Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.     

Feminist and empowerment theory and social work practice

Feminist and empowerment theories are especially important to the understanding of individual and sociopolitical levels of social work assessment and intervention. Incorporating feminist and empowerment approaches in practice will provide social workers with the knowledge, values and skills most likely to promote human rights and social justice. In this paper, we present an overview of both theories and illustrate them with a case example.     

The Welfare State as Safety Net in Migration Preferences: Empirical Evidence from an Experiment Among Dutch Master Students

Population Research and Policy Review - The welfare state can be perceived as a safety net which helps individuals adjust to situations of risk or transition. Starting from this idea of the welfare...     

A smooth dynamic network model for patent collaboration data

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - The development and application of models, which take the evolution of network dynamics into account, are receiving increasing attention. We contribute to...     

Leaving Home for Marital and Non-marital Reasons in the Netherlands, 1850–1940: The Impact of Parental Death and Parental Remarriage

European Journal of Population - Previous research shows that parentally bereaved children in north-western Europe in the past left home earlier than children who lived together with both...     

Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

A Bayesian approach for zero-modified Skellam model with Hamiltonian MCMC

Statistical Methods & Applications - In this paper is presented the zero-modified poisson difference and present possible applications of them in the analysis of paired count data. The...     

A network analysis of student mobility patterns from high school to master’s

Human migration involves the movement of people from one place to another. An example of undirected migration is Italian student mobility where students move from the South to the Center-North. This kind of mobility has become of general interest, and this work explores student mobility from Sicily towards universities outside the island. The data used in this paper regards six cohorts of students, from 2008/09 to 2013/14. In particular, our goal is to study the 3-step migration path: the area of origin (Sicilian provinces), the regional university for the bachelor’s degree, and the regional university for the master’s. Our analysis is conducted by building a multipartite network with four sets of nodes: students; Sicilian provinces; bachelor region of studies; and the master region of studies. By projecting the students’ set onto the others, we obtain a tripartite network where the number of students represents the link weight. Results show that the big Sicilian cities—Palermo, Catania, and Messina—have different preferential paths compared to small Sicilian cities. Furthermore, the results reveal preferential paths of 3-step mobility that only, in part, reflect a south-north orientation in the transition from the region of study for the bachelor degree to that for the master’s.