Search results

Using an ecological model of child participation and drawing on newsletter data from schools across the United States of America (USA), this chapter statistically explores five state factors linked with school protests against gun violence: (1) children’s neighbourhood opportunity; (2) race/ethnicity; (3) voter preference for either a Republican or a Democratic president; (4) child participation policies; and (5) gun laws/violence/ownership. The chapter explores factors linked to both student participation in protests and student nonparticipation in protests that take place at their schools. Three factors were found to be associated with participation and nonparticipation: children’s neighbourhood opportunity, voters’ preference, and participation policies. Findings suggest that Democratic-voting states, mediated by education opportunity, predict the frequency of student protests against gun violence. In Republican-voting states, where education opportunity does not mediate the frequency of school protests, students still organised and participated in protests but to a lesser extent. In addition, states with high overall children’s neighbourhood opportunity and voting student education board members are highly likely to have non-protesting students in schools with protests. The chapter presents five conclusions from these results for the positive and negative exercise of child participation rights and considers what further multilevel explorations can be done to further test the framework employed for this analysis.

Labor force transitions are empirically examined using Current Population Survey (CPS) data matched across months from 1996 to 2012 for Hispanics, African-Americans, and whites. Transition probabilities are contrasted prior to the Great Recession and afterward. Estimates indicate that minorities are more likely to be fired as business cycle conditions worsen. Estimates also show that minorities are usually more likely to be hired when business cycle conditions are weak. During the Great Recession, the odds of losing a job increased for minorities although cyclical sensitivity of the transition declined. Odds of becoming re-employed declined dramatically for blacks, by 2–4%, while the probability was unchanged for Hispanics.

Promoted for its inclusivity, agricultural value chain (AVC) financing leverages social capital and mechanisms such as off-take agreements and forward contracts to reduce borrowing and lending costs and risks for both farmers and lending institutions. AVC financing has been defined as the flow of financial products and services to and among the various actors within the AVC to address constraints of production and distribution and fulfill the needs of those involved in the chain by reducing risk and improving efficiency. This paper investigates how farmers' involvement in AVC affects their access to credit.

The authors collected primary data from 400 crop farmers in northern Ghana through a semi-structured questionnaire and analyzed the data, using the multinomial endogenous switching regression model.

Joint participation in AVC increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 64 and 78%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Similarly, participation in AVC horizontal linkage and AVC vertical linkage increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 40 and 47% and 46 and 74%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Irrigation farming, extension visits, knowledge of AVC in the community, access to a storage facility and trust in contract farming significantly influenced farmers' participation in AVC.

The authors’ work offers valuable insights into how different dimensions of value chain participation can impact smallholder farmers' access to credit. This work also underscores the importance of considering both formal and informal credit sources when analyzing the outcomes of value chain participation. The findings could enable formal financial providers to identify, liaise and/or resource informal financial players such as value chain actors to supply both formal and informal credit to farmers in AVCs.

Little is known about how experiential entrepreneurship education approaches contribute toward enhancing the engagement of students in the learning process. Using a purposive and convenience sample of individual student reflective journals, the purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate how the process of constructive misalignment enhances the level of student engagement through a team-based experiential entrepreneurship education assessment.

Data were gathered from a purposive and convenience sample of reflective journals, an individual “performance assessment” element of three Masters-level courses (courses 1, 2 and 3) that included an “active” group business ideas generation presentation and a report. These texts were analyzed through content analysis that critically evaluates and summarizes the content of data and their messages.

While expected learning outcomes included teamwork and communication, the higher levels of active learning and student engagement related to innovation and generating a business idea was much more modest. Rather, the study finds that significant learning opportunities were apparent when students experienced unexpected aspects of constructive misalignment, such as linguistic–cultural challenges, nonparticipation and freeriding.

Building on Biggs’ (2003) model of constructive alignment in course design and delivery/assessment, this paper elucidates various unexpected and surprising aspects. It suggests that constructive misalignment could provide major learning opportunities for students and is thus more likely in these team contexts where entrepreneurship students experience constructive misalignment. Educators should, therefore, continue to design experiential entrepreneurship courses and their performance assessments through team-based approaches that achieve higher levels of engagement as well as more active learning.

This work aims to identify the characteristics of the coproduction of the common good, or public services, from the models of public administration found in projects awarded by the United Nations, specifically in the 2014 United Nations Public Service Award (UNPSA) category of “encouraging participation in public policy decisions through innovative mechanisms.” This multicase documentary analysis uses a typology of coproduction adapted from Salm and Menegasso (2010), which integrates several typologies of public participation. The revised typology includes five models of coproduction – community-led coproduction, state-led coproduction, self-interested coproduction, symbolic coproduction, and manipulative coproduction. The typology is used in the analysis of two United Nations award-winning projects in 2014: a community participation project for the effective management of malaria at Tha Song Yang in Thailand and the Intercouncil Forum in Brazil. This first case displays a preponderance of the self-interested coproduction ideal type, due to its focus on efficiency and delivery effectiveness of the service. The second case displays a preponderance of the symbolic coproduction ideal type due to its use of consultation practices to give the impression that there is direct participation in the decision-making, without substantive effect on the outcomes. Based on this analysis, recommendations are made for revising the criteria used by the UNPSA to ensure that projects with similar participation to those in the state-led and community-led coproduction models are awarded in the future.

