The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

The quality of life of renal dialysis patients: trying to find the missing measurement

The physiological status of the individual renal patient is monitored regularly to ensure adequate dialysis is maintained, however, the psychosocial status of the renal patient is not subject to the same amount of attention. This study aimed to determine the Quality of Life and psychosocial needs of a sample of renal dialysis patients n = 170, and to consider methods of routine clinical assessment and evaluation. Difficulties with psychosocial adjustment and physical symptoms were demonstrated. These findings provide evidence for the need to routinely assess psychosocial status in this patient population. There are some scales which could be incorporated into standard settings and used as outcome measures to assess the effectiveness of interventions, and for planning and resource allocation purposes

Greenpeace Greenspeak: A Transcultural Discourse Analysis

This cross-cultural discourse analysis examines the construction of environmental issues on Greenpeace web pages in China, Japan and Germany. To uncover the semantic representation of environmental activism on these sites, the authors sought to identify discursive homogeneity and divergence and to bring to light embedded cultural assumptions. The sites were examined between January and July 2003 to the fifth level. Multiple readings considered figures of style, lexical choices and lexical style, visual aspects, and topic and themes. The conclusion discusses the adeptness of localising and regionalising Greenpeace discourses but also points to a visible fragmentisation of environmental discourses as well as inherent inabilities to transcend highly localised understandings of the role of humans in nature. Most significantly, the study illustrates the discursive weight of implicit social and natural hierarchies