North African labour migration: The search for alternatives

The varying responses of the Maghreb countries to the closure of the West European labour markets to immigrant labour inflows in 1973 are examined. While Algeria has affirmed its commitment to the return and re‐integration of its migrant community, Tunisia and Morocco have pursued policies of migrant re‐direction. Although emigration to Libya has increased substantially, fluctuating political relations made this a highly unstable destination. Government efforts to secure employment opportunities in the Gulf emirates and in Saudi Arabia have been markedly less successful. Long‐term solutions to the employment problems of the North African states demand radical new policies.     

A new criterion function for exploratory blockmodeling for structural and regular equivalence

We present a new criterion function for blockmodeling two-way two-mode relation matrices when the number of blocks as well as the equivalence relation are unknown. For this, we specify a measure of fit based on data compression theory, which allows for the comparison of blockmodels of different sizes and block types from different equivalence relations. We arm an alternating optimization algorithm with this criterion and demonstrate that the method reproduces consensual blockings of three datasets without any pre-specification. We perform a simulation study where we compare our compression-based criterion to the commonly used criterion that measures the number of inconsistencies with an ideal blockmodel.     

Contracting in College Health Instruction

This ten-year survey of the use of student mental health services offered by the University of North Carolina suggests that increased usage over time has been due to greater availability of staff and a broadening of services offered rather than to an increase of the prevalence of mental illness among the student body. The authors believe that college psychiatry, as one of the earliest examples of the provision of mental health services to a community, can be used as a model for other aspects of public health psychiatry.     

The “Pilgrim Question”: Regulating the Hajj in Late Imperial Russia

The goal of this article is to complicate the existing scholarly account of Russian policies toward the hajj, which heretofore have been studied primarily as an aspect of the tsarist state’s relations with Islam and empire building. This article demonstrates that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the hajj came to be understood by many educated Russians within and outside the government as a highly complex and contested “pilgrim question” which engaged a broad range of difficult issues: problems of governance, such as an aspiration for more effective regulation of increased mass mobility, identification of border-crossers and sanitary control, as well as issues of empire, socio-political and confessional order, and economic development. The essence of the “question” was how to order the travel of Muslim pilgrims to the holy places outside of the empire’s borders. Imperial expansion, the growth of the empire’s Muslim population, and the development of long-distance transportation all contributed to an increasing number of Muslim pilgrims from Russia. In response, and inspired by new conceptualizations of the role of a modern state in relation to its subjects, some Russian officials sought to take greater control of the hajj. By focusing on the Russian government and public debate on how to regulate the hajj, this article examines why and how educated Russians increasingly came to see the annual Muslim pilgrimage as a “question.” It discusses the different dimensions of this problem and what the proposed regulation entailed. Finally, the article suggests why the “pilgrim question” remained a contested issue in late imperial Russia.     

Changing aids‐ and fertility‐related behavior: The effectiveness of sexual education

A questionnaire was used to access the effectiveness of a ten‐week university course on human sexuality in changing students' AIDS‐ and fertility‐related behavior. The students' knowledge and behavior were evaluated (1) early in the class before there were any discussions or readings about sexual behavior, AIDS, or birth control and (2) three months later—approximately one month after completing the class. A randomly selected control group of students who did not take the class on sexuality was given the questionnaire at the same two points in time. Compared to the control group, the experimental group showed significant increases in knowledge about the likelihood of contracting the virus from one act of vaginal intercourse. The experimental group also reported increased worry about contracting AIDS from their sexual activity, while the control group did not. Further, compared with the control group, the experimental group increased certain cautious behaviors, such as being more selective in their choice of sexual partners and asking their partners more questions about their AIDS‐related behavior. However, the course did not lead students to: 1) significantly increase their use of the condom or other forms of contraception, 2) decrease their number of sexual partners, or 3) spend a longer time getting to know new partners before engaging in sexual activity. Implications for sexual education are discussed.     

THE EFFECT OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT LAWS ON YOUTH SUICIDE

Using state‐level data on suicides from the period 1987 to 2003, we find that the adoption of a law requiring a parent's notification or consent before a minor can obtain an abortion is associated with an 11%–21% reduction in the number of 15‐ through 17‐year‐old females who commit suicide. In contrast, the adoption of a parental involvement law is not associated with a reduction in the number of older females who commit suicide or in the number of 15‐ through 17‐year‐old males who commit suicide. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that parental involvement laws represent an increase in the expected cost of having unprotected sex, and, as a consequence, serve to protect young females from depression and what have been termed “stressful life events” such as conflict with a parent or an abortion. (JEL I18, I10, J13)