Gendered Racism on the Body: An Intersectional Approach to Maternal Mortality in the United States

Population Research and Policy Review - Scholars recognize sex and race as social determinants of health. However, demography research often ignores their derivatives (racism and sexism) and their...     

Children's appraisals as mediators of the relationship between domestic violence and child adjustment

This study examines the relationships among variables that were likely to mediate the effects of exposure to domestic violence on children's internalizing problems (i.e., children's appraisals of domestic violence and their perceptions of family relationships). The study was conducted with 79 children exposed to domestic violence, including 41 boys and 38 girls, aged between 9 and 12 years old. Indicators used for children's appraisals of violence were attribution of blame and perceived threat. Children's perceptions of family relationships were based on their levels of parentification and the degree of their loyalty conflicts. A path analysis was used to verify the predictive model's pathways and to test the multiple mediator effects. Findings confirm the contribution of mediating variables and also reflect the association between self-blame and children's parentification. The results stress the relevance of evaluating the combined role of different potential mediators to provide a better understanding of the impact of domestic violence on children.     

Transition and Foreign Aid Policies in the Visegrád Countries: A Path Dependant Approach

The paper argues that the current emerging international development policies of the Visegrád (V4) countries are heavily influenced by the certain aspects of the Communist past and the transition process. Due to these influences, the V4 countries have difficulties in adapting the foreign aid practices of Western donors and this leads to the emergence of a unique Central and Eastern European development cooperation model. As an analytical background, the paper builds on the path dependency theory of transition. A certain degree of path dependence is clearly visible in V4 foreign aid policies, and the paper analyses some aspects of this phenomenon: how these new emerging foreign aid donors select their partner countries, how much they spend on aid, how they formulate their aid delivery policies and institutions and what role the non-state actors play. The main conclusions of the paper are that the legacies of the Communist past have a clear influence and the V4 countries still have a long way to go in adapting their aid policies to international requirements.

Youth Future Civic Participation in Europe: Differences Between the East and the Rest

European countries were economically and politically separated during the Cold War, but since its end processes of globalization and the formation of the European Union have contributed to blur the borders. Previous studies suggest that the social transformations have affected differently civic participation of youths, but shortage of more recent data has precluded researchers from examining the differences in a country-comparative fashion. Along these lines, this paper has two main objectives: to explore the differences in the levels of expected civic participation across Europe, and to evaluate the fit of a theoretical model of civic participation in regard to the different points in time their democracies were established. To achieve these goals, data from 22 European educational systems (9 post-communist and 13 established democracies) participating in the International Civic and Citizenship Study (2009) conducted by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement is used. The results, in accordance with the literature, suggest differentiated patterns of future civic participation between the new and established democracies, but they are not that clear, suggesting that convergence between the two groups is ongoing. However, the tested empirical model of civic participation functions in a better way in the established than in the new democracies. In contrast with previous findings, differences in levels of expected civic participation seem to be related not only with the countries’ experience with democracy, but also with their cultural similarities and common history.     

Building Weighted-Domain Composite Indices of Life Satisfaction with Data Envelopment Analysis

The specialised literature has frequently addressed the relationship between life domains and people’s satisfaction with life. Some researchers have posed questions regarding the importance of domains, therefore interpreting them as weightings and creating domain satisfaction indices. This paper illustrates how Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques can be employed to compute domain-based composite indices of life satisfaction and weightings for life domains. Furthermore, an empirical application is performed on a sample of 178 people living in a rural community in Yucatan (Mexico). One of the main features of the aforementioned techniques is that weightings might differ from one individual to another. Accordingly, several weighting schemes are used to compute different life satisfaction indices, in addition to a constant equally-weighted index. Based on the goodness-of-fit criteria commonly used in this literature, our main result is that DEA-MCDM indicators of life satisfaction do not improve the relationship with self-reported life satisfaction in comparison to the equally-weighted index.     

Present in the World Economy: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (1996–2007)

To think through what new, perhaps transformative, way of life and struggle might be in the process of being invented by social forces moving on the terrain of the world economy, we must look into real concrete organizations binding people together. Only then can we begin to see what might be most radical about contemporary social movements: the putting into dialectical relation of two relatively autonomous, spatially specific, modes of struggle: a local ‘wars of position’ and a ‘war of movement’ that takes place on the terrain of the world economy. This article deals with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which has just won a 10-year-long campaign to raise the income and better the living conditions of tomato pickers in Southwest Florida. For all its specificity, this campaign presents us with a concrete organizational experience from which we can think more generally about the political significance of what has been variously and vaguely termed ‘the new internationalism of social movements’, ‘the anti-globalization movement’, or ‘globalization from below’.     

The Use of Psychiatric Medication,Human Capital,and the Amplification of Mistrust

This research investigates the relationships among willingness to utilize psychiatric medication, education, and three forms of mistrust—generalized mistrust, mistrust in physicians, and mistrust in psychiatric medication. Utilizing human capital theory and two waves of the U.S. General Social Survey (N = 2,671), our findings show a curvilinear relationship between willingness to use psychiatric drugs and education, such that individuals with less than a high school diploma and those with a college or advanced degree are more willing to use psychiatric drugs compared to those with a high school degree. Also, the effects of all three forms of mistrust are amplified and have significant, negative effects on the use of psychiatric medication among college graduates. Mistrust in physicians and mistrust in psychiatric drugs matters for high school graduates, while only mistrust in psychiatric medication impacts the use of psychotropics for those with less than a high school degree.