The experiences of pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey: A qualitative study

BackgroundDue to spread and impact of COVID-19 in the world and Turkey lead to fear, stress and anxiety in individuals. This trend is increasing more especially in pregnant women at risk as they are concerned about the safety of themselves and the fetus.AimIn our study, concerns, problems and attitudes of pregnant women related to diseases in the pandemic process will be determined by detailed discussions based on their individual experience, and by increasing the awareness of midwives and nurses about what pregnant women experience in this process.MethodsContent analysis is used as qualitative study pattern. Due to the social isolation rules during the coronavirus pandemic, interviews with pregnant women were planned to be held via mobile phone. The study was completed with 15 pregnant women.ResultsAs a result of the content analysis of the interviews, 3 main themes and 11 sub-themes were identified. The identified themes were as following: (1) not understanding the seriousness and fear of the unknown, (2) coronavirus pandemic and disruption of the routine prenatal care (3) disrupted routines and social lives. Each theme was necessarily discussed separately.ConclusionThe results of the study show that coronavirus pandemic has a significant potential for creating anxiety, adversity and fear, which has a negative emotional effect on pregnant people. It will be useful to provide awareness for midwives and nurses not only about the physical health of pregnant women, but also their mental health, and to cooperate with mental health experts if necessary.     

Turkish Validity Examination of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale

The validation studies of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS) have been conducted with samples from different nations but mostly from western individualistic cultures. Life satisfaction and its constructs could differ depending on cultural characteristics and life satisfaction scales should be validated in different cultures before using as measurement tools. This paper exhibits the validation study of the MSLSS in the collectivistic Turkish context and the study was conducted among 959 high school and primary school students. The MSLSS was found to be reliable and valid for the Turkish context with a few exceptions.     

The Feasibility of IFI‐Led Institutional Reform: Four Turkish Experiments Compared

Institutional reform has proved an enduring theme in the lending programmes of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF and the World Bank. But research harbours strong objections to the feasibility of IFI‐led institutional restructuring. This article evaluates these objections in the light of evidence from Turkey, a country with an early record of programme‐based reform initiatives in many institutional domains. Drawing on Turkey's central bank independence, banking regulation, anti‐corruption and agricultural subsidy reforms, it argues that IFI‐guided institutional restructuring may indeed encounter severe feasibility problems unless prescribed and implemented in a propitious environment marked by powerful international norms, widely accepted design templates, high levels of bureaucratic preparedness, and active endorsement from key domestic players.     

Artificial resuscitation: Beijing’s manipulation to pan-Turkism

Pan-Turkism emerged in the middle of the 19th century as an attempt to uniting all Turkic people along the Silk Road from the Mediterranean to China. After the ascent of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal as well as the Soviet incorporation of Central Asia, pan-Turkism had practically withered – although apparently not as an ideology. Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of the Central Asia republics have provided for the revival of the pan-Turkism vision, perceived by Beijing as a threat not only to its interests in Central Asia but, moreover, to Xinjiang’s internal stability and China’s sovereignty. While this vision could hardly be accomplished, China’s intensive preoccupation with pan-Turkism has facilitated its artificial resuscitation, though it appears already deceased. Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road initiative aims, among other things, at blocking pan-Turkism.     

The Timing of Leaving the Parental Home and Its Linkages to Other Life Course Events in Turkey

Abstract

This study employs the data of the 2003 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey to study the timing of leaving the parental home and the links between home leaving and other life course events (entry into labour force, family formation, and first birth) for three groups of home-leavers: early, on-time, and late. Results of the study suggest that the majority of the home-leavers are late home-leavers in Turkey. This pattern of parental home leaving observed in Turkey resembles the pattern which can found today in Mediterranean and Southern European countries. The median age at home leaving is found to be 24.4 years. In terms of gender differentials, the study implies that the timing of leaving the parental home for males (27.2 years) markedly differs from the timing of leaving the parental home for females (21.6 years). Results also imply the sequence of life-course events for males in Turkey: entry into labour force, marriage, the birth of first child, and home leaving. On the other hand, timing of home leaving for females was found to be in line with the timing of family formation. However, the home leaving experiencing by females does not mean a real home leaving in the context of Turkey; it is just a shifting from their own parental home to their husbands' parental home.     

