Description: Health and well-being of older adults has become a worldwide public health concern and has been attracting increasing attention from scholars across the globe. But little is known about the health of the Chinese elderly. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) --Pilot, a pilot survey in 2008 in two provinces of China, Gansu and Zhejiang, this dissertation examines the association between social capital at both the individual- and community- levels and three health outcomes among older adults in China. A series of multi-level models were estimated using SAS 9.2. Statistical results indicate that such individual-level social capital variables as perceived help and support in the future, help from others, and birthplace significantly impacted health among older Chinese adults. When examining the relationship between community-level social capital and health, this study confirms the significant association between community-level social capital and good health independent of individual-level predictors. This study also indicates that the impact of gender and rural-urban Hukou status interacts with the province of residence. The results were discussed in terms of cultural legacy in the Chinese cultural setting, the current social dynamics related to old age support, health-related government reforms, and various disparities across different ...

Description: Disasters are an ever increasing phenomena in our society, resulting in many people being adversely affected. the social vulnerability paradigm explores the social, economic and political factors which contribute to certain populations being disproportionately affected by disasters. However, the paradigm has not yet begun to investigate the cultural or religious ideologies which may affect a population's behavior in disaster. This study is an exploratory investigation into whether religious ideologies may impact a person's decision to prepare, or not, in the event of a disaster. Specifically, it seeks to investigate whether a person who holds a belief that natural disasters are under God's control will prepare for the hazard? the study undertaken five years after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans show that religious ideology is closely linked with one's capacity to prepare for the hazard which is closely tied in with social structure. It may appear that a person's 'fatalistic' attitude is tied to economic inability to prepare for a hazard. This does not mean that they will not prepare but that preparation may include prayer as their initial attempt to mitigate.

Description: Organized crime and terrorism taking place in the Turkish provinces get more attention in the public agenda than other type of crimes. Although property crimes receive less attention, they pose a serious threat to public order and the social welfare of Turkish society. Academic researchers have also paid little attention to the analysis of property crimes at the macro level in Turkey. For these reasons, this study focused on the analysis of property crimes for three years period, 2005, 2006 and 2007 in Turkey, using a conceptual model of social disorganization. Provincial level data from Turkish governmental agencies were used. The findings of multivariate analyses showed that social disorganization approach, as measured in this study, provided a partial explanation of property crime rates in Turkey. Family disruption and urbanization had significant effects on property crime rate, while remaining exogenous elements of social disorganization (i.e., SES, population heterogeneity and residential mobility) did not have any expected effects. In mediation analysis, using faith-based engagement and political participation rates as mediators between the structural factors of social disorganization and property crime rate provided marginal support for the theory. Political participation rate partially mediated the relationship between property crime rate and urbanization rate, while ...

Description: Using the 2009 National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), this paper uses logistic regressions to explore the effect of facility ownership on a facility’s show of altruism. Facility’s show of altruism is operationalized as a facility offering free treatment to all its clients, free treatment to some of its clients, or a facility offering a sliding fee scale to its client base in order to absorb some of the cost of treatment based on a potential client's income. Region, receipt of public funds, and religious affiliation are added as covariates in order to gauge whether the potential relationship between facility ownership and a facility’s show of altruism is genuine. Results indicate that private, for-profit ownership status of a facility is associated with a lower likelihood that a substance-abuse treatment facility would engage in altruistic behavior. However, receipt of public funds acts as a mediating variable, in that, its inclusion raises the likelihood that a private, for-profit facility would engage in shows of altruism. Furthermore, it appears that religious-affiliation increases the likelihood that a facility would display altruism by providing free treatment, to some of its clients, or to all, but less likely to display altruism by employing a ...

Description: The objective of this study is to investigate the variations in the type of trauma (post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and disorder of extreme stress not otherwise specified (DESNOS) resulting first from group membership, and second from variations in socioeconomic status, and last, from exposure to physical and psychological methods of interrogation due to imprisonment. I use a diverse sample of 202 child ex-detainees who served sentences in Israeli prisons and were 17 years of age or less at the time of arrest. Various regression techniques were utilized to determine the most parsimonious way to distinguish between the three groups in their trauma responses. The key finding in this study is that child refugee ex-detainees living in refugee camps, in general, did not report PTSD or DESNOS reactions compared to their counterparts. Continuing PTSD and DESNOS symptoms were more prevalent among the group of refugees living outside the camps. However, there is at least one finding that supported what I hypothesized: refugees living in camps were more likely to experience elevated levels of alterations in attention or consciousness (DESNOS2). For refugees in camps, the DESNOS absence tells us that the volatile childhood these children experienced was not associated with severe pathological ...