Costs of Inaction on Maternal Mortality: Qualitative Evidence of the Impacts of Maternal Deaths on Living Children in Tanzania.

Little is known about the interconnectedness of maternal deaths and impacts on children, beyond infants, or the mechanisms through which this interconnectedness is established. A study was conducted in rural Tanzania to provide qualitative insight regarding how maternal mortality affects index as well as other living children and to identify shared structural and social factors that foster high levels of maternal mortality and child vulnerabilities. Adult family members of women who died due to maternal causes (N = 45) and key stakeholders (N = 35) participated in in-depth interviews. Twelve focus group discussions were also conducted (N = 83) among community leaders in three rural regions of Tanzania. Findings highlight the widespread impact of a woman's death on her children's health, education, and economic status, and, by inference, the roles that women play within their families in rural Tanzanian communities. The full costs of failing to address preventable maternal mortality include intergenerational impacts on the nutritional status, health, and education of children, as well as the economic capacity of families. When setting priorities in a resource-poor, high maternal mortality country, such as Tanzania, the far-reaching effects that reducing maternal deaths can have on families and communities, as well as women's own lives, should be considered

Surviving Sexual Violence in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Since 1996 a deadly conflict has been ongoing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Within this conflict, sexual violence has been inflicted upon women as a strategic weapon of war. Given the challenges of working in this setting, this sexual violence epidemic has not been well studied. The current work is a retrospective chart review of women presenting to Panzi Hospital in 2006 requesting post-sexual violence care. The goals were to describe the demographics of sexual violence survivors and to define the physical and psychosocial consequences of sexual violence in Eastern DRC. A total of 1021 patient medical records were reviewed. The mean age was 36 years with an age range of 3.5 years to 80 years. Approximately 90% of sexual violence survivors were either illiterate or had attended only primary school. There were significant delays between the incidents of sexual violence and presentation to Panzi hospital (mean = 16 months, median = 11 months). Physical consequences reported following sexual violence included pelvic pain (22% of women), lumbar pain (11%), abdominal pain (7%) and pregnancy (6%). Thirty six percent of women reported being concerned about their health and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) plus HIV/AIDS were the most commonly singled out health concerns. Six percent of women reported that their husbands had abandoned them after the rape and abandonment was more common after gang rape or if the sexual violence resulted in pregnancy. Treatment programs for survivors of sexual violence must specifically address the economic hardships faced by victims must meet their time-sensitive medical needs and must provide them with psychological care

Using assignment data to analyse a blended information literacy intervention: a quantitative approach

This research sought to determine whether a blended information literacy learning and teaching intervention could statistically significantly enhance undergraduates’ information discernment compared to standard face-to-face delivery. A mixture of face-to-face and online activities, including online social media learning, was used. Three interventions were designed to develop the information literacies of first-year undergraduates studying Sport and Exercise at Staffordshire University and focused on one aspect of information literacy: the ability to evaluate source material effectively. An analysis was devised where written evaluations of found information for an assessment were converted into numerical scores and then measured statistically. This helped to evaluate the efficacy of the interventions and provided data for further analysis. An insight into how the information literacy pedagogical intervention and the cognitive processes involved in enabling participants to interact critically with information is provided. The intervention which incorporated social media learning proved to be the most successful learning and teaching approach. The data indicated that undergraduate students’ information literacy can be developed. However, additional long-term data is required to establish whether this intervention would have a lasting impact

Contributions to a sociology of the internet: a case study of the use of the internet in the republic of Croatia in the 1990s

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Within the humanities and social sciences there are a variety of approaches for the study of the Internet. Through the use of a case study of the operation of the Internet in The Republic of Croatia during the 1990s, this thesis contributes to a position that regards sociological or 'culturalist' concerns as significant as 'formalist' concerns. The thesis is divided into three sections; the first section examines the socio-political construction of the Internet in contemporary academic and journalistic discourse. Attention is paid to the following: the broad theoretical understandings of the relationship of technology and society, the way in which the Internet is thought to be different from older forms of mass media, the assumed political potency of the Internet and how such conceptions are understood in terms of their integration into broader political perspectives. The second section deals with the use of the Internet in the Republic of Croatia during the 1990s. Attention is paid to the history of the Internet in Croatia and its political use is examined. The degree to which the Internet functioned as an effective counter to the dominant hegemonic discourse is found to be negligible when compared to old media that were operating in 'such a fashion. The explanation offered shows how the Internet and other forms of computer-mediated communication offers forms of communication that may not be best suited for the debates that were occurring in Croatia at that time. The third section explores how media forms are strongly linked to social forms. The Internet is conceptualised as a media form that is dependent upon a number of requirements for its full political potential to be made evident. It is concluded that attention should be placed upon both the interrelatedness of society, media technology and form of action studied, and the ways in which such concepts are socially constructed

