two distinctive Business Models (BMs) existing in the automotive industry, one lean and one agile. We advance the lean-agile debate by asserting that lean and agile firms acquire quality (efficiency) and flexibility strengths respectively, and not vice-versa. Given this, we theoretically side with the notion of performance ‘trade-offs’ and contend the idea that capabilities are cumulatively gained. By incorporating an argument built on the strategy literature on BMs and Dynamic Capabilities, we assert that lean and agile firms have evolved to underpin different kinds of competitive advantage within the same industry, but these advantages are placed at different tiers in the automotive supply chain.     

Self-organizing maps in population based metaheuristic to the dynamic vehicle routing problem

We consider the dynamic vehicle routing problem (dynamic VRP). In this problem, new customer demands are received along the day. Hence, they must be serviced at their locations by a set of vehicles in real time. The approach to address the problem is a hybrid method which manipulates the self-organizing map (SOM) neural network into a population based evolutionary algorithm. The method, called memetic SOM, illustrates how the concept of intermediate structure, also called elastic net or adaptive mesh concept, provided by the original SOM can naturally be applied into a dynamic setting. The experiments show that the heuristic outperforms the approaches that were applied to the Kilby et al. 22 problems with up to 385 customers. It performs better with respect to solution quality than the ant colony algorithm MACS-VRPTW, a genetic algorithm, and a multi-agent oriented approach, with a computation time used roughly 100 times lesser.