Official Measure Research Articles

Constructing sexual risk: ‘Chikan’, collapsing male authority and the emergence of women-only train carriages in Japan

Women-only train carriages have been introduced in Japan as a response to widespread groping (chikan) by men. In August 2007, 155 young women completed a survey at a variety of locations in central Tokyo, mainly at the popular meeting places, Shinjuku and Shibuya. The survey involved face-to-face interviews conducted mainly by young female interviewers. The numbers involved are insufficient for rigorous statistical analysis and in this pilot study we were principally interested in further refining ideas and hypotheses for further investigation by considering results in the context of significant contemporary social trends. This article starts by considering a particular cultural context in which the issue of groping resulted in the introduction of women-only train carriages and this official antigroping measure which has been widely accepted. The article then examines women's responses to the availability of women-only train carriages, using surveys carried out in Tokyo. It concludes by considering the specific and anomalous targeting of primarily middle aged ‘salarymen’, a focus understood in the context of the collapse of the ideological power of the patriarchal corporate figure associated with the end of the Japanese economic miracle. Women's use and support for women-only train carriages is not solely dominated by anxiety over the risk of chikan. Our survey indicated that it was a symbolic rejection of a particular type of masculinity, rather than the physical separation from a risk of being groped.

Explaining health inequality: Evidence from the UK

0277-9536/$ e see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.015 With its uniquely long historical series of officially collected data on occupational mortality, researchers in the UK have been well placed to investigate the causes of health inequality. Since 1921, the decennial Census of England and Wales has contained an “Occupational Mortality Supplement” that tabulates mortality according to groups of occupations, which came to be known as “social classes”. After 1931 the class groups were sufficiently comparable to allow trends to be discerned. The Black Report of 1980 (DHSS, 1980; Townsend, Davidson, & Whitehead, 1988), which put health inequality onto the agenda of research and policy for the next 30 years, was based on these official statistics. The official measure of social class used in the Report was not ideal as a measure of social inequality, as it was never clear exactly what it operationalized. In some census volumes it was described as a measure of ‘occupational skill’ and in others as ‘general standing in the community’. No attempts were ever made to validate either of these definitions. This may be one of the reasons why the official statistics, so influential in their description of health inequality, were less helpful when it came to understanding why it occurs. The Decennial Supplements on OccupationalMortality show the relentless increase of inequality in mortality, which if anything accelerated after the introduction of the UK’s National Health Service in 1946 and the implementation of the raft of policies known as the “Welfare State”. During this period, ‘full employment’ was an objective of government policy (for men only), as were the abolition of the other Five Great Evils of Squalor, Disease, Ignorance and Want. In pursuit of these aims, post war governments of both political colours built new housing and improved schooling as well as maintaining free health care and benefits for the unemployed.

Do Europe's Minimum Income Schemes Provide Adequate Shelter Against the Economic Crisis and How, If at All, Have Governments Responded?

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changes that have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens with adequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on data for 24 European Union countries, this paper asks whether EU governments implemented additional measures during the first phase of the crisis to improve safety nets. Our data, drawn from a large network of national experts, show that many countries introduced supportive measures, in particular in the form of additional increases in gross minimum income benefits. More generous child benefits have also helped to increase net disposable incomes of families on minimum income. Behavioral requirements imposed on minimum income recipients have been neither tightened nor relaxed. In a limited number of countries, activation efforts aimed at minimum income recipients have been intensified. Despite some improvements, social safety nets in Europe remain far below widely accepted poverty thresholds, including the EU's own official measure.

Measuring Poverty: The Official U.S. Measure and Material Hardship

AbstractMaterial hardship is a concept that is crucial to our understanding of inequality. I define it as: an inadequate consumption of goods or services that the public deems minimally necessary for decent human functioning. While quantitative poverty research purports to address this concept, it in fact does so only in part. Most discussions of poverty using the official poverty line say nothing about the material situation of the poor. This study rectifies this failing by making material hardship the centerpiece of the analysis. Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) are used to compare hardship figures with official poverty statistics. Comparisons of the income poor with the hardship poor find that hardship is more prevalent than official poverty figures suggest. The groups who are the worst off according to income‐poverty figures also do pretty poorly under hardship measures. But we also find that groups we generally think of as economically advantaged do suffer hardship at rates more similar to the traditionally disadvantaged groups. Non‐senior adults, married‐couple households, and workers all experience more hardship than official income rates lead us to believe. One important deviation involves seniors, who look much better off under hardship measures. Thus, the poor population that emerges under the hardship measures (younger, married, and working) looks closer to the U.S. mainstream than the official measure has led us to believe.

