Intermediate inequality and welfare

We introduce a new centrist or intermediate inequality concept, between the usual relative and absolute notions, which is shown to be a variant of the α-ray invariant inequality measures in Pfingsten and Seidl (1997). We say that distributions x and y have the same (x, π)-inequality if the total income difference between them is allocated among the individuals as follows: 100π% preserving income shares in x, and 100(1−π)% in equal absolute amounts. This notion can be made as operational as current standard methods in Shorrocks (1983). Received: 13 May 1998/Accepted: 25 January 1999     

Attitudes Toward Women in Health Care Organizations: A Turkish Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the health care employees’ attitudes toward women in health care organizations in Turkey. It was measured using a 25-item scale by Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp (1973 Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1973). A short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 2(4), 219–220. doi:10.3758/BF03329252[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The study was conducted on 541 employees: 279 males and 262 females. Structural equation model (SEM) was applied to analyze the relationship between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman. The result of this analysis showed that the relations between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman were statistically significant. All three hypotheses were statistically supported. This result indicated that employees’ marital status and (monthly) income significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in a positive direction. Besides, employees’ gender significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in an inverse direction. Future research can focus on investigating the effects of the attitudes toward women on other elements (e.g., performance, motivation, job satisfaction) or a wider sample to reach more generalized results.     

Urban or rural fragments: which soil use in forest surroundings induces greater litter deposition?

Urban Ecosystems - The soil use in surroundings of forest remnants, as well as, variations in seasonality and rainfall totals from each year might influence the composition, structure, and...     

Catching a glimpse: Corona‐life and its micro‐politics in academia

The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.     

‘My Child is Anxious Because We Might Get Deported’: Brief Therapy from MRI with an Immigrant Family in the United States

As we go to press in a COVID-19 world, the topic of anxiety is foremost on our minds. While each situation has to be considered in its own context, how to manage different anxieties has common denominators. There is currently a sharp increase in forced migration around the globe so mental health professionals must develop effective skills, like the ability to adapt services to different contexts and cultures, to manage the needs of immigrant people. Problem-Solving Brief Therapy, as developed at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, is a systemic model of therapy, which aims at promoting change in the complaint the presenting client (the ‘talker’) cares about. The model’s roots in Constructivism foster integrating the clients’ beliefs and values into therapy to allow the therapists to adapt to the clients’ particular needs. This paper is the analysis of a single case where the therapist worked with an immigrant family because their child suffered from severe anxiety related to the parents’ threatened deportation. The paper focuses on premises and strategies that allowed minimising cultural barriers between therapists and family members, thus facilitating a strong therapeutic alliance conducive to improvement.     

Developments in National Policies for Food and Nutrition Security in Brazil

Brazil is on track to achieve many of the Millennium Development Goals, and this is widely credited to bold and innovative government policies backed by new forms of popular participation in social policy. This article examines evaluation evidence on two of the most important recent initiatives in Brazil's policies for food and nutrition security (conditional cash transfers through Bolsa Família and support for family agriculture through the Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos). It also considers advances in older policies (such as the School Meals programme) and the work of the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, which has culminated in national legislation establishing food and nutrition security as a right.     

A Universal QQ-Plot for Continuous Non-homogeneous Populations

This article presents a universal quantile-quantile (QQ) plot that may be used to assess the fit of a family of absolutely continuous distribution functions in a possibly non-homogeneous population. This plot is more general than probability plotting papers because it may be used for distributions having more than two parameters. It is also more general than standard quantile-quantile plots because it may be used for families of not-necessarily identical distributions. In particular, the universal QQ plot may be used in the context of non-homogeneous Poisson processes, generalized linear models, and other general models.     

Explanatory Matrices on the Causes of a Tailing Dam Collapse in Brazil: The (Dis)Articulation of Epistemes

Mining tailing dam ruptures are increasingly common events in South America. Due to their high potential degree for avoidance, they are considered to be technological disasters and often have a considerable impact on local populations and communities, as well as affecting the ecosystem. The failure of the Fundão dam in 2015 in the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais (is) considered one of the largest socioenvironmental disasters in the country's history. Different explanations for the causes of the disaster were put forward by various social actors. This article critically analyzes these discourses through the theoretical-methodological reference of the social theory of discourse, with the aim of understanding the various discursive contexts of the causes of the breach of the dam. The analysis and understanding of these explanatory matrices suggested that different discourses present different epistemological approaches to the causes of the disaster, related to aspects such as sociohistorical, political, ideological, and asymmetric relations of power. The statements had different emphases, being associated with distinct epistemic positions that were often not in convergence.  Moreover, certain terms and approaches reinforce or minimize processes of vulnerability experienced by the affected populations. These discourses present consents, dissents, and contradictions and when systematically integrated can improve the planning of risk management and broaden the understanding related to technological disaster occurrence.