Critical Discourse,Applied Inquiry and Public Health Action with Urban Middle School Students: Lessons Learned Engaging Youth in Critical Service-Learning

The Nuestro Futuro Saludable partnership designed a critical service-learning intervention focused on health equity and action. The 10-week afterschool intervention was implemented in a Boston middle school. Youths who took part in the intervention were knowledgeable about the social determinants of health in their communities, as well as to the barriers to health. Our findings indicate that engaging young people in a meaningful way will be critical if health improvement efforts are to be realized. We found that a critical service-learning framework that incorporates elements of applied inquiry and critical pedagogy was effective as a health intervention and provided opportunities for action.     

The Effective Use of New Media in Disseminating Evangelical Messages Among Catholic College Students

Religious life of American youth has received little attention from social scientists, but this is changing as research underscores the importance of religious identity. The Catholic Church has historically employed new forms of communication to reach its followers. This article examines Catholic college students’ use of new media and the impact on their faith. To explore this, a qualitative method was used. Five major themes emerging from the study were: (a) positive effects of Christian media content, (b) everyday use of new media, (c) the Catholic Church is buried in tradition, (d) importance of credible sources, and (e) failure to program toward youth. Data collected from these qualitative interviews suggest the Catholic Church must become aggressive in utilizing new media and programming messages of faith and education about the Church to this younger generation as their values are being shaped.     

Household Structure and Living Conditions in Nigeria

Data on 7,632 households from the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey are used to examine household structure and living conditions in Nigeria. The study finds significant disadvantage in living conditions of single‐adult, female‐ and single‐adult, male‐headed households relative to two‐parent households. Extended households show no significant advantage in living conditions over two‐parent households if headed by women but are consistently advantaged if headed by men. Although extended households do not entirely wipe out the disadvantage of female headship on household living conditions, they show a significant mitigating potential. Efforts to understand and alleviate poverty in Nigeria may need to address simultaneously gender imbalances in access to livelihood opportunities and factors that foster nucleation of family structure into single‐adult households.     

Globalisation and Female Economic Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study assesses the relationship between globalisation and the economic participation of women (EPW) in 47 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2013. EPW is measured with the female labour force participation and employment rates. The empirical evidence is based on panel-corrected standard errors and fixed effects regressions. The findings show that the positive effect of the overall globalisation index on EPW is dampened by its political component and driven by its economic and social components, with a higher positive magnitude from the former or economic globalisation. For the most part, the findings are robust to the control for several structural and institutional characteristics. An extended analysis by unbundling globalisation shows that the positive incidence of social globalisation is driven by information flow (compared to personal contact and cultural proximity) while the positive effect of economic globalisation is driven by actual flows (relative to restrictions). Policy implications are discussed with some emphasis on how to elevate women’s social status and potentially reduce their victimisation to male dominance.     

On The Optimal Choice of Cube and Star Replications in Restricted Second-Order Designs

This article examines the central composite design in which some of the experimental runs are replicated. Three different classes of N-point designs are compared using the criterion of Schur's ordering under orthogonality, rotatablity, and slope- rotatablity conditions. The response surface designs with the star portion replicated seem to have more potential than others under orthogonality condition, while the designs with the cube portion replicated is preferable to the designs with their star portion or only the center point replicated under rotatable and slope-rotatable conditions.     

Fitting polynomial trend to time series by the method of Buys-Ballot estimators

The statistical properties of two closed-form estimators of the parameters of the quadratic time trend model are derived. The estimators are based on the derived variables from Buys-Ballot table. The estimators are derived by assuming that error term is identically and independently distributed. However, the validity of this assumption is sometimes difficult to verify. We also study, through simulations, the impact of misspecifying the error distribution on the estimation and prediction accuracy in the quadratic time trend model. It is shown that the estimators are inconsistent in the presence of misspecification. T methods are illustrated with real-life examples.     

Smart phone is a expectation-laden trophy: adolescent girls–adults’ mobile phone tensions and changing sexuality negotiation

This article is based on a study conducted in Nigerian Christian and Muslim neighborhoods on the intrigues that characterized adults-adolescent girls’ relations about how and when adolescent girls could use smart phones. Questionnaires, ethnographic interviews, school debates, observations, and focus group discussion methods were used to study the influence of smart phones on adolescent girls’ identity construction, adults-adolescent girls’ tension as regards ownership and use of smartphones, and new dynamics in adolescent girls-male friends’ relationship caused by smart phone uptake. For this population, smart phones display contextual symbolism that transcends their technological meaning, shifting girls’ social dependence from adults to peers and technology. Smart phone use has given adolescent girls a new way of identity construction, empowered them subtly in sexuality negotiation and assigned new roles to them. Adults’ concern about adolescent girls’ use of smart phones is rooted in their fears about the possible negative influences of smart phone use, which they see as entertainment driven and inimical to adolescent girls’ development. Findings of this study revealed that tensions between adults and adolescent girls over smart phone uptake originated from role reversal and expectation-laden nature of smart phones acquired by male friends, which effective mutual sharing of knowledge and resources could address. Adolescent girls should justify their craving for smart phones morally, socially, and psychologically. Adults and social institutions also need to rediscover their new roles in a world where digital innovations are necessities.     

Crossing Boundaries: Internal,Regional and International Migration in Cameroon

Internal and international migration increasingly continues to be of global importance for development policies and programmes, but the dearth of data on migration for African countries and the limited focus on the structural conditions that motivate migration from specific localities within the region remain glaring. In this study, we examine the patterns and drivers of migration in Cameroon, focusing on the dynamics of rural–urban migration, migrant circulation, regional economic migrants and refugees, international migration, brain drain and returns from emigration. Consequent upon regional conflicts and instability, we highlight the refugee problem in Cameroon and significant challenges in addressing it. Finally, we underscore the policy and research challenges necessary to harness the potentials of internal and international migration for national development.     

EM-based algorithms for autoregressive models with t-distributed innovations

This paper considers the estimation of parameters of AR(p) models for time series with t-distribution via EM-based algorithms. The paper develops asymptotic properties for the estimation to show that the estimators are efficient. Also testing theory for the estimators is considered. The robustness of the estimators and various tests to deviations from an assumed model is investigated. The study shows that the algorithms have equal estimation efficiency even if the error distribution is miss-specified or perturbed by outliers. Interestingly, the estimators from these algorithms performed better than that of the Modified Maximum Likelihood (MML) considered in Tiku et al. (2000 Tiku, M. L., Wong, W. K., Vaughan, D. C., Bian, G. (2000). Time series models in non-normal situations: Symmetric innovations. Journal of Time Series Analysis, 21: 571–596. [Google Scholar]).