Multidimensional Analysis of Water Poverty and Subjective Well-Being: A Case Study on Local Household Variation in Faisalabad,Pakistan

Water poverty is difficult to evaluate because it is multidimensional. It is determined not only by the availability of water sources but also whether communities have adequate access to clean, uncontaminated water. It is also dependent on the resource needs of those using the water. Under the premise that water scarcity is multidimensional, we use a Water Poverty Index approach using Principal Component Analysis to develop an index at the household level in 10 villages in one large farming community to examine each household’s subjective view of well being as a result of water poverty. This paper reviews how water resources endowments and depletion because of indiscriminate disposal of untreated industrial wastewater, household sewage and climate change are posing serious threats to water poverty at the household level in developing agrarian economies like Pakistan. We report from our results that both the perceived level of pollution and the proximity to clean and polluted water sources matter significantly for subjective well-being in rural households of Pakistan. The villages closer to polluted water sources are unhappier while the villages, which have better access to fresh water, have relatively higher subjective well-being. A strong implementation of environmental protection measures and regional strategies are suggested to alleviate water poverty and increase subjective well-being in local communities.     

The differential influence of geographic isolation on environmental migration: a study of internal migration amidst degrading conditions in the central Pacific

Population and Environment - This study investigates how geographic isolation interacts with declining environmental and economic conditions in Kiribati, an island nation wherein which limited...     

Instrumental variable estimation in ordinal probit models with mismeasured predictors

Researchers in the medical, health, and social sciences routinely encounter ordinal variables such as self‐reports of health or happiness. When modelling ordinal outcome variables, it is common to have covariates, for example, attitudes, family income, retrospective variables, measured with error. As is well known, ignoring even random error in covariates can bias coefficients and hence prejudice the estimates of effects. We propose an instrumental variable approach to the estimation of a probit model with an ordinal response and mismeasured predictor variables. We obtain likelihood‐based and method of moments estimators that are consistent and asymptotically normally distributed under general conditions. These estimators are easy to compute, perform well and are robust against the normality assumption for the measurement errors in our simulation studies. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real data. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 653–667; 2019 © 2019 Statistical Society of Canada     

Efficacy of Cyberbullying Prevention on Somatic Symptoms—Randomized Controlled Trial Applying a Reasoned Action Approach

The theory of reasoned action (ToRA) has been proposed as a framework for cyberbullying prevention design, targeting attitudes and norms. In this study effects of a long (10 weekly sessions) and a short (one day, four sessions) cyberbullying prevention program based on the ToRA were compared with a control group over 9 months. Longitudinal data from 722 students (mean age = 13.36) on cyberbullying, somatic symptoms, attitudes, and norms were analyzed within a structural equation model. Participation in the long intervention group significantly reduced cyberbullying (d = ?0.584) and somatic symptoms (d = ?0.316). No between‐group differences emerged for attitudes and norms. Developmental trajectories and associations were found to be as suggested by ToRA in both cross‐sectional and change‐score analyses.     

Diversity and assemblage filtering in ground-dwelling spiders (Araneae) along an urbanisation gradient in Denmark

Urban Ecosystems - We studied the effects on spiders of a three-step rural-urban urbanisation gradient near a Danish town embedded in a historically forested landscape. Using pitfall traps set in...     

TRUST,COORDINATION, AND THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM

We study political activism by several interest groups with private signals. When their ideological distance to the policymaker is small, a “low‐trust” regime prevails: agents frequently lobby even when it is unwarranted, taking advantage of the confirmation provided by others' activism; conversely, the policymaker responds only to generalized pressure. When ideological distance is large, a “high‐trust” regime prevails: lobbying behavior is disciplined by the potential contradiction from abstainers, and the policymaker's response threshold is correspondingly lower. Within some intermediate range, both equilibria coexist. We then study the optimal organization of influence activities, contrasting welfare levels when interest groups act independently and when they coordinate. (JEL: D72, D78, D82)     

Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Attitudes Towards Immigration in the EU-15

In this paper, we use data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey to analyze the extent to which differences in average attitudes towards immigration across the EU-15 countries may be explained by differences in socioeconomic characteristics and individually perceived consequences of immigration, using an extension of a decomposition technique developed by Fairlie (2005). We find that despite the significant effects of socioeconomic characteristics on attitudes, differences in the distributions of these characteristics can only explain a modest share of the cross-country variation in average attitudes. A larger part can be explained by differences in perceived consequences of immigration, but the main part is still left unexplained. Apart from providing useful input for policy makers working in the area of immigration policy, this raises a number of questions for further research for which the ESS data can be successfully applied.

Depressive Symptoms Among Native and Immigrant Adolescents in Norway: The Role of Gender and Urbanization

The study investigates depressive symptoms among 3,431 adolescents aged 13–15 years. The sample comprises both native Norwegian and immigrant adolescents living in Norway. The main finding of the study is that the level of depressive symptoms is significantly higher among the immigrant adolescents than their Norwegian counterparts. When analysed separately for boys and girls, the difference is still significant for boys. Generally depressive symptoms are significantly higher among girls than among boys. Depressive symptoms, especially in boys, may also be related to the degree of urbanization of the area they live in. In cities, there is a significant difference between native Norwegian and immigrant boys, with immigrant boys having a higher level of depressive symptoms than native Norwegians. The implications for future research about immigrant adolescents and their psychosocial adjustment are discussed.