Improving quality at the point of service

The authors provide a research-based construct of youth program quality that differentiates safety, support, interaction, and engagement, four important issues for practitioners working with youth in the middle years. They describe two tools that have helped direct staff to be intentional about creating offerings that are appropriate for early adolescents: the focusing idea of point-of-service quality and the technology of observational assessment. They describe how these tools can be used to create cultures of accountability and intentionality that extend across program levels.     

Business Performance Analytics: exploring the potential for Performance Management Systems

Business Performance Analytics (BPA) entails the systematic use of data and analytical methods (mathematical, econometric and statistical) for performance measurement and management. Although potentially overcoming some traditional diagnostic issues related to Performance Management Systems (PMS), such as information overload, absence of cause-effect relationships, lack of a holistic view of the organisation, research in the field is still in its infancy. A comprehensive model for operationalising analytics for diagnostic and interactive PMS is still lacking. Adopting an action research approach, this paper addresses this gap and develops a five-step framework applied to a company operating in the construction industry. The results show that in addition to encouraging dialogue, BPA can contribute to identifying critical performance variables, potential sources of risk and related interdependencies. A number of critical issues in implementing data-based approaches are also highlighted, including data quality, organisational competences and cultural shifts.     

Vocational or academic track? Study and career plans among Swedish students living in rural areas

This ethnographic study explores how rural lower secondary school students reflect on study and career choices, focusing on the choice between vocational and academic upper secondary programs. Applying a spatial perspective, we analyze individual students’ reflections about study and career choices within a variety of rural regions, and compare patterns in the regions. The results indicate complex interactions between structural factors and individual dispositions. In places where education levels were low and the local labor market predominantly offered unskilled manual and service work, there was a stronger tendency to choose vocational programs than in places with higher education levels and access to a more varied labor market. Likewise, there was an association between strongly gendered labor markets and gender-typical choices. However, individual students positioned themselves actively in relation to the local place, its local labor market and social relations; their choices were place-bound to varying degrees, and chose upper secondary programs and presented ideas about prospective careers that were harmonious with the local labor market in some cases, but discordant in other cases. The results are discussed in the framework of individuals’ horizon for actions.     

Does schooling protect sexual health? The association between three measures of education and STIs among adolescents in Malawi

While multiple studies have documented shifting educational gradients in HIV prevalence, less attention has been given to the effect of school participation and academic skills on infection during adolescence. Using the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, a longitudinal survey that followed 2,649 young people aged 14–17 at baseline from 2007 to 2013, we estimate the effect of three education variables: school enrolment, grade attainment, and academic skills—numeracy and Chichewa literacy—on herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) and HIV incidence using interval-censored survival analysis. We find that grade attainment is significantly associated with lower rates of both HSV-2 and HIV among girls, and is negatively associated with HSV-2 but not HIV among boys. School enrolment and academic skills are not significantly associated with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for boys or girls in our final models. Efforts to encourage school progression in high-prevalence settings in sub-Saharan Africa could well reduce, or at least postpone, acquisition of STIs.     

Seeking Western Men: Divergent Trajectories of China’s “Email-Order Brides”

Qualitative Sociology - Based on 17 months of ethnography at three different online dating agencies in southern China, this article examines the life histories and decision-making...     

Neighborhood Norms,Disadvantage, and Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration

Most theoretical treatments of intimate partner violence (IPV) focus on individual‐level processes. More recently, scholars have begun to examine the role of macrolevel factors. Results of that research indicate that social ties facilitate the diffusion of cultural norms—including tolerance of deviance/violence—across neighborhoods. Yet the influence of the neighborhood normative climate extends beyond norms regarding the use of violence, shaping cultural understanding about dating and the opposite sex. Using data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS), the current investigation examines the multilevel association between dating norms and IPV perpetration among a large, diverse sample of adolescents and young adults. Results indicate that individuals’ liberal dating attitudes are associated with IPV perpetration. Furthermore, this effect varies across levels of neighborhood disadvantage.     

Quality Assessment of the Oncology Health Service in a Public Hospital

Quality assessment is a crucial issue in the strategic management of the public health sector. The objective of this study is to investigate the patients’ perception of the health system quality and explore the relationships between doctors and long-term cancer patients. The data under study have been collected during a survey conducted with long-term cancer patients who follow an oncological therapy in a Public Hospital. In the study, exploratory factorial analysis is developed and two structural equation models are proposed. The first model describes the service quality as perceived by the patients, which is influenced by four important factors, namely tangible aspects, reliability, empathy (doctor–patient human relations) and hospital organization. The second model describes the relationship between doctors and long-term cancer patients, which is influenced by three factors, that is reliability, empathy and hospital organization. The discussion highlights the contribution that the results of the study may make to the investigation of the possible strategies for improving health care service quality.

     

Thinking beyond polemics: Approaching the health society through Foucault

This paper offers a synthetic outline of the contribution of a foucauldian approach to the analysis of health, with specific attention to the dynamics of the relation between health promotion and the ‘health society’. Through the concept of ‘biopower’, this approach was among the first in sociology to highlight the general relevance of health to the constitutive dynamics of modern (and eventually late-modern) societies. Through the concept of ‘governmentality’, scholars in a range of disciplines offered early critical analyses of health promotion discourse in the specific context of neo-liberalism, highlighting some of its paradoxical features. To the extent that such paradoxes are now more widely articulated as an explicit subject for public debate through the notion of a ‘health society’, it might be argued that the critical function initially offered through the notion of governmentality has become somewhat redundant. Against this background, the paper concludes by discussing, through examples relating to new biotechnologies and to drug policy, how a foucauldian approach continues to be relevant in the contemporary context.     

Transnational patterns among Asian American and Latina/o American children of immigrants from Southern California

A growing literature has examined the prevalence of transnational engagement among children of immigrants. However, few studies have been equipped to analyse underlying dynamics that serve to impede or perpetuate transnational practices among them in the United States. In this article, we compare transnationalism narratives between 1.5- and second-generation children of immigrants to more fully adjudicate enduring transnational ties over time. Our analysis of 134 interviews from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study suggests that children of immigrants from Southern California conceptualise transnational experiences in diverse but remarkably similar ways. The meanings attached to transnational behaviours and identities employ certain patterns, and are often related to strength of kin-based ties, ethnic language fluency, and levels of structural access to the homeland. Moreover, findings indicate that the second-generation is nearly as transnationally engaged as the 1.5-generation. This provides novel but limited evidence in support of claims that transnational ties are sustained across generations.     

Covid-19: agnotology,inequality, and leadership

ABSTRACT

I use the concept of agnotology to examine the way in which the UK government diverted the public gaze from lack of equipment and hidden privatization by claiming to ‘follow the science’ and so adopt the ‘strategy’ of herd immunity. This has resulted in excess deaths, hospitalization and life-changing injury. The global experience of Covid-19 has emphasized existing inequalities, anger, and the challenge of ‘leadership’ in such threatening times. I briefly look at the role of HR as we work through the long-lasting effects of the pandemic on individuals and ‘civilization’.