The novels of Maurice Gee (1962-1994) : Gee's New Zealand : in the throes of entropy : a thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

This inquiry explores the dualistic aspects of Maurice Gee's novels, particularly with reference to Prowlers and Going West. I will be highlighting the juxtaposition of opposing characters (the observers and the doers), and the opposition of mind and body - of idealism and empiricism - as developed in these two novels. I will also be investigating how Gee's novels explore the dynamics of human relationships, accounting for the recurrent themes of language, fear, death, love and madness, as they appear in his oeuvre. Chapter three explores how Gee's fiction deals with the difficulties of writing an objective account of someone's life. All these areas of investigation reveal an overall view that Gee's New Zealand society has gradually shifted towards a state of chaos and uncertainty within the last one hundred years. In chapter one I will explore the images and events, as depicted in Gee's autobiographical essay "Beginnings," that have shaped his creative imagination. I will show how they have been transformed, or re-worked, in his fiction, as well as how and why they stress the importance of imagination. I will be arguing how, through his characters, Gee continues to exorcise the traumas, conflicts and confusions of his own past, as well as demonstrating the didactic functions given to this process by his subjecting his main characters to similar experiences. I will show how Gee investigates the negative effects of a puritan heritage, and ultimately, how it can be damaging to the growing and developing adolescent psyche, causing confusion, and distorting one's perception of the real, particularly in the way it is expressed in the novel In My Father's Den. I will show how Gee's abhorrence of 'bureaucratic and institutional repression' is expressed in The Big Season, and the 'O' trilogy - at the level of community, - and in the two novels, The Special Flower and Games of Choice - at the level of family. More specifically, I will show how the narratives emphasize the need for the individual to break away from these constricting forces in order to find his own shape, and achieve a firm sense of personal identity. I will inquire into the ways in which Gee explores the idea of 'the mixed nature of the human condition' in the 'O' trilogy, and will commence a discussion of how this theme is developed in Prowlers and Going West, which will be expanded in the remaining two chapters. I will discuss how the sense of feeling 'special,' and of being in possession of 'special knowledge', can create the illusion of feeling privileged, but also how this can be seen as a burden, and how it can generate a sense of 'isolation,' thereby alienating the individual from the outside world. I will show how Gee's vision of the world can be interpreted as dualistic

Multilevel models for cross-national comparisons: the association between individual and national-level demographic characteristics in fertility and partnerships

Multilevel models are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis- and particularly cross-national comparative analysis- is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocated countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Individual data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons:the association between individual & national-level characteristics in fertility & partnership

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility

Contraceptive confidence and timing of first birth in Moldova: an event history analysis of retrospective data

Objectives: To test the contraceptive confidence hypothesis in a modern context. The hypothesis is that women using effective or modern contraceptive methods have increased contraceptive confidence and hence a shorter interval between marriage and first birth than users of ineffective or traditional methods. We extend the hypothesis to incorporate the role of abortion, arguing that it acts as a substitute for contraception in the study context.Setting: Moldova, a country in South-East Europe. Moldova exhibits high use of traditional contraceptive methods and abortion compared with other European countries.Participants: Data are from a secondary analysis of the 2005 Moldovan Demographic and Health Survey, a nationally representative sample survey. 5377 unmarried women were selected.Primary and secondary outcome measures: The outcome measure was the interval between marriage and first birth. This was modelled using a piecewise-constant hazard regression, with abortion and contraceptive method types as primary variables along with relevant sociodemographic controls.Results: Women with high contraceptive confidence (modern method users) have a higher cumulative hazard of first birth 36?months following marriage (0.88 (0.87 to 0.89)) compared with women with low contraceptive confidence (traditional method users, cumulative hazard: 0.85 (0.84 to 0.85)). This is consistent with the contraceptive confidence hypothesis. There is a higher cumulative hazard of first birth among women with low (0.80 (0.79 to 0.80)) and moderate abortion propensities (0.76 (0.75 to 0.77)) than women with no abortion propensity (0.73 (0.72 to 0.74)) 24?months after marriage.Conclusions: Effective contraceptive use tends to increase contraceptive confidence and is associated with a shorter interval between marriage and first birth. Increased use of abortion also tends to increase contraceptive confidence and shorten birth duration, although this effect is non-linear—women with a very high use of abortion tend to have lengthy intervals between marriage and first birth

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons:the association between individual & national-level characteristics in fertility & partnership

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility

Evaluation of the partnership histories in the Centre for Population Change GHS time series dataset

A combined time series of the General Household Survey datasets from 1979 to 2007 has been compiled by the Centre for Population Change (CPC). This dataset includes, along with socio-economic variables, the demographic histories collected in the Family Information section of the GHS questionnaire over the GHS rounds covered, in harmonised form. The present paper evaluates both the internal consistency of the marriage and cohabitation histories and their correspondence with external sources.The data are weighted using new weights generated by CPC for the analysis of these data. Overall, cumulative proportions married by each age for the cohorts of 1951-55 to 1966-70 correspond well with ONS figures for England and Wales, though there are some systematic disparities in selected years. As found in an earlier study, retrospective estimates from the 2000-07 histories of the proportions cohabiting at a point in time are somewhat above the cross-sectional estimates at survey 5 and 10years before

On the Absence of a Normal Nonabelian Sylow Subgroup

Let $G$ be a finite solvable group. We show that $G$ does not have a normal nonabelian Sylow $p$-subgroup when its prime character degree graph $\Delta(G)$ satisfies a technical hypothesis.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Longitudinal methods for life course research : a comparison of sequence analysis, latent class growth models, and multi-state event history models for studying partnership transitions

Júlia Mikolai was a PhD student at the Department of Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton and was funded by a +3 Scholarship provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J500161/1) while completing most of this work.This paper qualitatively compares and contrasts three methods that are useful for life course researchers; the more widely used sequence analysis, and the promising but less often applied latent class growth models, and multi-state event history models. The strengths and weaknesses of each method are highlighted by applying them to the same empirical problem. Using data from the Norwegian Generations and Gender Survey, changes in the partnership status of women born between 1955 and 1964 are modelled, with education as the primary covariate of interest. We show that latent class growth models and multi-state event history models are a useful addition to life course researchers’ methodological toolkit and that these methods can address certain research questions better than the more commonly applied sequence analysis or simple event history analysis.PostprintPeer reviewe

Trends in Demographic and Health Survey data quality:an analysis of age heaping over time in 34 countries in Sub Saharan Africa between 1987 and 2015

Abstract Objective This paper evaluates one aspect of data quality within DHS surveys, the accuracy of age reporting as measured by age heaping. Other literature has explored this phenomenon, and this analysis build on previous work, expanding the analysis of the extent of age heaping across multiple countries, and across time. Results This paper makes a comparison of the magnitude of Whipple’s index of age heaping across all Demographic and Health Surveys from 1986 to 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa. A random slope multilevel model is used to evaluate the trend in the proportion of respondents within each survey rounding their age to the nearest age with terminal digit 0 or 5. The trend in the proportion of misreported ages has remained flat, in the region of 5% of respondents misreporting their age. We find that Nigeria and Ghana have demonstrated considerable improvements in age reporting quality, but that a number of countries have considerable increases in the proportion of age misreported, most notably Mali and Ethiopia with demonstrate increases in excess of 10% points