Transnational Grannies: The Changing Family Responsibilities of Elderly African Caribbean-Born Women Resident in Britain

This paper explores the role and position of grandmothers in African-Caribbean families resident in Britain. The data used for this paper comes fromm a sample of 180 life-history interviews collected in 1995–1996 from three generations of Caribbean-origin people living in Britain and the Caribbean. Findings from this research suggest that African-Caribbean grandmothers resident in Britain have come to play a less active role within their immediate family compared to earlier historical periods. At the same time however, these grandmothers have come to take on a more a transnational emissary role for their family and kin located throughout North America and Europe. Caribbean-born grandmothers appear to be using more modern means for fulfilling certain traditional tasks like child shifting, story telling or acting as a social safety net. Using their agency African Caribbean-born grandmothers have been able to carve out new niches for themselves despite changes in family structure brought about by migration and settlement patterns in Britain.     

The Implications of Immigration for the Training of Social Work Professionals in Spain

Correspondence to Sonia Hernández Plaza, Area de Psicologia Social, Departamento de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Universidad de Almería, Ctra. Sacramento s/n, Almería, 04120, Spain. Summary Important demographic changes have been taking place in Spainduring the last two decades as a result of immigration. Dueto an ever-increasing multicultural spread, social work professionalsare faced with the new challenge of providing quality servicesto diverse ethnic populations. After briefly describing themain characteristics of immigration in Spain, their implicationsfor the provision of social services and the need to providemulticultural training for social workers are analysed. Theconceptual framework proposed addresses some of the main variablesthat professionals working with these minorities should takeinto account, emphasizing: culture; language; family support;community resources; clients' explanatory model of the problems;provision of services for multiple problems; ethnic discrimination;and assessment instruments. Some key points for multiculturaltraining in this field are discussed, paying special attentionto the need to develop culturally sensitive and bias-free diagnostictools; accreditation and funding of professional programmes;and cross-cultural competence training. The main contents andobjectives of a multicultural training course for social workersare described.     

The 1970 US draft lottery revisited: a spatial analysis

Summary.  We revise the result of the 1970 selective service draft lottery in the USA following an open question that was suggested by Fienberg in a paper published in Science in 1971. The result of the drawings can be viewed as a particular spatial pattern which can be analysed by using general spatial tools adapted to our context. Approaches for assessing the complete spatial randomness for this spatial process on a finite support are proposed. More specifically, these approaches involve the number of events in a square window and a k ( r )-based function used to analyse stationary spatial point processes.     

Contents of Volume 51

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 51     

Identifying ecosystem patterns from time series of anchovy (Engraulis ringens) and sardine (Sardinops sagax) landings in northern Chile

ABSTRACT

Useful knowledge acquisition from known and systematized information (data) is a big challenge for researchers, users and finally, decision makers. In this sense, knowledge discovery from data (KDD) process represents a valuable tool for information analysis. Moreover, this work presents an approach through KDD in time series pattern identification for anchovy and sardine fisheries and environmental data, in northern Chile. Time series, multivariate analysis and data mining techniques, along with technical literature review for results validation. The KDD approach and the data mining techniques implemented achieved an integration between these variables, identifying relevant patterns associated with fisheries abundance fluctuations and strong association with environmental changes such as El Niño and long-term cold–warm regimes between them, establishing anchovy and sardine pre-dominant time-periods, associated with environmental conditions are identified. The latter establishes groundwork for studying underlying functional relationships that could reduce gaps in the national fisheries management policies for those fisheries.