Age limits for participation in child protection court proceedings in Sweden

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Swedish legislation, children have the right to participate in child protection proceedings. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the notion of age and maturity in child protection proceedings in order to elucidate how these aspects could influence children's rights to participate. We focus on the view of three groups of actors involved in child protection proceedings in Sweden—social workers, lawyers, and laypersons in social welfare boards and administrative courts—and on how children's age and maturity should be taken into consideration in decisions on their participation in court. The analysis is based on survey data. The study found that social workers, laypersons, and lawyers have different views on when children are old enough to have the right to litigate in court. Additionally, there is no consensus on how the maturity of the child can be assessed to inform the decision about participation. More discussion is needed about what competences a child needs to participate in court and to what extent this right should be limited by their age. Importantly, courts and decision‐making proceedings can be made more child friendly.     

Trends in the Race and Ethnicity of Eminent Americans

During the last several decades, the ethnic and racial composition of the American elite has changed to include some ethnic minorities and women. This study examines changes in the composition of one segment of the American elite: those who have obtained eminence in their occupations. Lieberson and Carter's study of the ethnic composition of eminent Americans, using Who's Who in America, is replicated with data from the 1990s (Lieberson and Carter, 1979, American Sociological Review 44:347–366). In addition, comparisons between blacks listed in Who's Who in America and blacks listed only in Who's Who among Black Americans are made. During the 20 years since Lieberson and Carter's study, Jews have made remarkable gains in eminent membership, while the rate of black representation has increased only moderately. Women are a small percentage of the eminent regardless of ethnicity, although black women are better represented than their counterparts in white ethnic groups.     

Educational Attainments of Immigrant Offspring: Success or Segmented Assimilation?1

In this article, I study the educational attainments of the adult offspring of immigrants, analyzing data from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). Fielded annually since 1993 by Statistics Canada, respondents are asked for the first time in 1996 to report the birthplaces of their parents, making it possible to define and study not only the foreign‐born population (the first generation), but also the second generation (Canadian born to foreign‐born parents) and the third‐plus generation (Canadian born to Canadian‐born parents). The survey also asked respondents to indicate if they are members of a visible minority group, thus permitting a limited assessment of whether or not color conditions educational achievements of immigrant offspring. I find that “1.5” and second generation adults, age 20–64 have more years of schooling and higher percentages completing high school compared with the third‐plus generation. Contrary to the segmented “underclass” assimilation model found in the United States, adult visible minority immigrant offspring in Canada exceed the educational attainments of other not‐visible‐minority groups. Although the analysis is hampered by small sample numbers, the results point to country differences in historical and contemporary race relations, and call for additional national and cross‐national research.     

Bayesian analysis of elapsed times in continuous‐time Markov chains

The authors consider Bayesian analysis for continuous‐time Markov chain models based on a conditional reference prior. For such models, inference of the elapsed time between chain observations depends heavily on the rate of decay of the prior as the elapsed time increases. Moreover, improper priors on the elapsed time may lead to improper posterior distributions. In addition, an infinitesimal rate matrix also characterizes this class of models. Experts often have good prior knowledge about the parameters of this matrix. The authors show that the use of a proper prior for the rate matrix parameters together with the conditional reference prior for the elapsed time yields a proper posterior distribution. The authors also demonstrate that, when compared to analyses based on priors previously proposed in the literature, a Bayesian analysis on the elapsed time based on the conditional reference prior possesses better frequentist properties. The type of prior thus represents a better default prior choice for estimation software.     

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues,methodology and initial results

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the World Bank’s international poverty line. In revising the line, we have sought to minimize changes to the real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs), so as to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank’s twin goals – which were set with respect to that line. In particular, the new line was obtained by inflating the same fifteen national poverty lines – originally used by Ravallion et al. (World Bank Econ. Rev. 23(2): 163–184 2009) to construct the $1.25 line – to 2011 prices in local currency units, and then converting them to US dollars using 2011 PPP conversion factors. With a small approximation, this procedure yields a new international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. In combination with other changes described in the paper, this revision leads to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence for 2011: from 14.5 % using the old method to 14.1 % using the new method. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 % of the world’s population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats and limitations of the approach taken.     