The influence of socioeconomic status on the incidence, outcome and mortality of fractures of the hip

This is the first study to use the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2007, the Government's official measure of multiple deprivation, to analyse the effect of socioeconomic status on the incidence of fractures of the hip and their outcome and mortality. Our sample consisted of all patients admitted to hospital with a fracture of the hip (n = 7511) in Nottingham between 1999 and 2009. The incidence was 1.3 times higher (p = 0.038) in the most deprived populations than in the least deprived; the most deprived suffered a fracture, on average, 1.1 years earlier (82.0 years versus 83.1 years, p < 0.001). The mortality rate proved to be significantly higher in the most deprived population (log-rank test, p = 0.033), who also had a higher number of comorbidities (p = 0.001). This study has shown an increase in the incidence of fracture of the hip in the most deprived population, but no association between socioeconomic status and mortality at 30 days. Preventative programmes aimed at reducing the risk of hip fracture should be targeted towards the more deprived if they are to make a substantial impact.

Improving the Measurement of Poverty.

This study estimates 2007 national poverty rates using an approach largely conceptualized by a 1995 National Academy of Sciences panel and similar to the supplemental poverty measure that will soon be produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study uses poverty thresholds based on expenditures for shelter, food, clothing, and utilities, as well as a measure of family income that includes earnings, cash transfers, near-cash benefits, tax credits, and tax payments. The measure also accounts for child care, work, and out-of-pocket medical expenses; variation in regional cost of living; and mortgage-free homeownership. Under this method, the rate of poverty is estimated to be higher than the rate calculated in the traditional manner, rising from 12.4 percent in the official measure to 16 percent in the new measure; the rate of child poverty is more than 3 percentage points higher, and elderly poverty is nearly 7 points higher.

A New Measure of Alcohol Affordability for the UK

To present revisions to the official UK measure of alcohol affordability published by the National Health Service (NHS) Information Centre. The revisions address the following problems in the official measure:(a) The income measure used in the calculation is a measure of the income for the whole population of the UK, not income per capita. (b) The income measure includes 'imaginary' items, namely imputed rentals and attributed income from insurance policies. (c) The income measure is inconsistent in its treatment of housing costs. (d) The adjustment for inflation makes the measure unnecessarily complex and can have counter-intuitive effects. The revised measure has the same essential structure as the NHS measure, being the ratio of income to price of alcohol. Adjustments were applied to official income figures, and adjustments for inflation were removed. The revised measure shows that affordability has levelled off since 2003, in contrast to the NHS measure, which shows it continuing to rise until 2008. The revised measure corrects a basic error of failing to divide total income for the UK by number of people in the population. This alters the measure but is more correct. Further improvements result in a measure that correlates more closely with UK alcohol consumption over the last decade.

Crawlers in our life

The life blood of science is information. Information we create and build upon, apply, store, recall, teach and use to build the most objective development of our scientific field of interest. The Internet naturally has come to be an important part of this mission. This Utopian view is not without complications as we come to see with development of the Internet in orthodontics. Recently I was obliged to become acquainted with Web crawlers. Web Crawlers are automated computer programs that systematically browse the Web. They survey Web sites and index the information by links tags, key words, etc. Probably every time you use a search engine, you are using the results of somebody’s Web crawler. Many referrals to our site at Angle.org come from search engines and not directly by typing in our URL, http://angle.org. You may think so what. Well these rascals recently crawled into my life and I was surprised. It seems that many firms want to have their own search engines and one way to do this is to use a Web crawler to systematically regularly survey the sites of interest on the Web and copy what they want onto their server. Why do organizations and people do this? There are very legitimate uses of Web crawlers, but there are also less constructive applications. When their server becomes the supplier of the information to a search, they can control what is displayed including what is omitted and the priority of one item over another. This raises the question, how is the priority of items displayed determined? There is not only the potential for money to be involved here, think of the censorship possibilities and how political and other bodies could control what people see who use their servers. With this background, how does this affect orthodontic literature? If you type impacted canine into your search engine, and it goes to their server, the server determines which articles from which web sites you see and in what order they are presented to you. I always viewed this as a wonderful tool and work saver. Now I am less comfortable that I am seeing everything available without bias. The precipitating factor here for me was when I wanted to determine the number of hits on our web site. Originally, we reported the hits as reported by Counter, the agreed official measure. These clearly were real hits, but my web site operator explained to me that in recent years the development of web crawlers has grown and now many of these hits came from Web crawlers systematically and regularly searching our site. For the last 10 years, our long standing policy has been to make science freely available to everyone on the Internet. However, our Open Access gave free reign not only to you, but to the crawlers also. Last October we adopted a new platform with protection against Web crawlers. Now when I count our hits it is obvious that more recently activities such as crawlers were producing at least half of the hits on our web site. How much are these hits ultimately leading to proper use of the information is impossible to determine. It’s a sort of cold war with the people who would take our information for other purposes than we intended. They set up new approaches and these are countered by our people. Clearly the dichotomy between Open Access for the good of the patient and those who wants to control or generate revenue will continue to be out of sync. This whole world is experiencing the same thing because most journals and sites want advertising revenues to support the operation of their site. Advertisers want to know what they are buying and this is determined by the traffic at your site. This has been measured by hits with research that shows some percentage of the total traffic at your site end up as users who generate revenue for the advertiser. The problem with counting hits accurately is, therefore, critical and this makes the flow of advertising dollars from the printed pages to the Internet lower and slower. We are small potatoes in this picture. Financing the sites on the Web is at the core of the paradigm shift from printed material to the digital world.

