Understanding Gender and Power Dynamics Within the Family: A Qualitative Study of Nepali Women's Experience

Among the Maori of New Zealand, Aboriginals of Australia, and other Indigenous peoples, family dynamics strongly influence the ways that issues emerge in counseling. This study explores aspects of gender and power within the context of birth practices in rural Nepal. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 postpartum women, as well as family members, to collect narratives of birthing experiences that highlight issues of oppression, marginalisation, and power struggles. Implications for multicultural and social justice awareness in family therapy are discussed, especially with regard to the subtle, disguised ways that power operates behind the scenes, often sabotaging efforts by health and mental health professionals to bemost helpful.     

Estimation of coefficient of dispersion using auxiliary information

In this note, we consider the problem of estimation of coefficient of dispersion of a study variable by making use of known value of the coefficient of dispersion of an auxiliary variable. We propose ratio and regression-type estimators. We derive expressions of bias and variance of the proposed estimators to the first order of approximation. The relative efficiencies of the ratio and regression-type estimators with respect to the naïve estimator are investigated through a simulation study.     

Risk averse demand selection with all-or-nothing orders

Consider a firm that operates in consecutive single selling seasons, delivering its products across several markets with unique revenue and uncertain demands in each market. Using a profit maximization approach based on a newsvendor-type model, the firm may still incur several losses across consecutive periods in the short run. Risk analysis with demand selection has been modeled where customer/market demands follow a normal distribution. Often a firm faces a set of potential unconfirmed orders, where each order will either come in at a predefined level or it will not come in at all. In this paper, we consider these all-or-nothing (AON) demands and provide insights into their effect on expected profit and the frequency of extremely costly procurement policies. Instead of solely identifying the market/demand set and procurement quantity that maximizes expected profit, we use a conditional value-at-risk approach that allows a decision maker to control the number of profitable but risky demands to consider in the overall procurement policy. This approach is compared against an expected profit objective, and several managerial insights are provided.     

Disciplining the sex ratio: exploring the governmentality of female foeticide in India

The ‘girl child’ has attracted a considerable amount of attention in India as an object of policy addressing gender discrimination. This article examines the field of campaigns seeking to address female foeticide and positions the public discourse on the ‘girl child’ and sex selective abortion in India within a broad cultural backdrop of son preference. The article argues that anti-female foeticide campaigns exist within a disciplinary domain of female foeticide which both generates a discourse of saving the ‘girl child’ and also shows attempts to utilise both incentives and punitive measures in carving out a female foeticide carceral space.     

Risk factors of coronary heart disease: a Bayesian model averaging approach

To analyse the risk factors of coronary heart disease (CHD), we apply the Bayesian model averaging approach that formalizes the model selection process and deals with model uncertainty in a discrete-time survival model to the data from the Framingham Heart Study. We also use the Alternating Conditional Expectation algorithm to transform the risk factors, such that their relationships with CHD are best described, overcoming the problem of coding such variables subjectively. For the Framingham Study, the Bayesian model averaging approach, which makes inferences about the effects of covariates on CHD based on an average of the posterior distributions of the set of identified models, outperforms the stepwise method in predictive performance. We also show that age, cholesterol, and smoking are nonlinearly associated with the occurrence of CHD and that P-values from models selected from stepwise methods tend to overestimate the evidence for the predictive value of a risk factor and ignore model uncertainty.     

Legitimizing Work: Telework and the Gendered Reification of the Work-Nonwork Dichotomy*

L'intérêt principal de cet article est de savoir pourquoi les télé-travailleuses et travailleurs (individus ?uvrant à la maison) ont besoin de séparer leur vie publique de leur vie privée. Au moyen d'entrevues qualitatives avec des télétravailleurs des deux sexes, on étudie les différences dans la manière d'organiser la vie selon la dichotomie public/travail et privé/non-travail. Les mécanismes qui rendent nécessaire le renforcement de cette dichotomie sont aussi explorés. This paper focusses on why employees who telework (do professional work at home) continue to need to maintain a boundary between their public and private lives. Through qualitative interviews with female and male teleworkers, gender differences in the ways in which they organize their lives in terms of the public/work—private/ nonwork dichotomy are considered. The mechanisms which necessitate the reification of this dichotomy are explored.     

“The Best of Both Worlds” and “Cutting My Own Throat”: Contradictory Images of Home-Based Work

This article documents the existence of two contradictory depictions of computer-aided home-based work found in the popular press and the academic literature. Working at home is sometimes said to allow individuals to gain a full and successful integration of their paid and family work. At other times the physical proximity of home and work activities accompanying homework is portrayed as the cause of great anxiety and stress. Through case studies of women and men who do professional work at home in Canada, I explore the ways in which these two contradictory images are in fact simultaneously reflected in individuals' experiences of working at home.