Turkey: A Pilot Study of Elder Mistreatment in a Convenience Sample

ABSTRACT

Attitudes towards elder abuse were explored through a survey on International Perspectives on Family Violence and Abuse in a Turkish convenience sample of 25 females and 14 males, ranging in age from 22 to 58. Participants gave examples of behaviors considered in their culture to be extremely abusive, moderately abusive, and mildly abusive from an adult child toward his or her older parent. Responses were coded into four major categories of abuse, each of which had several subcategories: psychological aggression (including the subcategories of verbal aggression, emotional abuse, disrespect, disobedience, power assertion, blame, and imprisonment), neglect (including physical neglect, psychological neglect, abandonment, and putting the older individual into a nursing home), physical aggression (including beating and hitting), and mistreatment related to goods and services (including economic demands, economic withholding, and labor). The most common examples of extreme abuse were neglect, particulary physical neglect, followed by physical abuse. At the moderate and mild levels, various forms of psychological aggression were most commonly mentioned. The only significant gender difference was that men listed more instances of verbal aggression as examples of extreme abuse than women. A positive correlation was found between age and the number of abandonment examples at the extreme level. Results were interpreted from a cultural perspective.     

Reforming public debt governance in Turkey to reach debt sustainability

The paper argues that the achievement of sustainability of public debt requiring the fulfillment of solvency and liquidity conditions in countries for which real interest rates are above the real growth rates is challenging and difficult. Since solvency is a rather complex concept and its governance is difficult and delicate, the paper maintains that such countries could try to achieve the sustainability of public debt by delegating the tasks of securing the observance of solvency and liquidity conditions to fiscal councils (FC) that need to be formed as autonomous public institutions with sufficient financial and technical resources. In Turkey FC needs to be assigned the further task of improving policymakers’ incentives to opt for sound government procurement and taxation policies that would lead to the achievement of efficient allocation of resources and elimination of corruption and nepotism in the economy.     

Gendering Resistance: Multiple Faces of the Kurdish Women's Struggle

The article explores the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey by bridging two forms of resistance: those of guerrilla women fighters and of activist women. Based on my extensive ethnographic and archival research, I ask how women under conditions of war engage in different modes of resistance. In what ways does the “heroic resistance” of guerrilla women resonate with and/or contradict the everyday, “ordinary” struggles of activist women? The potent image of the Kurdish guerrilla woman that emerged in the early 1990s is constitutive of many other modes of political subjectivities, even among women who do not or cannot become guerrillas. One of those subjectivities is that of the activist woman. My analysis suggests that women's activism opens up a middle ground of action between “heroic” and “ordinary” resistance by reconciling revolutionary politics with everyday activism around gender‐based violence, democracy, and human rights. Although both revolutionary movement participants and scholars of revolutionary resistance often contrast the “ordinary” with the realm of armed resistance, this article challenges this dichotomy. I take the two realms of resistance—the ordinary and the heroic—as the core constituents of revolutionary resistance, and I reconsider the gendered interplay between them.     

当代土耳其智库的发展及其影响

土耳其是最早建立智库的中东国家之一,智库对土耳其内政外交的影响日益显著。本文追溯了土耳其智库的发展演变,对土耳其现有的智库做了基本分类,并在此基础上分析了土耳其智库的特点,以及对土耳其外交政策和中土关系的影响。值得注意的是,土耳其智库在2000年以后发展迅速,在国内政治的影响下,智库在与政府的关系、意识形态和人力资源等方面形成了自身的特点,但也存在不少问题。本文认为,当前"一带一路"倡议使中国与沿线国家的双边关系加深,促进了中土两国的智库交流,为中土之间的互信、合作增添了新渠道。但与此同时,应加强对土耳其极端民族主义智库活动和动向的关注,以切实保障中土在"一带一路"框架下务实合作的成果。