Beat the bite of inflation

The latest inflation figures are causing headaches in the Bank of England, as well as for savers. Recent figures put the consumer price index, the official measure of inflation, at 3.7% – the highest in 17 months. Earlier this year, the retail price index, which is commonly used by employers, banks and building societies, jumped from 4.4% to 5.3% – its biggest monthly leap since 1991.

MONEY STILL MATTERS - THE IMPLICATIONS OF M4X FOR QUANTITATIVE EASING

It has been argued that quantitative easing (QE) is designed to prevent a collapse of broad money. However, the official M4 broad-money measure was growing rapidly when QE was introduced. This figure was, though, exaggerated by artificial transactions within banking groups and some have suggested that broad money supply measures should exclude these transactions (M4X). This article tests whether the authorities are right to focus on M4X. It is concluded that M4X is more closely related to the wider economy than M4 but that the official M4X statistics need substantial improvement. The conclusions regarding QE generally are more nuanced and it is noted that the UK's fiscal profligacy is exacerbating the downturn in the private sector, despite politicians' claims to the contrary.

Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review

Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences of poverty featured new techniques for identifying underlying processes and mechanisms. Researchers also explored “neighborhood effects” and focused on poverty deconcentration efforts. Finally, scholars produced a voluminous literature on the efforts to reform welfare and their subsequent effects.

The Effect of Question Wording on Reported Expectations and Perceptions of Inflation

Public expectations and perceptions of inflation may affect economic decisions, and have subsequent effects on actual inflation. The Michigan Survey of Consumers uses questions about “prices in general” to measure expected and perceived inflation. Median responses track official measure of inflation, showing some tendency toward overestimation and considerable disagreement between respondents. Possibly, responses reflect how much respondents thought of salient personal experiences with specific prices when being asked about “prices in general.” Here, we randomly assigned respondents to questions about “prices in general,” as well as “the rate of inflation” and “price you pay.” Reported expectations and perceptions were higher and more dispersed for “prices in general” than for “the rate of inflation,” with “prices you pay” and “prices in general” showing similar responses patterns. Compared to questions about “the rate of inflation,” questions about “prices in general” and “prices you pay” focused respondents relatively more on personal price experiences - and elicited expectations that were more strongly correlate to the expected price increases for food and transportation, which were relatively large and likely salient, but not to the expected price increases for housing, which were relatively small and likely less salient. Our results have implications for survey measures of inflation expectations.

Using the American community survey to create a National Academy of Sciences–style poverty measure: Work by the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity

AbstractThe need to improve the U.S. poverty measure has received renewed attention as state and local governments have initiated antipoverty efforts and wish to judge their effect. This paper describes the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity's implementation of the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations for measuring poverty. The center's decision to use the Census Bureau's American Community Survey as its principal data source created the project's central challenge; many of the items needed to construct the academy's measure of resources are not included in the survey and needed to be estimated through a variety of methods. The resultant measure creates a higher poverty rate and a demographic profile of the poor that is quite different from that generated by the official measure. The paper concludes with observations about these differences and how this new picture of poverty has begun to influence policymaking in New York City. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Poverty measurement in the U.S., Europe, and developing countries

