Measuring Parental Involvement in Dual-Earner Qatari Families

Parental involvement in dual-earner families is a subject that has been widely studied in the literature in Western contexts. Less attention, however, has been allocated to the challenges that dual-earner families encounter in raising children in Arab Gulf states. This paper study aims to address the following questions: To what extent are dual-earner families involved in their children’s lives? What are the gender differences in parental involvement? This paper employed the 2017 survey data of working Qatari males and females to measure their parental involvement and engagement in family time and childcare. The results highlighted parental factors, work characteristics and social supports as key factors determining the degree of parental involvement. The results also showed the gender differences in parental involvement scores, which comprise several factors, including work demands and time spent with children. Taken together, our findings provide insights allowing suggestions for mechanisms that could generate foundational parental welfare policies for dual-earner families in Qatar and the wider Arab Gulf Region as a whole. Further contributions to this research domain could include studies encompassing a wider scope of geographical locations within the Arab Gulf states using robust experimental investigations.Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library

Will they take this offer? A machine learning price elasticity model for predicting upselling acceptance of premium airline seating

Employing customer information from one of the world's largest airline companies, we develop a price elasticity model (PREM) using machine learning to identify customers likely to purchase an upgrade offer from economy to premium class and predict a customer's acceptable price range. A simulation of 64.3 million flight bookings and 14.1 million email offers over three years mirroring actual data indicates that PREM implementation results in approximately 1.12 million (7.94%) fewer non-relevant customer email messages, a predicted increase of 72,200 (37.2%) offers accepted, and an estimated $72.2 million (37.2%) of increased revenue. Our results illustrate the potential of automated pricing information and targeting marketing messages for upselling acceptance. We also identified three customer segments: (1) Never Upgrades are those who never take the upgrade offer, (2) Upgrade Lovers are those who generally upgrade, and (3) Upgrade Lover Lookalikes have no historical record but fit the profile of those that tend to upgrade. We discuss the implications for airline companies and related travel and tourism industries.© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Measuring Parental Involvement in Dual-Earner Qatari Families

Parental involvement in dual-earner families is a subject that has been widely studied in the literature in Western contexts. Less attention, however, has been allocated to the challenges that dual-earner families encounter in raising children in Arab Gulf states. This paper study aims to address the following questions: To what extent are dual-earner families involved in their children’s lives? What are the gender differences in parental involvement? This paper employed the 2017 survey data of working Qatari males and females to measure their parental involvement and engagement in family time and childcare. The results highlighted parental factors, work characteristics and social supports as key factors determining the degree of parental involvement. The results also showed the gender differences in parental involvement scores, which comprise several factors, including work demands and time spent with children. Taken together, our findings provide insights allowing suggestions for mechanisms that could generate foundational parental welfare policies for dual-earner families in Qatar and the wider Arab Gulf Region as a whole. Further contributions to this research domain could include studies encompassing a wider scope of geographical locations within the Arab Gulf states using robust experimental investigations.Other Information Published in: Journal of Child and Family Studies License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02183-z</p

Fertility Transitions: Implications for Future Demographic Trends in Qatar

Introduction: In Qatar, while most of the country's demographic situations have been widely studied, much less attention has been paid to the determinants of Qatari women's socio-demographic characteristics and the prevalence of family planning methods. This raises the following question: How, and to what extent, do population dynamics that stratify national populations by age; sex; marital status; and level of education, income, and employment contribute to the declining of fertility rate and cause mortality differentials in Qatar? Materials and Methods: Data from a 2018 fertility survey project with a random sample of 607 Qatari households, collected via personal interviews using a questionnaire and a computer assisted personal interview, by the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute at Qatar University, was examined based on a multi-dimensional model. The data were analyzed using logistic and Poisson regression techniques. Results: The data show that Qatari women's total fertility rate is 3.2, with women in the 20-29 age group having the highest fertility rates. Evaluating the effects of women's educational attainment and employment status revealed no significant factors influencing the age-specific fertility rate of Qatari women. In addition, the results indicate that the most common contraceptive method currently used among Qatari women is pills (29%), and their use is more prevalent among older Qatari women who have had more children than among younger Qatari women with fewer children. Conclusion/ future direction: The paper provides comprehensive policy recommendations for increasing the reproductive rate in Qatar by providing supporting programs to increase the total fertility rate and childbearing rates among Qatari women. It also promotes the provision of high-quality family planning services

Effective policies to mitigate food waste in Qatar

This paper highlighted food waste as one of the biggest threats to food security that put pressure on the natural resources and limit the ecological capacity of land of Qatar to continue providing renewable resources. Climate change, desertification of farmland, water shortages, soil degradation and arable land per capita decline are the main characteristics of the state of Qatar. This arid and semi-arid environment resulted in difficulties to produce food locally. Qatar used to import 90% of its food from neighboring countries before the blockade in 2017. Qatar is passing an important era of total shift from food security to self-sufficiency. In a very short time, Qatar managed to register almost full sufficiency in perishable foods and produced abundant amount of food. This shed light in the importance of sustainable production and consumption to avoid environmental disasters such as food waste that directly affect the sustainability of arable land and ground water. A panel of academics, administrators, civil society and charities came together to discuss the issue of sustainability regarding food waste, in order to formulate policies and strategies to mitigate food waste and produce compost to be used in agriculture and hence achieve food self-sufficiency. These policies will help managers and policy makers to make correct decisions to preserve the environment

QT2S: A System for Monitoring Road Traffic Via Fine Grounding of Tweets

Social media platforms provide continuous access to user generated content that enables real-time monitoring of user behavior and of events. The geographical dimension of such user behavior and events has recently caught a lot of attention in several domains: mobility, humanitarian, or infrastructural. While resolving the location of a user can be straightforward, depending on the affordances of their device and/or of the application they are using, in most cases, locating a user demands a larger effort, such as exploiting textual features. On Twitter for instance, only 2% of all tweets are geo-referenced. In this paper, we present a system for zoomed-in grounding (below city level) for short messages (for example, tweets). The system combines different natural language processing and machine learning techniques to increase the number of geo-grounded tweets, which is essential to many applications such as disaster response and real-time traffic monitoring

A new One Health Framework in Qatar for future emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases preparedness and response

One Health is increasingly recognized as an optimal approach to address the global risk of health threats originating at the human, animal, and ecosystem interface, and their impact. Qatar has successfully practiced One Health approach for investigation and surveillance of zoonotic diseases such as MERS-CoV, and other health threats. However, the current gaps at institution and policy level hinder the sustainment of One Health. In this paper, we have assessed the potential for implementation of One Health Framework to reinforce and sustain One Health capacities in Qatar for 2022–2027. To implement One Health Framework in the country, Qatar Joint External Evaluation (JEE) report, lessons learnt during One Health experiences on zoonotic, vector-borne, and food borne diseases were used to present an outline for multisectoral coordination. In addition, technical capacities of One Health and factors that are required to operationalize it in the country were also assessed in series of meetings and workshops held at Ministry of Public Health on March 2022. Present health care infrastructure and resources were found to be conducive for effective management and response to shared health threats as evident during MERS-CoV, despite being more event based. Regardless, the need for more sustainable capacity development was unanimously emphasized. The consensus between all relevant stakeholders and partners was that there is a need for better communication channels, policies and protocols for data sharing, and the need to invest more resources for better sustainability. The proposed framework is expected to strengthen and facilitate multilateral coordination, enhanced laboratory capacity and network, improve active surveillance and response, risk communication, community engagement, maximize applied research, and build One Health technical work force. This would enable advancement and sustainment of One Health activities to prevent and control health threats shared between humans-animals-ecosystem interface