Lee Leaning to Mr. Meredith (4 October 1962)

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mercorr_pro/1962/thumbnail.jp

The Defence of Ethnic Identity in Malaysia

The changing dynamics of interstate conflict in the post-Cold War environment led scholars to debate the relevance of established security theory. While traditionalists maintained that the state-centric theory should retain its primacy, others argued for a security agenda, not only broadened or widened to include other sectors, but one deepened or extended to include the individual and larger societal groupings as referent objects of security. In the 1990s, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute developed a reformulated and expanded security agenda which recognized five dimensions of security – political, military, economic, environmental and societal. Societal security has been defined as the defence of identity with identity accepted as the way in which communities think about themselves and the manner in which individuals identify themselves as members of a particular community. The Institute’s research on societal security was further expanded by Paul Roe in his 2005 study on ethnic conflict in the Balkan states. The determination of successive Malaysian governments to inculcate Islamic values throughout its infrastructure and society was borne from the inter-communal violence in May 1969, a civil reaction to the unexpected election results. The loss of parliamentary majority, for so long the domain of the Malays, confirmed a significant shift in political power and the increasingly influential role of the non-Malay voice in the political process. The inter-ethnic hostility resulted in a Federation-wide state of emergency and the suspension of parliamentary democracy for 20 months during which time the country was led by the National Operations Council under the leadership of Tun Abdul Razak. The National Operations Council and subsequent administrations progressively introduced policy to restore Malay political supremacy and redress societal imbalance. Despite the obvious success of Malaysia’s social transformation, research has indicated that policy introduced to lessen the economic and social inequality of the Malays has, in effect, led to a polarising of ethnicities. Political historians and analysts are mindful that increasing ethnic tension along with tacit ethnic segregation are salient reminders of the violence of the 1969 ethnic riots. With the theoretical framework on societal security provided by the CPRI, this thesis proposes to analyse the impact of the post-1969 political paradigm on Malaysian society with particular focus on inter-societal relations

The Dual Imperative in Refugee Research: Some Methodological and Ethical Considerations in Social Science Research on Forced Migration

Social scientists doing fieldwork in humanitarian situations often face a dual imperative: research should be both academically sound and policy relevant. We argue that much of the current research on forced migration is based on unsound methodology, and that the data and subsequent policy conclusions are often flawed or ethically suspect. The paper identifies some key methodological and ethical problems confronting social scientists studying forced migrants or their hosts. These problems include non-representativeness and bias, issues arising from working in unfamiliar contexts including translation and the use of local researchers, and ethical dilemmas including security and confidentiality issues and whether researchers are doing enough to ‘do no harm’. The second part of the paper reviews the authors’ own efforts to conduct research on urban refugees in Johannesburg. It concludes that while there is no single ‘best practice’ for refugee research, refugee studies would advance their academic and policy relevance by more seriously considering methodological and ethical concerns

Interview with Anita Leaning

Anita Leaning discusses bison farming.https://digital.kenyon.edu/elfs_interviews/1018/thumbnail.jp

Interview with Anita Leaning

Anita Leaning discusses bison farming.https://digital.kenyon.edu/elfs_interviews/1018/thumbnail.jp

Using intensive interaction to work with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities: Care staff perceptions

Intensive interaction (II) is an approach to teaching the pre-speech fundamentals of communication to children and adults who have severe to profound learning difficulties and/or autism and who are still at an early stage of communication development. This review of the current literature includes an examination of changes in legislation and therapeutic work for people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD), it explores emotional literacy and the development of mother-infant interaction as a basis for the use of II with people with PMLD, and it critics the current evidence base for the use of II. Emphasis is placed on staff factors in working with people with PMLD and especially the elements of staff dynamics which occur during the implementation of II. Finally, this review suggests further research which may help to widen the knowledge base about II