The last few decades have seen increasing attention to problems of open and disguised unemployment (and underemployment) in developing countries. Open unemployment appears to have increased in the sixties. Disguised unemployment of persons in the labour force (as defined by marginal product of labour below the wage) is a key element in the labour surplus interpretations of underdeveloped economies. In developed countries, hidden or disguised unemployment is thought of primarily in terms of nonparticipation related to the difficulty of obtaining a job; the usual proxy for such difficulty is the unemployment rate. As open unemployment has risen in the urban areas of many L.D.C's, while participation rates have at the same time been falling, it is natural to ask whether this particular form of hidden unemployment is becoming increasingly important in those countries. More generally, a country's participation rate is a valuable indicator of the degree of utilization of the labour force; the hints it may provide as to the nautre of the labour market and the demand for labour are one of several contributions it makes to the understanding of an economic system.

We survey banks to construct national estimates of total noncash payments by type, payments fraud and related information. The survey is designed to create aggregate total estimates of all payments in the United States using data from responses returned by a representative, random sample. In 2016, the number of questions in the survey doubled compared with the previous survey, raising serious concerns of smaller bank nonparticipation. To obtain sufficient response data for all questions from smaller banks, we administered a modified survey design which, in addition to randomly sampling banks, also randomly assigned one of several survey forms, subsets of the full survey. This case study illustrates that while several other factors influenced response outcomes, the approach helped ensure sufficient response for smaller banks. Using such an approach may be especially important in an optional-participation survey, when reducing costs to respondents may affect success, or when imputation of unplanned missing items is already needed for estimation. While a variety of factors affected the outcome, we find that the planned missing data approach improved response outcomes for smaller banks. The planned missing item design should be considered as a way of reducing survey burden or increasing unit-level and item-level responses for individual respondents without reducing the full set of survey items collected.

In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place after World War II, Arendt observes in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, ‘What the courts demand … is that the defendants should not have participated’ (pp. 33–34). Following Arendt, the author argues that thinking could have enabled possible perpetrators of great evil to meet this demand, for when a person stops to think, whatever they are doing is interrupted. What is more, the person who stops to think is themselves interrupted by thinking. In brief, becoming aware of the possibility that they exist as a person in a mode other than what Ngaire Naffine calls ‘the responsible subject’, thinking disrupts the legal person. A discussion of thinking as interrupting the legal person thus illuminates not only what may turn a person away from participation in the life of a criminal state, but also what that turn means for responsibility.

This paper reviews the current literature on theoretical and methodological issues in discrete choice experiments, which have been widely used in non-market value analysis, such as elicitation of residents' attitudes toward recreation or biodiversity conservation of forests.

We review the literature, and attribute the possible biases in choice experiments to theoretical and empirical aspects. Particularly, we introduce regret minimization as an alternative to random utility theory and sheds light on incentive compatibility, status quo, attributes non-attendance, cognitive load, experimental design, survey methods, estimation strategies and other issues.

The practitioners should pay attention to many issues when carrying out choice experiments in order to avoid possible biases. Many alternatives in theoretical foundations, experimental designs, estimation strategies and even explanations should be taken into account in practice in order to obtain robust results.

The paper summarizes the recent developments in methodological and empirical issues of choice experiments and points out the pitfalls and future directions both theoretically and empirically.

This study aims to ascertain the effect of socio‐demographic constraints on dimension of travel choice. This study also seeks to derive personal ecological explanations for variation in travel preference, travel intention and travel choice behavior of a wide range of destinations.

A large representative sample of 49,105 Australian respondents is utilized. Binary logistic regression is used to determine the impact of constraint variables.

Age, income and life stage have significant differential and interactive effects on travel behavior. Socio‐demographic variables act in different ways to constrain/free different types of travel behavior. However there are significant levels of travel by even the most constrained groups as well as significant amounts of non‐travel by the least constrained sectors of our society. These impacts are country specific.

The travel motivations of constraint groups need to be considered to order better understand travel behavior. Investigation of psychological and ecological facilitators and constraints to travel is needed.

This information is most useful for market segmentation and the development of constraint group destination marketing plans. Managers can use utilize such results to minimize the barriers to travel by particular groups.

This paper utilizes a large database to provide insights into the personal ecological constraints to travel.