Temporary Work,Underemployment and Workplace Accommodations: Relationship to Well‐being for Workers with Disabilities

This study examines whether employment status and workplace accommodations are associated with perceived well‐being among workers with disabilities. Data from the 2006 Participation and Activity Limitation Survey conducted by Statistics Canada were used to test the relationship between employment status, receipt of workplace accommodations and well‐being. Findings indicated that fully utilized permanent employees showed greater life satisfaction and less perceived disability‐related discrimination than either temporary workers or permanent workers who were underemployed. These findings support the theory that inadequate employment is associated with deleterious effects on employee well‐being due to inferior need fulfilment and reduced social status. Workplace accommodations were associated with higher levels of well‐being for all workers with disabilities and helped to mitigate the negative effects of temporary status and underemployment. These findings supported the theoretical extension of main effect and buffering models of workplace stress to the prediction of perceived workplace discrimination.     

Predicting body fat using weight–height indices

While body fat is the most accurate measure of obesity, its measurement requires special equipment that can be costly and time consuming to operate. Attention has thus typically focused on the easier to calculate body mass index (BMI). However, the ability of BMI to accurately identify obesity has been increasingly questioned. This paper focuses attention on whether more general body mass indices are appropriate measures of body fat. Using a data set of body fat, height, and weight measurements, general models are estimated which nest a wide variety of weight–height indices as special cases. In the absence of a race and gender categorisation, the conventional BMI was found to be the appropriate index with which to predict body fat. When such a categorisation was made, however, the BMI was never selected as the appropriate index. In general, predicted female body fat was some 10 kg higher than that of a male of identical build and predicted % body fat was over 11 percentage points higher, but age effects were smaller for females. Considerable racial differences in predicted body fat were found for males, but such differences were less marked for females. The implications of this finding for interpreting recent research on the effect of obesity on health, society, and economic factors are considered.     

Hunger: The Silent Epidemic Among Asylum Seekers and Resettled Refugees

Refugees and asylum seekers face challenges after arriving in a host country. They carry the trauma that they may have experienced in their countries of origin, during fight, and in countries of asylum. Other stressors impact on their adjustment after arriving in the United States including basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. This is a retrospective review of data collected as part of a needs assessment by a program, which serves survivors of torture and refugee trauma. Asylum seekers (n=65) and refugees were compared (n=30). Asylum seekers were more apt to be from Africa (p<.001), need family reunification (p=.027), speak more languages (p<.001), suffer from political persecution (p<.001), move from place to place due to not having a permanent place to live (p=.031), and be unable to contribute to the rent (p<.001). Unadjusted, asylum seekers were also more likely than refugees to have gone to bed hungry in the previous two weeks (p<.001) or since arriving in the United States (p<.001). Refugees were more likely to be eating more food now than before feeing, and asylum seekers the opposite (p<.001). Being an asylum seeker made one 3.7 times more likely to suffer from food insecurity than being a refugee, and 5.3 times more likely to not have work authorization. Among asylum seekers, adjusting for gender, age, education, lack of permanent housing, English fluency, and self-reported health status, not having work authorization made one 5.6 times more likely to suffer from hunger. Independently, being a torture survivor made one 10.4 times more likely to suffer from hunger. Asylum seekers must wait 150 days before applying for asylum in the United States. For humanitarian reasons, mandatory-waiting periods for work authorization for asylum seekers should be eliminated.     

Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services: How Consumer Access Is Restricted by State Policies

State Medicaid programs have expanded home and community-based services (HCBS). This article compares trends and variations in state policies for Medicaid HCBS programs in 2005 and 2010. State limitations on financial eligibility criteria and service benefits have remained stable. Although the use of consumer direction, independent providers, and family care providers has increased, some states do not have these options. The increased adoption of state cost control policies have led to large increases in persons on waiver wait lists. Access could be improved by standardizing and liberalizing state HCBS policies, but state fiscal concerns are barriers to rebalancing between HCBS and institutional services.     

The social and demographic impact of the Southeast Asian Crisis of 1997–99

When an unexpected financial crisis overtook Southeast Asia in 1997 planners and policymakers feared that the economic difficulties would unwind two decades of remarkable economic and social development. Newspaper headlines spoke of massive increases in poverty, unemployment and malnutrition, and it was speculated that family planning programs would collapse and fertility would rise dramatically. Infant and child mortality and maternal mortality were also expected to increase. This paper briefly reviews the onset of the financial crisis as a background for assessing whether speculations about die demographic and social effects tallied with reality. It is found that these effects were neither as dramatic nor as easy to monitor as some of the public debate implied. The general lesson is that the most serious social and demographic problems were not so much the products of crisis as embedded in chronic weaknesses that had become entrenched in times of economic growth. The crisis exposed these weaknesses.     

Integrating psychometric and cultural theory approaches to formulate an alternative measure of risk perception

Psychometric and cultural theory are key approaches used to explain risk perceptions. However, both approaches explain only 20 and 5–10% of the variance of risk perceptions, respectively. Through advances in social psychology, terror management theory revealed that certain survey questions used in the psychometric approach primed thoughts of death. Such unintentional priming evoked defense mechanisms that would subconsciously activate participants’ cultural biases and values when answering some questions but not others. There are two implications: one, psychometric theorists need to modify their questionnaires to reduce the incidence of priming thoughts of death; and two, integrating the psychometric and cultural theory approaches may potentially explain a higher amount of variance in risk perceptions. Specifically, attitudes (psychometric approach), demographics, affect and past behavior collectively influence cultural biases, which in turn exert an effect on risk perception. However, such a model calls for an appropriate measure of the dynamic nature of cultural biases that current attitudinal measures fall short of. Drawing from methodology within industrial/organizational psychology, the Situational Judgment Test (SJT) is proposed as an alternative measure for risk perception. Steps to designing an SJT are outlined and followed through to culminate in a 10-item SJT that measures cultural biases.