Transnational Information Politics and the “Child Migration Crisis”: Guatemalan NGOs Respond to Youth Migration

Sharp increases in “child migrants” from Central America detained at the US border in 2014 brought unprecedented levels of attention to long extant social and political issues perceived as causing youth migration. While governments on both sides of the US border faced criticism over responses to the migration “crisis,” the presumed causes of this migration presented in US media discourses went largely unquestioned. This article presents data collected in June 2015 from in-depth interviews with Guatemalan and transnational non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, scholars, lawyers, and activists in order to understand the complex interpretations of child migration by NGO actors in Guatemala. Findings illustrate how NGOs may selectively draw on the power of prevailing media narratives to buttress ideological and programmatic goals while simultaneously contesting how the same media depictions obscure the lived realities of migrants. We consider the transnational information politics of representations of “child migration” across government, media, and civil society sectors and the critical role of NGOs in articulating the complex realities faced by populations vulnerable to migration.     

Gendered Organizations: Progress and Prospects

In this paper, we explore the context for the emergence of a theory of gendered organizations and define the basic features of the approach, noting the explosion of scholarship in the area and the now firmly established trend toward understanding gender, race, class, and sexuality as aspects of social structures. We focus on three of the most important emerging areas in research on gendered organizations: the study of intersectionality, the increasing emphasis on the importance of organizational context, and the exploration of mechanisms for organizational change. We conclude by briefly noting prospects for the further development of research on gendered organizations.     

A Test to Detect Within-family Infectivity when the Whole Epidemic Process is Observed

An epidemic model for the spread of an infectious disease in a population of families is considered. The score test of the hypothesis that there is no higher infectivity between family members is constructed under the assumption that the epidemic process is observed continuously up to some time t . The score process is a martingale as a function of t and by letting the number of families tend to infinity, a central limit theorem for the process can be proved. The central limit theorem not only justifies a normal approximation of the test statistic—it also suggests a smaller variance estimator than expected.     

The Experience and Practice of Approved Social Workers in Northern Ireland

Correspondence to Dr Roger Manktelow, School of Social and Community Sciences, University of Ulster Magee College, Derry, BT48 7JL, Northern Ireland. Summary This article reports on the first extensive survey of ApprovedSocial Worker (ASW) activity under the Mental Health (NorthernIreland) Order 1986. The integrated health and social servicesorganizational structure, the adverse effects on individualmental health of the legacy of thirty years of civil conflictand the move from hospital to community care are significantfeatures which have influenced the delivery of mental healthsocial work services locally. The practice and experience ofASWs was surveyed by postal questionnaire and user and carerexperience of compulsory hospital admission was investigatedby a series of focus groups. The study revealed that two-thirdsof ASWs had experience of acting as an applicant in compulsoryhospital admission during the past two years. Nearly half (42per cent) of these ASWs had reported experience of between oneand five admissions and one-tenth had completed over twentyadmissions in the two-year period. In only a small minorityof cases did joint face-to-face assessment with the GeneralPractitioner (doctor) take place; nearly half of ASWs reporteddifficulties in obtaining transport; and only one-fifth of ASWshad experience of acting as a second approved social worker.Half of ASWs reported experience of guardianship, either asapplicant or in making the recommendation. Both service usersand carers reported a lack of understanding about the role ofthe ASW and complained about the lack of alternative resourcesthat ASWs could use to prevent hospital admissions. These findingsare discussed and a number of recommendations are proposed forimprovements to approved social worker practice.     

HOMOPHOBIA AND HOMOSOCIALITY:

Past research on the subject of homophobia consists of theoretical generalizationl, on its origin or empirical correlations of a multitude of attitudinal and demgraphic variables, with very little synthesis of the two. The present study relates homophobia to the maintenance of powerful sex-segregated institutions. It does so by operationalizing, for the first time, the concept of homosociality, which refers to social preference for members of one's own gender, but does not necessarily imply erotic attraction. This concept is tested for its relationship with homophobia in a survey of a large adult sample. Traditional explanations of homophobia (which center around religious and sex-role conservatism) are similarly explored. All proposed hypotheses find support.     

Epidemics in heterogeneous communities: estimation of R0 and secure vaccination coverage

A stochastic multitype model for the spread of an infectious disease in a community of heterogeneous individuals is analysed. In particular, estimates of R ₀ (the basic reproduction number) and the critical vaccination coverage are derived, where estimation is based on final size data of an outbreak in the community. It is shown that these key parameters cannot be estimated consistently from data; only upper and lower bounds can be estimated. Confidence regions for the upper bounds are derived, thus giving conservative estimates of R ₀ and the fractions necessary to vaccinate.     

The Incomplete Revolution

South Africa's negotiated transition promised significant gains for gender equality, as women acquired one-third of the seats in the national parliament, secured constitutional protection, and began a process of legislative and institutional reform. Once apartheid was dismantled, the programs of racial and gender empowerment theoretically should have proceeded at the same rates, given the rhetorical commitments of the liberation parties. Life for the majority of South African women, however, continues to be marked by socio-economic hardships, patriarchal domination, and gender violence. This article asserts that the roots of women's continued inequality are found within the western reform models utilized by the anti-apartheid movement that reproduced public/private, male/female dichotomies in state institutions, thereby entrenching male discourse and power. The data suggest that in order to disrupt the power of the patriarchy women need to challenge male domination within the domestic sphere as well as challenging gender discrimination in public political spaces.     

A General Statistical Framework for Multistage Designs

Abstract. The efficiency of observational studies may be increased by applying multistage sampling designs. It is, however, not always transparent how to construct such a design to obtain increased efficiency. We here present a general statistical framework for describing and constructing multistage designs. We also provide tools for efficiency and cost‐efficiency comparisons, to facilitate the choice of sampling scheme. The comparisons are based on Fisher information matrices and the results are presented in graphs, where either efficiency or cost‐adjusted efficiency is plotted against a normalized measure of cost. The former curve resides in the unit square and is analogous to the receiver operating characteristic curve used for testing.