Older adults in sub-Saharan Africa living with children and grandchildren

Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, we examine the composition of households containing older adults in 24 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on those living with children and grandchildren. Overall, 59 per cent live with a child and 46 per cent with a grandchild. Men are more likely to live in nuclear households and women in extended households and alone. Regression analyses show that individual-level determinants of household composition differ by sex. For example, living with children and grandchildren is tied to living with a spouse for men, but for women the effect is either not significant or in the opposite direction. Households with an older adult and a grandchild, but no adult children, are common. Usually the adult child lives elsewhere, though about 8 per cent of older adults live with a grandchild who has at least one deceased parent. Older adults are more likely to be living with double-orphans in countries with high AIDS-related mortality.     

Drone-topia as method

ABSTRACT

The figure of the civilian camera drone remains ambiguous and contested. Its promises and perils shape contemporary imaginaries of future mobilities and visualities. Donny the Drone by Mackenzie Sheppard is one example of a fictional short film that creatively engages with such ambivalent scenarios in the story about a sentient quadcopter. In this article, I explore this techno-futurist narrative in how it serves as a heuristic for a mobile utopia. Themes of mobility and aerial commons, visuality and cosmopolitanism, relationality and affective subjectivity, along with domination and political mobilization emerge from the utopian thought experiment about a camera drone becoming human. Ultimately, I show how the evolving figure of the civilian drone serves as an experimental platform and utopian method towards elevated visions for an imaginative reconstitution of society.     

Family size and support of older adults in urban and rural China: Current effects and future implications

Change in China's age structure is creating concerns about whether reductions in family size undermine traditional support mechanisms for older adults. Future generations may expect less support as the availability of children declines. In this article, the association between number of children and the receipt of instrumental and financial support is examined for rural and urban populations. Probabilities are modeled as bivariate probits. Coefficients are used to conduct simulations in which support is examined across hypothetical distributions of number of children. The results show that the number of children is an important determinant of support, but future reductions in support may not be as dramatic as anticipated.     

Pay equity in occupations: the nursing profession

The issue of comparable worth has been discussed in great detail, both in the media and in academic journals. This study provides an in-depth look at one female-dominated profession - the nursing profession. The focus of the analysis is on the determinants of individuals' decisions to participate or not participate in the nurse labor market. If the determinants are economic in nature, then comparable worth can be discussed in an economic framework. If, however, the decision is based on real or socialized differences in preferences, then other approaches may prove more valuable. This study finds that the choices made by the surveyed nurses were non-economic in nature.     

Race-ethnicity and medical services for infertility: stratified reproduction in a population-based sample of U.S. women

Evidence of group differences in reproductive control and access to reproductive health care suggests the continued existence of "stratified reproduction" in the United States. Women of color are overrepresented among people with infertility but are underrepresented among those who receive medical services. The authors employ path analysis to uncover mechanisms accounting for these differences among black, Hispanic, Asian, and non-Hispanic white women using a probability-based sample of 2,162 U.S. women. Black and Hispanic women are less likely to receive services than other women. The enabling conditions of income, education, and private insurance partially mediate the relationship between race-ethnicity and receipt of services but do not fully account for the association at all levels of service. For black and Hispanic women, social cues, enabling conditions, and predisposing conditions contribute to disparities in receipt of services. Most of the association between race-ethnicity and service receipt is indirect rather than direct.     

Making Sense of Meta-Analysis: A Critique of “Effectiveness of Long-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy”

Evidence-based practice depends in part on knowledge derived from relevant research. For any given topic, there are likely to be many, potentially relevant studies; a careful appraisal and synthesis of the results of these studies is needed to understand the state of the empirical evidence. Meta-analysis is widely used to combine results of quantitative studies; yet this method is unfamiliar to many people and, as a result, meta-analyses are often uncritically accepted. In this article, we argue that meta-analysis is only one component of a good research synthesis. We critique a recent metaanalysis on the effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, showing that this metaanalysis failed to meet current standards for the conduct and reporting of systematic research reviews and meta-analyses. We demonstrate the use of AMSTAR, a straightforward tool for assessing the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.     

The Role of Systematic Reviews and the Campbell Collaboration in the Realization of Evidence-Informed Practice

Evidence-informed practice asks practitioners and policy-makers to integrate current best evidence with client context in order to provide meaningful and potentially effective services across a range of presenting problems. Done correctly, systematic reviews are a crucial part of this process, providing social workers and other helping professionals with transparent, rigorous, and informative syntheses of research in a given area. This paper makes clear the need for systematic reviews in social work, briefly explains what systematic reviews are and how they are made, and describes the role of the Campbell Collaboration in creating a world library of systematic reviews.     

The Social Construction of Infertility

Health and illness are not objective states but socially constructed categories. We focus here on infertility, a phenomenon that has shifted from being seen as a private problem of couples to being seen as a medical condition. Studying infertility provides an ideal vantage point from which to study such features of health care as inter‐societal and cross‐cultural disparities in health care, the relationship between identity and health, gender roles, and social and cultural variations in the process of medicalization. Infertility is stratified, both globally and within Western societies. Access to care is extremely limited for many women in developing societies and also for marginalized women in some highly industrialized societies. We also discuss the ways in which responses to infertility are influenced by the process of self‐definition. The experience of infertility is profoundly shaped by varying degrees of pronatalism and patriarchy. In advanced industrial societies, where voluntary childfree status is acknowledged, many women experience infertility as a ‘secret stigma’; in other cultures, where motherhood is normative for all women, infertility may be impossible to hide. In the West, acceptance of the medical model is virtually hegemonic, but in other societies medical interpretations of infertility coexist with traditional interpretations.     

Adolescent Transitions to Young Adulthood: Antecedents,Correlates, and Consequences of Adolescent Employment

The antecedents, correlates, and consequences of adolescent employment were investigated in a sample of 251 low‐income, African American youth that were followed since birth. The youth (age: M at preschool = 4.89, SD= .70; M at adolescence = 16.44, SD= .66; M at transition to adulthood = 19.36, SD= .76; and M at early adulthood = 27.67, SD= .75) were the firstborn children of African American teenage mothers who gave birth in Baltimore in the 1960s. Analyses examined the antecedents and correlates of age of entry into employment and stability of employment during adolescence. The associations of adolescent work experiences with subsequent adult education and employment outcomes also were considered. Findings indicate that among this sample of low‐income, African American youth, those who repeated a grade in school during middle childhood were more likely to enter the workforce at later ages than their peers who did not repeat a grade. The small subset of adolescents who never worked (n= 12) appear to be markedly more disadvantaged than their peers who worked. At the transition to adulthood, adolescents who entered the workforce earlier were more likely to complete high school than their peers. In addition, stable employment during the adolescent years had more beneficial effects on young men's chances of attending college than young women's postsecondary education. This pattern of findings is consistent with ethnographic accounts of adolescent employment among poor, minority, urban youth.