Élaboration et validation d'un questionnaire sur le travail décent

Les auteurs cherchent à élaborer un outil de mesure du travail décent reposant sur un questionnaire inédit axé sur les perceptions des travailleurs. Les items proposés se fondent sur les «éléments fondamentaux» du travail décent selon l'OIT. Une première version de soixante‐douze items est administrée sur deux grands échantillons au Portugal et au Brésil. Les analyses factorielles exploratoire et confirmatoire menées sur cette base permettent d'isoler sept facteurs spécifiques et un facteur global du travail décent. Avec de bons coefficients de fiabilité et une bonne validité convergente et discriminante, le questionnaire proposé ouvre la voie à de nouvelles études empiriques dans le domaine.     

Optimal Monte Carlo integration on closed manifolds

Statistics and Computing - The worst case integration error in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces of standard Monte Carlo methods with n random points decays as $$n^{-1/2}$$. However, the...     

“They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement

This article approaches the analytic of the “Muslim Question” through the prism of the discursive and conspiratorial use of demographics as an alleged threat to Europe. It argues that concerns about “Muslim demographics” within Europe have been entertained, mobilized, and deployed to not only construct Muslims as problems and dangers to the present and future of Europe, but also as calls to revive eugenic policies within the frame of biopower. The article begins by sketching the contours of the contemporary “Muslim Question” and proceeds with a critical engagement with the literature positing a deliberate and combative strategy by “Muslims” centered on birth rates—seen by these authors as a tactical warfare—to allegedly replace European “native” populations. The analysis continues by focusing on two images juxtaposing life and death as imagined within the replacement discourse, and that capture that discourse in powerful albeit disturbing ways. Finally, the article proposes reading the population replacement discourse as a deployment of biopolitics and one of its many techniques, namely, eugenics.     

The politics of safety net reform in Southern Europe during the Great Recession: Introduction to the regional issue

Southern European welfare states have developed relatively solid social insurance income maintenance programs, but have lacked effective means-tested benefit systems to address poverty and protect outsiders. Spain and Portugal are usually considered the two first countries to depart from the traditional path with the creation of minimum income schemes between 1988 and 1995. In the Spanish case, minimum income programs were established at the regional level and are very heterogeneous despite their institutional stability. The limited extent of these programs in most Spanish regions must be put in the context of national means-tested income support schemes in the fields of pensions and unemployment. The introduction of these programs in the 1980s was also a significant path departure. The combination of these programs has offered some income support to low income groups left unprotected by traditional insurance benefits, although in a patchy and limited way, especially as regards the working-age population. The social effects of the Great Recession, especially in terms of long-term unemployment, evictions and impoverishment, have reopened the debate on how to combat monetary poverty, which has been on the general election agenda since 2014–2015. Most regions have reformed their programs in different directions since 2008, under the contradictory pressures of growing demand and financial constraints. Such debate, however, has not been able yet to set a clear basis for a new development of anti-poverty income support policy.     

Kin and Youths in the Social Networks of Youth‐Headed Households in Namibia

In settings highly affected by HIV/AIDS, households headed by children may result from strained family relations, poverty, and stigma associated with the disease. Understanding local systems and dynamics of support is essential to planning comprehensive models of care. This study measured size and composition of the support and conflict networks of 27 children and youth heads of household in northern Namibia and documented their perceptions of adequacy. Results showed a strong presence of and satisfaction with kin and peers as supporters, which challenges the assumptions that these households have few functional ties to family and that adults are the sole providers of support. Assistance to children without parental supervision should build on existing local strategies and children's resources.     

‘The times,are they a‐changing?’ As the world enters a new millennium are we as paediatricians keeping up with the changing needs of children?

This paper describes changes that are occurring in paediatric practice in a variety of settings. The ‘new morbidity’ demands focused training of paediatricians of the twenty‐first century. Areas that include advocacy, public health, adolescence, chronic illness, health promotion, behavioural issues, parenting and family dynamics, social influences, health and social inequalities, managerial decision making and technological advances should be a part of paediatric training. These factors assume different importance in developing nations where priorities may be more focused on public health, nutrition and health promotion. Partnership with others who have children's interests at heart, for example mental health services, public health, social sciences, education and social services is imperative in planning service development informed by good information systems incorporating measures of mortality and morbidity. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society1

This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.
Social structures are organized around relationships of production/consumption, power, and experience, whose spatio-temporal configurations constitute cultures. They are enacted, reproduced, and ultimately transformed by social actors, rooted in the social structure, yet freely engaging in conflictive social practices, with unpredictable outcomes. A fundamental feature of social structure in the Information Age is its reliance on networks as the key feature of social morphology. While networks are old forms of social organization, they are now empowered by new information/communication technologies, so that they become able to cope at the same time with flexible decentralization, and with focused decision-making. The article examines the specific interaction between network morphology and relationships of production/consumption, power, experience, and culture, in the historical making of the emerging social structure at the turn of the Millennium.     

Influence diagnostics in the tobit censored response model

In this article, we develop influence diagnostic tools for the tobit model. Specifically, we discuss global influence methods based on the Cook distance and residuals with envelopes, and total and conformal local influence techniques. In order to analyze the sensitivity of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of the model to small perturbations on the assumptions of the model and/or data, we consider several perturbation schemes, such as case-weight and response perturbations. Finally, we illustrate the developed methodology by means of a real data set.     

Influence diagnostics for the structural errors-in-variables model under the Student-t distribution

The influence of observations on the parameter estimates for the simple structural errors-in-variables model with no equation error, under the Student-t distribution, is investigated using the local influence approach. The main conclusion is that the Student-t model with small degrees of freedom is able to incorporate possible outliers and influential observations in the data. The likelihood displacement approach is useful for outlier detection, especially when a masking phenomenon is present and the degrees of freedom parameter is large. The diagnostics are illustrated with two examples.     

Influence diagnostics on the coefficient of variation of elliptically contoured distributions

In this article, we study the behavior of the coefficient of variation (CV) of a random variable that follows a symmetric distribution in the real line. Specifically, we estimate this coefficient using the maximum-likelihood (ML) method. In addition, we provide asymptotic inference for this parameter, which allows us to contrast hypothesis and construct confidence intervals. Furthermore, we produce influence diagnostics to evaluate the sensitivity of the ML estimate of this coefficient when atypical data are present. Moreover, we illustrate the obtained results by using financial real data. Finally, we carry out a simulation study to detect the potential influence of atypical observations on the ML estimator of the CV of a symmetric distribution. The illustration and simulation demonstrate the robustness of the ML estimation of this coefficient.