Re‐framing the Analysis: A 3‐dimensional Perspective of Prisoners’ Children's Well‐being

This article highlights three dimensions to understanding children's well‐being during and after parental imprisonment which have not been fully explored in current research. A consideration of ‘time’ reveals the importance of children's past experiences and their anticipated futures. A focus on ‘space’ highlights the impact of new or altered environmental dynamics. A study of ‘agency’ illuminates how children cope within structural, material and social confines which intensify vulnerability and dependency. This integrated perspective reveals important differences in individual children's experiences and commonalities in broader systemic and social constraints on prisoners’ children. The paper analyses data from a prospective longitudinal study of 35 prisoners’ children during and after their (step) father's imprisonment to illustrate the arguments.     

A class of symmetric bivariate uniform distributions

A class of symmetric bivariate uniform distributions is proposed for use in statistical modeling. The distributions may be constructed to be absolutely continuous with correlations as close to±1 as desired. Expressions for the correlations, regressions and copulas are found. An extension to three dimensions is proposed.     

'It is a horrible term for someone': service user and provider perspectives on 'personality disorder'

This paper presents findings from a study exploring the views of people with personality disorder diagnoses and various professionals working with them. After outlining the policy context and the study's conceptual framework, the aims and methods are described. Interviews were conducted with 12 service providers and 10 users. The main findings are then discussed, including user and provider perspectives on the meaning of 'personality disorder' and the strategies and support people use to address their difficulties. Finally, the theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Colonialism,Decolonisation, and the Right to be Human: Britain and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees

The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees is central to scholarship on refugee and asylum issues. It is the primary basis upon which asylum seekers make their claims to the majority of host states today and, as a key text of the human rights framework, has come to be associated with the very idea of a universalised rights-bearing human being. Yet British asylum policy today is characterized by efforts to limit access to the right to asylum. Many scholars believe this is because asylum seekers today are different, in character and number, to previous cohorts of applicants. This article goes back to the founding of the refugee rights regime and investigates the exclusions of colonized peoples from access to the right to asylum. Using Chimni's concept of the “myth of difference”, the article demonstrates that asylum seekers have long existed outside of Europe, and that their exclusion from international rights has been both longstanding and intentional. This historical sociology suggests that the basis for critical work on the issue of asylum policy today must be one which takes colonial histories into account.     

The ensemble Kalman filter is an ABC algorithm

The ensemble Kalman filter is the method of choice for many difficult high-dimensional filtering problems in meteorology, oceanography, hydrology and other fields. In this note we show that a common variant of the ensemble Kalman filter is an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) algorithm. This is of interest for a number of reasons. First, the ensemble Kalman filter is an example of an ABC algorithm that predates the development of ABC algorithms. Second, the ensemble Kalman filter is used for very high-dimensional problems, whereas ABC methods are normally applied only in very low-dimensional problems. Third, recent state of the art extensions of the ensemble Kalman filter can also be understood within the ABC framework.     

Never easy to say “sorry”: Exploring the interplay of crisis involvement,brand image,and message appeal in developing effective corporate apologies

This study examines how the interplay among crisis involvement, brand image, and message appeal impacts the effectiveness of an apology in the context of a corporate crisis. To determine apology effectiveness, a 2 (crisis involvement: high vs. low) × 2 (brand image: symbolic vs. functional) × 2 (message appeal type: emotional vs. informational) experimental design was employed. The results demonstrate that the three-way interaction is significant, especially in the low-crisis involvement condition. The study concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research.     

The Social Economy in Bolivia: Indigeneity,Solidarity, and Alternatives to Capitalism

The social economy (SE) is alternatively conceptualized as a third sector (between the private and public sector); or by a typology of the organizations involved (such as cooperatives, non-profit organizations and social enterprises); or by the principles and values driving such activities (such as cooperation, mutual benefit, and democracy). One important consideration is often overlooked, namely that the SE emerges in different forms and with varied emphases depending on location. The SE is ‘place-based’—rooted in specific geographic, historical, cultural, and socioeconomic settings. This article explores the conceptualization of the SE in the Bolivian context from the perspective of government and civil society actors. The research took place after the country recognized the importance of the social, cooperative and community economy in their new constitution and found that the understanding of the SE in Bolivia relates strongly to the country’s indigenous and colonial heritage.     

Measurement of the subjective work environment

Abstract

This paper considers the various issues that frame the development and use of measures of the subjective work environment. It begins by questioning the role of the work environment in determining occupational health, and explores the possible mechanisms by which that environment might exert its influence. It concludes that one of the important final common pathways is psycho-physiological in nature, and is rooted in individual perception and cognition and the experience of stress. Important for this model are the concepts of mediation and moderation. The measurement of the subjective work environment has often been idiosyncratic to the study in hand, and there are few well-established measures in common use. It is argued that researchers should be careful when deciding not to use established measures and effectively ‘invent’ their own. In developing new measures, decisions have to be made concerning the nature of the measure along with its ‘granularity’ and complexity. It is also argued that it is important that researchers should follow good psychometric practice in the development of those measures. Suggestions for ‘good practice’ are discussed. Attention is drawn to the issues of reliability and validity, and this paper discusses the role of triangulation in the planning and execution of data collection and analysis. The paper ends by reviewing the recommendations made towards the development and use of measures of the subjective work environment.     

Nativity Seen in the Anthropocene: Contemporary Fieldwork and Subjective Challenges

Ongoing political changes, diasporic mobilities and new communication modalities present anthropologists with novel challenges for conducting ethnographic field work. As both configurations of and expectations for varied forms of social identity change, so too has the notion of the native, what Arjun Appadurai once called the technical preserve of anthropologists. Through reflection on contemporary field work experiences in Kazakhstan, the Philippines and South Korea, this set of papers considers how changing political and cultural regimes, diasporic mobilities and social media also tag the native anthropologist, a concept which can be to the advantage of the researcher, but also can create new problems and complexities for research.