Estimation and diagnostic for skew-normal partially linear models

Partially linear models (PLMs) are an important tool in modelling economic and biometric data and are considered as a flexible generalization of the linear model by including a nonparametric component of some covariate into the linear predictor. Usually, the error component is assumed to follow a normal distribution. However, the theory and application (through simulation or experimentation) often generate a great amount of data sets that are skewed. The objective of this paper is to extend the PLMs allowing the errors to follow a skew-normal distribution [A. Azzalini, A class of distributions which includes the normal ones, Scand. J. Statist. 12 (1985), pp. 171–178], increasing the flexibility of the model. In particular, we develop the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for linear regression models and diagnostic analysis via local influence as well as generalized leverage, following [H. Zhu and S. Lee, Local influence for incomplete-data models, J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B 63 (2001), pp. 111–126]. A simulation study is also conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the EM algorithm. Finally, a suitable transformation is applied in a data set on ragweed pollen concentration in order to fit PLMs under asymmetric distributions. An illustrative comparison is performed between normal and skew-normal errors.     

Proposal for training of workers and researchers as from the participatory return of research results in workers' health

This study streams from a perspective of Workers' Health as a field of intervention where worker's experience on the process of illness is essential to understand and generate changes in the work process, and to contribute to develop knowledge in this area. We intended to collaborate in the training of researchers and nursing workers as a means of contributing to amplify their knowledge related to work and health conditions. As a motto to promote dialogue between researchers and workers, we organized workshops to discuss the results of an epidemiological study on the work-health relationships in nursing. Ten workshops were conducted at two federal public hospitals, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The main aspects discussed during the workshops revealed (i) work nuances for which the questionnaire was not sufficiently sensitive, (ii) some associations between different aspects of the survey, dealt with in the questionnaires, and (iii) recognition that some aspects shown in the epidemiological results were experienced at work. One can appreciate that the proposal presented here contributed to the training of researchers and workers, amplifying their knowledge and contributing to the development of the activity.     

Ergonomics and the inclusion of people with disabilities in a Brazilian workplace

The customization of a secretary workstation at a drama school was the objective of this case study. The investigation involved a 25-year-old illiterate woman with intellectual disabilities and low vision that had been been attending, for over 12 years, a state school for people with disabilities. The customization process, operationalized after a diagnosis was made, focused on environmental rearrangements, with the purpose of meeting the physical and social demands of the workstation. The results of this research are configured in an ergonomic analysis of work associated with an inventory of social skills, applied to people living directly with the participant. Preliminary evaluations indicated the degree of adjustment of labor demands to the personal characteristics of the participant in the customized job.     

Estimation and diagnostic analysis in skew-generalized-normal regression models

The skew-generalized-normal distribution [Arellano-Valle, RB, Gómez, HW, Quintana, FA. A new class of skew-normal distributions. Comm Statist Theory Methods 2004;33(7):1465–1480] is a class of asymmetric normal distributions, which contains the normal and skew-normal distributions as special cases. The main virtues of this distribution is that it is easy to simulate from and it also supplies a genuine expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we extend the EM algorithm for linear regression models assuming skew-generalized-normal random errors and we develop a diagnostics analyses via local influence and generalized leverage, following Zhu and Lee's approach. This is because Cook's well-known approach would be more complicated to use to obtain measures of local influence. Finally, results obtained for a real data set are reported, illustrating the usefulness of the proposed method.     

Divorce,living arrangements,and material well-being during the transition to adulthood in rural Malawi

In this paper, we use longitudinal data to investigate how parental death and divorce influence young women’s own experience of divorce in Malawi, a setting where women marry relatively early and unions are fragile. We find that maternal death and parental divorce are positively associated with divorce for young women but, after controlling for socio-demographic and marital characteristics, only the association with maternal death remains statistically significant. Maternal and paternal death are both strongly associated with women’s post-divorce living arrangements, which in turn affects their material well-being. This finding suggests that divorcing at a young age shapes the subsequent life chances of women; although some women return to their parental home and may have the opportunity to reset the transition to adulthood, other women begin their 20s as head of their own household and with considerable material disadvantage.