Attitudes Toward Divorce and Their Relationship With Psychosocial Factors Among Social Work Students

This study aimed to explore attitudes toward divorce and their relationship with general satisfaction with life, spiritual beliefs, parental bonding, and depressive symptomatology among a sample of 210 social work students from two different universities in Florida. Results indicated that the majority of students had favorable attitudes toward divorce overall, perceiving divorce as a solution to unhappy marriage. Participants also reported strong feelings regarding marital obligation and the effect of divorce on children and society. Attitudes toward divorce were associated with spiritual beliefs and parental bonding.     

Costs of Extending the Noncontributory Pension Program for Elderly: The Mexican Case

Population aging coupled with high poverty rates among older persons and a lack of access to social-security benefits or traditional support systems have led governments in low and middle-income countries to introduce non-contributory pension programs for the elderly. This article reviews a non-contributory pension program introduced in Mexico in 2007 that has since expanded greatly. We use a variety of sources to estimate current and future costs of this program.     

Inter-organizational Coordination in the Wild: Trust Building and Collaboration Among Field-Level ICT Workers in Humanitarian Relief Organizations

As many NGOs find themselves responding to the same crises, they have realized the potential benefits of coordinating their information and communication technology (ICT) activities—sharing satellite communications and internet access, sharing disaster assessment information—and have created cross-organizational coordination bodies. Coordination at the headquarters level across organizations has proven to be insufficient, and some bodies are now engaging ICT personnel in their field offices in coordination efforts. This case study presents the findings of one body’s field office coordination efforts among its ICT workers, where trust building through collaborative activities is revealed to be essential elements in successful coordination across organizations.     

Who has Housing Affordability Problems? Disparities in Housing Cost Burden by Race, Nativity, and Legal Status in Los Angeles

Housing costs are a substantial component of US household expenditures. Those who allocate a large proportion of their income to housing often have to make difficult financial decisions with significant short-term and long-term implications for adults and children. This study employs cross-sectional data from the first wave of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey collected between 2000 and 2002 to examine the most common US standard of housing affordability, the likelihood of spending 30 % or more of income on shelter costs. Multivariate analyses of a low-income sample of US-born Latinos, whites, African Americans, authorized Latino immigrants, and unauthorized Latino immigrants focus on baseline and persistent differences in the likelihood of being cost burdened by race, nativity, and legal status. Nearly half or more of each group of low-income respondents experience housing affordability problems. The results suggest that immigrants’ legal status is the primary source of disparities among those examined, with the multivariate analyses revealing large and persistent disparities for unauthorized Latino immigrants relative to most other groups. Moreover, the higher odds of housing cost burden observed for unauthorized immigrants compared with their authorized immigrant counterparts remains substantial, accounting for traditional indicators of immigrant assimilation. These results are consistent with emerging scholarship regarding the role of legal status in shaping immigrant outcomes in the United States.     

Conceptual framework for measuring carbon footprint in supply chains

Over the last few years, the fight against climate change has become one of the main topics of international debate. Hence, consumer behaviour has begun to change as they have started to assess the environmental impacts of the products and services they buy. Although various methods exist for measuring environmental (e.g. carbon) impacts, there is no international consensus about the most appropriate one. In addition, calculations can also be affected by limited data availability and uncertainty surrounding the value of key variables. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for measuring and analysing the carbon footprint in supply chains. This research contributes to the knowledge and practice of green supply chain management, at the corporate level, by providing robustness. This aids the decision-making process by identifying strategies in order to reach the efficiency that can be achieved by reducing CO₂ emission over the supply network. The framework is validated using real data from a supply chain belonging to the agro-industrial sector. Finally, these results and experience is generalised in order to show the difficulties and challenges in the measuring task.     

An Evaluation of the NERJIT Priority Rule in a Kanban‐Controlled Flowshop

Significant progress in production and information technologies and innovations in management of operations during the last couple of decades have made the production of small lots and deployment of Just‐In‐Time (JIT) concepts in flowshops possible. As a result, some researchers and practitioners have been seeking to improve the performance of non‐repetitive systems using JIT concepts. In this process, the JIT concepts that were originally designed for mass production have been modified to adapt JIT to non‐repetitive systems. This article uses a priority rule that is based on real‐time demand and production information for sequencing jobs in a kanban‐controlled flowshop. The analysis of the effect of this priority rule; the number of kanbans; the length of the withdrawal cycle; First‐Come, First‐Served (FCFS); and Shortest Processing Time (SPT) on four performance measures—customer wait time, total inventory, input stock‐point inventory, and output stock‐point inventory, shows that the use of this priority rule results in a significant reduction of customer wait time and a slight decrease in inventory.     

Issues to consider in internalization of a service

In a staff-model HMO, the demand for services may be greater in one area than in another. Services with little demand and/or high cost are usually contracted to an external provider or institution. Equipment purchases or renovation of a facility to accommodate a new service sometimes go hand in hand with internalizing a service, and capital budgeting is an integral part of the process. The decision on when it is feasible to internalize services has to be considered on two levels: service and finance. This article will look at what issues affect the organization on these two levels and will consider the cost-benefit and legal issues that need to be considered when making such a decision. A work sheet that may be used as is or modified is included.     

Demographic and related determinants of recent Cuban emigration

"This article highlights some of the principal demographic determinants of recent Cuban emigration, while also considering how these demographic variables interact with other social and economic determinants, utilizing a broad conceptualization of emigration. It also makes reference to Cuban military activities abroad. The conclusions that follow suggest that labor migration is more responsive to demographic factors than some theorists assume."