Environmental Refugees? Classifying Human Migrations Caused by Environmental Change

What distinguishes environmental refugees from other refugees—or other migrants? Are all environmental refugees alike? This essay develops a classification to begin to answer these questions and facilitate future policies and research on environmental refugees. Environmental refugees may have considerable control over the decision to migrate, but this varies by the type of environmental disruption. The origin, intention, and duration of environmental disruptions shape the type of refugee. Refugees from disasters and expropriations have limited control over whether environmental changes will produce migration. Gradual degradation allows “environmental emigrants” to determine how they will respond to environmental change.     

The relationship between childbearing and transitions from marriage and cohabitation in Britain

In this article, we describe a general framework for the analysis of correlated event histories, with an application to a study of partnership transitions and fertility among a cohort of British women. Using a multilevel, multistate competing-risks model, we examine the relationship between prior fertility outcomes (the presence and characteristics of children and current pregnancy) and the dissolution of marital and cohabiting unions and movements from cohabitation to marriage. Using a simultaneous-equations model, we model these partnership transitions jointly with fertility, allowing for correlation between the unobserved woman-level characteristics that affect each process. The analysis is based on the partnership and birth histories that were collected for the 1958 birth cohort (National Child Development Study) aged 16-42. The findings indicate that preschool children have a stabilizing effect on their parents 'partnership, whether married or cohabiting, but the effect is weaker for older children. There is also evidence that although pregnancy precipitates marriage among cohabitors, the odds of marriage decline to prepregnancy levels following a birth.     

When Twenty-Four Hours is not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents

Individuals can be money poor, time poor or both. While income is the most used indicator of poverty, broader indexes including non-monetary aspects of deprivation have been proposed and measured. As one such measure, our study focuses on the element of deprivation arising from the time deficit of many working people. The usual poverty threshold is calculated as the amount of income to buy the minimum required goods and services from the market. This minimum required purchase is greater for these people since they have less time than the average person to produce some goods and services for themselves at home. So, they need money to buy these in the market in order to maintain the same consumption. The income standard must be supplemented to adequately measure actual poverty. Time use data make it possible to establish time requirements and time availability and provide a measure of time poverty. Using Canadian GSS 1998 data, and building on the work of Vickery (1977, ‚The time poor: A new look at poverty’, The Journal of Human Resources 12(1), pp. 27-48) and of Douthitt (1993, ‚The inclusion of time availability in Canadian poverty measures’, Time-Use Methodology: Toward Consensus (ISTAT, Roma), pp. 83–91), and our own previous study, we estimate time-adjusted poverty thresholds and rates for single and dual parent Canadian families. As expected, we have found high incidence of time deficit among the employed single parents with children. We make a case for the acceptance of a redefined poverty standard for such time-deprived groups.     

The moderating effect of threat on the relationship between population concern and environmental concern

Two hundred sixty-one research participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure concern for the environment and concern for population growth. The introduction to the questionnaire focused on either threat to society, personal threat, or no threat. Contrary to some previous research findings, a positive correlation between concern for the environment and concern for population growth was found. This finding is explained by the simultaneity of measurement of the two constructs, item phrasing, and the possibility that previous research findings lacked transhistorical reliability. The threat manipulation was found to moderate the relationship between concern for the environment and concern for population growth. Analyses of demographic variables showed that women expressed more environmental concern that men, and that regular church attendees expressed the least concern for population growth.     

Managing the critical transition from volume to value

Experts say value-based health care delivery truly is the wave of the future. Learn what you need to do to get ready to embrace the change.     

eDiary and Female Sexual Distress Scale(©) in evaluating distress in hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD)

Sex-related distress is integral to the diagnosis of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). This article describes the results of three prospective, non-treatment validation studies (two North American and one European), each testing over 200 participants with HSDD, other types of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), or no FSD in which the 12-item Female Sexual Distress Scale(?) (FSDS(?)), the 13-item FSDS-Revised(?)(FSDS-R(?)), and a single question asked using a daily electronic diary (the eDiary For HSDD Trials(?); eDiary) were used to measure sex-related distress. FSDS results with 30- and seven-day recall were equivalent. The results observed with FSDS-R Item 13 (a single question assessing concern due to low sexual desire) were comparable to the FSDS. Mean eDiary monthly distress scores were closer to the minimum possible score (equivalent to "a little bit" of distress) and were about twice as variable as FSDS or FSDS-R Item 13 scores in participants with HSDD. All three measures confirmed that there is more distress in women with HSDD compared to women with no sexual dysfunction at all time points, demonstrating discriminant validity.     

Specifying links between infants' theory of mind,associative learning,and selective trust

The psychological mechanisms underlying infants' selective social learning are currently a subject of controversy. The main goal of the present study was to contribute data to this debate by investigating whether domain-specific or domain-general abilities guide infants' selectivity. Eighteen-month-olds observed a reliable and an unreliable speaker, and then completed a forced-choice word learning paradigm, two theory of mind tasks, and an associative learning task. Results revealed that infants showed sensitivity to the verbal competence of the speaker. Additionally, infants with superior knowledge inference abilities were less likely to learn from the unreliable speaker. No link was observed between selective social learning and associative learning skills. These results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that socio-cognitive abilities are linked to infants' selective social learning.