In December of 2009, as this issue goes to press, many within the American community of analysts, policymakers, and program managers are looking expectantly at the possibility of change in the basic measure used to gauge poverty in the United States. A broad consensus has emerged that the current official measure of poverty in the United States is deeply flawed, in the income threshold used to gauge need as well as in the measurement of available resources (Blank, 2008). While there will be opposition to this change, primarily due to concerns centering around the relationship of the poverty measure to funding of block grants and benefit eligibility within programs, there does seem to be good reason to believe that the time has arrived for a new poverty measure for the United States. Income-based poverty measures compare resources available to people to a threshold, below which they are considered poor.1 Both the poverty threshold and the measurement of available resources currently in use in the United States can be readily improved. The current poverty threshold of three times the cost of a minimally adequate diet was developed in 1963 using data from 1955 and has primarily been adjusted since then only for inflation. The proportionate share of food in the average American’s budget has shrunk dramatically since 1963 as incomes have risen and spending patterns have changed. This alone would imply multiplying the cost of a minimally adequate diet by eight. Updating the poverty threshold to more accurately reflect the composition of a more contemporary set of expenditures is overdue. Similarly, measuring resources available to families to meet needs by including cash benefits while excluding the value of in-kind transfers such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and ignoring effects of the tax system through programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides a picture of need neither before the generosity of government nor afterwards. There is no technical or informational hurdle that justifies not measuring the components of private income, the additions to available resources that flow from public benefits, and the influence of the tax system on family resources. Poverty Measurement in the U.S., Europe, and Developing Countries Kenneth A. Couch Maureen A. Pirog

American Measurement: Refining Cups and Spoons for Scientific Cooking in the Late 19th–Early 20th Century

Scientific cooking, which offered reliable results from standardized recipes, required exact measuring. The cup measure was a portion of an old official ale measure, but the teaspoon and tablespoon evolved from common cooking and eating utensils. Several versions of equivalents developed and were in use by the late 19th century. In 1915 the U.S. Bureau of Standards officially codified the amounts, but, as late as 1948, measuring utensils available for purchase were not necessarily accurate.

The face reveals athletic flair: Better National Football League quarterbacks are better looking

We investigated whether individual differences in athleticism, and in turn heritable fitness, may be signaled by differences in facial attractiveness within a highly select group of athletes: National Football League (NFL) quarterbacks (QBs). Athleticism was operationalized as the passer rating, the NFL’s official measure of performance among QBs. Results from a preliminary study showed a positive correlation between 30 NFL QBs’ passer ratings and their facial attractiveness as rated by 30 women. In a further study, a different group of 30 women rated a different cohort of 58 NFL QBs. The results showed that the QBs’ mean attractiveness ratings were positively correlated with their passer ratings, which was found to be independent of players’ age, ethnicity, height, weight, or facial expression. These findings build upon previous research and provide further support for the hypothesis that individual differences in athleticism, a heritable trait desirable in mate selection, may be signaled reliably through facial attractiveness.

What did the Soviet Rulers Maximise?

The predominant view in the literature holds that the main objective of the Soviet rulers was growth of the official measure of aggregate output, irrespective of its use structure, that is, growth for its own sake. We show that the pursuit of this objective would have been irrational, and argue instead that the main objective was the pursuit of military might. This formulation returns the Soviet rulers to the company of rational economic actors, helps explain the main characteristics of the Soviet economic development better than the majority view, and provides a different perspective on the system's final decades.

Monetary models of exchange rates and sweep programs

Numerous studies find that monetary models of exchange rates cannot beat a random walk model. Such a finding, however, is not surprising given that such models are built upon money demand functions and traditional money demand functions appear to have broken down in many developed countries. In this article, we investigate whether using a more stable underlying money demand function results in improvements in forecasts of monetary models of exchange rates. More specifically, we use a sweep-adjusted measure of US monetary aggregate M1 which has been shown to have a more stable money demand function than the official M1 measure. The results suggest that the monetary models of exchange rates contain information about future movements of exchange rates, but the success of such models depends on the stability of money demand functions and the specifications of the models.

The Measurement of Child Poverty in the United States

How poverty is defined and measured has significant implications for the identification of children in need. This article evaluates the current measure of child poverty in the United States in order to gauge its appropriateness for assessing child well-being. The article begins with a brief discussion of the meaning of poverty and evaluates the history, structure, and strengths of the official measure of child poverty. In addition, critical shortcomings that potentially mask the known deprivation of poverty are revealed and Amartya Sen's capability approach is introduced as a tool for capturing this deprivation. The overall premise of this article, therefore, is that the discourse on poverty might benefit by reconceptualizing approaches to measuring and defining poverty.

Geographic Differences in Housing Prices and the Well-Being of Children and Parents

ABSTRACT:This article contributes to the ongoing discussion about whether the official poverty measure should be adjusted for geographic differences in the cost of living (COL). Part of the support for spatial COL adjustments is the concern that the reduced purchasing power of the poor in higher-priced areas could jeopardize the health and well-being of children and parents. The results of this analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement do not support this view. We find that children growing up in higher-priced housing markets appear to fare no worse than those in lower-priced markets.