Female autonomy and child nutritional status: The extended-family residential unit in Amman, Jordan

This study explores the hypothesis that the mother's position within household power relations--her autonomy with respect to other household members--influences her ability to provide for the health of her children. We argue that in the context of the Arab Middle East, a woman's structural position within the household is a good indicator of her relative autonomy: if she if the daughter-in-law in a vertically extended residential unit, she has less autonomy than if she is head or co-head of household. Our analysis is based on data collected from 1341 households in 1985 as a part of the Follow-up Health and Population Assessment of four urban settlements in Amman, Jordan. They include measures of the child's weight and age, plus a variety of socioeconomic factors. We analyze the effect of the mother's autonomy on child nutritional status within a multiple regression framework that controls for rival hypotheses. In particular, we investigate whether it is the availability of other potential child-care substitutes, particularly the grandmother, that influences child nutrition rather than household structure. We also look at household income, mother's education, the area of residence, and the child's sex. Our results show a strong negative influence associated with having a mother whose autonomy in the household is low. This effect does not disappear when mother's age and education, and household size and composition are taken into consideration. Nor is it a proxy for the higher household incomes characteristics of extended-family residential units with their multiple earners.female autonomy preschool nutrition extended family Jordan

Women's work and infant care in the Philippines

Using data from a survey of 3000 Filipino infants and mothers, we analyze the implications of having more than one preschooler on several work outcomes, as well as the effect of availability of substitute care givers. The work outcomes of interest are those thought to be least compatible with infant care: work outside the home, wage work remunerated on a time basis, and long working hours. Our findings suggest that having multiple preschoolers only makes a difference for mothers whose household income is below the median: it increases their likelihood of working outside the home. Grandmothers and paid helpers consistently increase the likelihood of the various work outcomes and increase hours worked. Our findings suggest that urban residence, an indicator of work opportunity structure, increase the likelihood of wage-time work and is associated with longer working hours.child care women's work job compatibility Philippines

INTEGRATING RACE, PLACE AND MOTIVE IN SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY: LESSONS FROM A COMPARISON OF BLACK AND LATINO HOMICIDE TYPES IN TWO IMMIGRANT DESTINATION CITIES*

In this paper, we examine and compare the impact of social disorganization, including recent immigration, and other predictors on community counts of black and Latino motive‐specific homicides in Miami and San Diego. Homicides for 1985 to 1995 are disaggregated into escalation, intimate, robbery and drug‐related motives. Negative binomial regression models with corrections for spatial autocorrelation demonstrate that there are similarities and differences in effects of social disorganization and other predictors by motive‐specific outcomes, as well as for outcomes across ethnic groups within cities and within ethnic groups across cities. Recent immigration is negatively or not associated with most outcomes. Overall, the study shows the importance of disaggregating homicide data by race/ethnicity and motive and demonstrates that predictions based on existing theories are qualified on local conditions

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7