Providers’ perspectives of barriers experienced in maternal health care among Marshallese women

Problem

Pacific Islanders are disproportionately burdened by poorer maternal health outcomes with higher rates of pre-term births, low birth weight babies, infant mortality, and inadequate or no prenatal care.

Caught Between Love and Money: The Experiences of Paid Family Caregivers

This paper considers the experiences of family home care providers, paid an hourly wage by California’s In Home Supportive Services program to care for disabled or elderly relatives. These caregivers are unique in that they provide care in what Arlie Hochschild calls the “third sector” of social life, where norms and responsibilities tied to work and family intersect. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of family home care providers, we find that providers perceive their paid caregiving as deviant behavior that violates social norms surrounding family care, i.e. that people should not be paid for the care of kin. Family caregivers manage the norm violation associated with their carework by offering “accounts” that 1) emphasize the tasks and skill associated with caregiving and 2) by framing their carework as a public good that benefits the larger community. These accounts allow family providers to distance themselves from the norm violation of receiving a wage for care and to reconstruct their actions in a positive light.     

When managerialism meets professional autonomy: The university ‘budget update’ as genre of governance

Through analysis of 178 texts posted online by university leaders during a severe budget shortfall, I explore the tensions that arise as managerialist practices are recontextualized within university governance. I identify 64 texts constitutive of a hybrid genre, which I call the ‘budget update’. The structure and linguistic features of this genre are described. Interdiscursive and intertextual analysis demonstrate hybridities that emerge when leaders enact, negotiate, and resist managerialism.     

Panel accretion and external validity in adolescent substance use research

This study investigates the relationship of panel accretion to panel attrition and examines its impact on threats to external validity in adolescent substance use research. Panel accretion involves the addition of new participants to a panel design after initial baseline data has been obtained. Accretion occurs in longitudinal studies in which data is routinely gathered on all participants, as is often the case in prevention or epidemiological research on adolescent substance use. Accretion, attrition, and panel findings for three, 2-year panel samples in grades 7 through 9 are examined. The results indicate that accretion and attrition samples have an isomorphic relationship to one another on a range of dependent measures when drawn from the same population. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for adolescent substance use research, the examination of validity threats due to panel bias, and understanding the ecological validity of research findings.     

Estimating the costs of preventive interventions

The goal of this article is to improve the practice and reporting of cost estimates of prevention programs. It reviews the steps in estimating the costs of an intervention and the principles that should guide estimation. The authors then review prior efforts to estimate intervention costs using a sample of well-known but diverse studies. Finally, the authors illustrate the principles with an example, the Family Bereavement Program. They conclude that example by discussing whether and how the costs of the intervention might differ when implemented in a real-world setting.     

The obesity pay gap: gender,body size,and wage inequalities—a longitudinal study of Chinese adults, 1991–2011

Sociocultural values promoting Western body-type ideals have proliferated over the past 20 years. An important question is whether the same obesity wage penalties seen in the United States, such as wage reductions for obese individuals, are emerging in China as ideals of beauty change to reflect Western ones. We hypothesize that Westernisation will exacerbate the impact of body size on wages for years to come, particularly for urban non-manual workers whose workplaces call for extensive interpersonal relations with employers, colleagues, and customers. This study examines the economic outcomes for individuals aged 18–55, focusing on 6600 female and 8488 male participants in the longitudinal 1991–2011 China Health and Nutrition Survey. Linear fixed-effects regression models estimate the net effect of body mass index (BMI) on wages, as well as the marginal effect of BMI on wages, by survey year. All analyses control for demographic backgrounds and household fixed effects, and are stratified by gender. The results show that normal-weight women with non-manual jobs in 2011 made 2.79–2.95 times more than they had in 1991, while overweight women made 2.66–2.76 times more, and obese women made only 2.57–2.63 times more. The results also indicate that women with non-manual jobs have been subject to wage disparities since 2000. Specifically, the wage disparity for heavier women living in urban areas with non-manual jobs increased significantly after 2000, while current male obesity rates may have been propelled by social acceptance of larger body sizes among men, particularly for manual workers living in rural areas.     

The racial politics of STEM education in the USA: interrogations and explorations

ABSTRACT

This special issue brings together a mix of early-career, mid, and senior scholars to critically examine current realities of, and boldly imagine future possibilities for, STEM education in the lives of racially minoritized children in the United States. Given the implicit and sometimes explicit aspirations of STEM education to be a counteracting force against racialized injustice, how do students and communities of color experience and make sense of STEM reforms/initiatives? By examining a broad range of STEM contexts including mathematics, computer science, science and environmental science education, and through a diversity of methodological approaches, this special issue aims to contribute to a scholarly conversation about how racialized power intersects with the larger themes and foci of STEM education. In our introduction, we both highlight broad themes of the issue, and offer possible directions for future research at the intersections of race, power, and STEM.     

Child welfare management: a model curriculum.

A social work school curriculum designed especially to train persons to manage child welfare program is in its second year of operation. It may provide a model for training personnel in this area.