Return migration from Australia: a case study

"The study investigates the departure from Australia of former settlers who arrived during the 1980 calendar year. The 1980 settler arrival cohort [consists] of 75,167 visaed migrants.... The study has three main aims: (i) to analyse departures from Australia of the 1980 settler arrival cohort with a view to gauging the success of Australia's immigration program in retaining settlers; (ii) to examine the retention rates of settlers with respect to characteristics...including age, sex, marital status, country of last residence, and settler eligibility category; and (iii) to consider implications of the findings." Australia's present immigration policy is discussed, previous research on return migration from Australia is summarized, and a detailed analysis of the departure data is presented. "This study found that by August 1984, 12.4 per cent of non-refugee settlers who arrived in Australia during 1980 had departed permanently but that only 0.6 per cent of the 1980 refugee cohort had done so." These figures represent a decline in immigrant departure rates since the 1960s and early 1970s. Small differences in departure rates by place of birth, age, and marital status, which may have demographic consequences if sustained over time, are noted. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

A comparison of quality and utilization problems in large and small group practices

Physicians practicing in large, multispecialty medical groups share an organizational culture that differs from that of physicians in small or independent practices. Since 1980, there has been a sharp increase in the size of multispecialty group practice organizations, in part because of increased efficiencies of large group practices. The greater number of physicians and support personnel in a large group practice also requires a relatively more sophisticated management structure. The efficiencies, conveniences, and management structure of a large group practice provide an optimal environment to practice medicine. However, a search of the literature found no data linking a large group practice environment to practice outcomes. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to determine if physicians in large practices have fewer quality and utilization problems than physicians in small or independent practices.     

How Employed Mothers in Australia Find Time for Both Market Work and Childcare

Time use studies find that employed mothers reduce their parental childcare time by much less than an hour for every hour they spend in market work. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4,059 randomly selected households) to investigate how employed mothers manage to avoid a one-for-one trade-off between work and childcare. It compares the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers and non-employed mothers and finds that parents use non-parental childcare to reschedule as well as to replace their own childcare, that employed mothers reschedule activities from weekdays to weekends or to earlier or later in the day, and spend less time than other mothers in housework, childfree leisure and personal care.

Community-based arts research for people with learning disabilities: challenging misconceptions about learning disabilities

This article presents some of the community-based artwork of a group of men with learning disabilities, who aimed to challenge some of the misconceptions associated with learning disabilities. People with learning disabilities regularly face many forms of direct and indirect stigma. The consequences of such negative perceptions may affect individuals’ social relationships and ensure that barriers are strengthened which prevent their full inclusion. The men in this project used a series of visual and creative methods to challenge some of these misconceptions by telling stories through art, demonstrating skill through photography, using poetry to talk about sexual identity and improvising drama and filmmaking to challenge stigma, and through sculpture expressed their voices. Thus, by doing so, they were able to challenge some of the stigma associated with learning disabilities, indicating that community-based arts research is a valuable way in which to promote the voices of people with learning disabilities.     

Socially disadvantaged women's views of barriers to feeling safe to engage in decision-making in maternity care

BackgroundAlthough midwifery literature suggests that woman-centred care can improve the birthing experiences of women and birth outcomes for women and babies, recent research has identified challenges in supporting socially disadvantaged women to engage in decision-making regarding care options in order to attain a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to provide an understanding of the issues that affect the socially disadvantaged woman's ability to actively engage in decision-making processes relevant to her care.Research designThe qualitative approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to gain an understanding of maternity care encounters as experienced by each of the following cohorts: socially disadvantaged women, registered midwives and student midwives. This paper focuses specifically on data from participating socially disadvantaged women that relate to the elements of woman-centred care-choice and control and their understandings of capacity to engage in their maternity care encounters.FindingsSocially disadvantaged women participants did not feel safe to engage in discussions regarding choice or to seek control within their maternity care encounters. Situations such as inadequate contextualised information, perceived risks in not conforming to routine procedures, and the actions and reactions of midwives when these women did seek choice or control resulted in a silent compliance. This response was interpreted as a consequence of women's decisions to accept responsibility for their baby's wellbeing by delegating health care decision-making to the health care professional.ConclusionThis research found that socially disadvantaged women want to engage in their care. However without adequate information and facilitation of choice by midwives, they believe they are outsiders to the maternity care culture and decision-making processes. Consequently, they delegate responsibility for maternity care choices to those who do belong; midwives. These findings suggest that midwives need to better communicate a valuing of the woman's participation in decision-making processes and to work with women so they do have a sense of belonging within the maternity care environment. Midwives need to ensure that socially disadvantaged women do feel safe about having a voice regarding their choices and find ways to give them a sense of control within their maternity care encounters.     

Old age rational suicide

In the societal debate surrounding voluntary euthanasia or physician‐assisted suicide, there is a concern that older people will be left exposed to any legislation, subject to either faint suggestion or outright coercion from familial or professional carers. Whilst it is critical to take account of older people's potential vulnerability to any current or proposed assisted suicide legislation, there is a parallel strand of research exploring another relationship which older people can have with this debate: one of activism. Sociological research has shown that older people make up the “rank and file” of those active within the right‐to‐die movement. One of the stated motivations of some older people requesting hastened death has been that, in spite of an absence of life‐threatening disease, they feel “tired of life” or that they have lived a “completed life” and feel ready to die. The notion of suicide for reasons of longevity and being tired of life are becoming increasingly significant given the fact of global ageing. This article brings together empirical and theoretical research on the phenomenon of old age rational suicide in order to develop an underexplored area in both the sociology of death and the sociology of ageing.     

Mangrove forests store high densities of carbon across the tropical urban landscape of Singapore

Tropical forested ecosystems provide multiple ecosystem services to rural and urban landscapes, with carbon storage gaining particular attention. Deforestation due to rural-urban transitions may lead to a reduction in carbon storage ability. Coastal mangrove forests are particularly at risk from deforestation due to their location in the rapidly urbanizing coastal zone, and the city state of Singapore is an extreme example, losing as much as 90 % of its original mangrove cover due to land reclamation and reservoir construction. Knowledge of mangrove ecosystem services may allow better conservation, restoration and incorporation of remaining mangrove patches into the urban landscape. Focusing on the regulating ecosystem service of carbon storage, mangrove carbon stocks have been estimated for Singapore using a combination of field and remote sensing techniques. Biomass carbon showed substantial spatial variation, with old, contiguous mangrove patches containing a higher density of biomass carbon than fragmented, river-fringing or restored mangroves. In total, national biomass carbon equated to 116,117.1 megagrams of carbon (Mg C), and a coarse estimate of the total carbon stock (including soil carbon) suggests that Singapore’s mangroves may store 450,571.7 Mg C. While lower than other regional estimates focused on natural, oceanic mangroves, this is a significant carbon stock for a disturbed, urban mangrove system, and may be equivalent to the average annual carbon emissions of 621,000 residents. This analysis, alongside a review of other urban forest studies, highlights the importance of forested ecosystems such as mangroves in providing a carbon storage ecosystem service to urban areas.     

Towards intensive parenting? Changes in the composition and determinants of mothers' and fathers' time with children 1992–2006

Contemporary expectations of good parenting hold that focused, intensive parental attention is essential to children's development. Parental input is viewed as a key determinant in children's social, psychological and educational outcomes, with the early years particularly crucial. However, increased rates of maternal employment mean that more parents are juggling work and family commitments and have less non‐work time available to devote to children. Yet studies find that parental childcare time has increased over recent decades. In this paper, we explore the detail of this trend using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS), 1992 and 2006. To investigate whether discourses on intensive parenting are reflected in behaviour, we examine a greater range of parent–child activities than has been undertaken to date, looking at trends in active childcare time (disaggregated into talk‐based, physical and accompanying care activities); time in childcare as a secondary activity; time spent in the company of children in leisure activities; and time spent in the company of children in total. We also investigate whether the influence of factors known to predict parental time with children (gender, education, employment status and the age of children) have changed over time. We contextualize our analyses within social and economic trends in Australia and find a compositional change in parental time, with more active childcare occurring within less overall time, which suggests more intensive, child‐centred parenting. Fathers' parent–child time, particularly in physical care, increased more than mothers' (from a much lower base), and tertiary education no longer predicts significantly higher childcare time.     

The challenge of creating ‘alternative’ images of ageing: Lessons from a project with older women

This article analyses two participatory projects designed to engage older women in the creation of new imagery of old age. While it was hoped that this imagery would offer an ‘alternative’ to mainstream depictions or indeed offer older women a presence amidst the much noted absence of images of older women, the brief left it open to the professional photographers recruited to the project and to the participants themselves to direct the representations. In recent years, critical gerontologists have repeatedly called for artistic challenges to conventional ways of imaging old age. By working with two groups of older women, the intention was that ‘ordinary’ older women (non-celebrity, non-artist) could be included in that challenge and imagery created which would show the lives of older women honestly. In the case of the two projects described here, professional photographers were enlisted to give visual form to the women's views on ageing and their lives as older women and deliver ‘exhibition quality’ images. Important factors in determining the types of images produced included the artistic style and preferences of the photographers and their respective ages, both of which are explored here. In-depth analysis of some of the images produced shows that while they did not succumb to the usual ‘heroes of ageing’/‘bodily decline’ binary (Featherstone & Hepworth, 2005), they did not escape other dualistic categorisations. The images can be broadly viewed as nostalgic/melancholic or humorously carnivalesque. This finding is evidence of how difficult it is to create ‘alternative’ images of older women which defy established modes of categorisation.