Strategies People Research Articles

Flood proneness and coping strategies: the experiences of two villages in Bangladesh

This paper explores peoples' indigenous survival strategies and assesses variations in people's ability to cope with floods in two flood-prone villages in Bangladesh. It reveals that people continuously battle against flood vulnerability in accordance with their level of exposure and abilities, with varied strategies employed at different geophysical locations. The paper reports that people in an area with low flooding and with better socioeconomic circumstances are more likely to cope with impacts compared to people in areas with high and sudden flooding. Similarly, households' ability to cope varies depending on people's socioeconomic conditions, such as education, income and occupation. Although floods in Bangladesh generate socioeconomic misery and cause damage to the environment, health and infrastructure, people's indigenous coping strategies have helped them to reduce significantly their vulnerability. Such flood-mitigating strategies should be well recognised and emphasised further via proper dissemination of information through an early-warning system and subsequently external assistance.

The Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior

Four studies examined how impulse-control beliefs--beliefs regarding one's ability to regulate visceral impulses, such as hunger, drug craving, and sexual arousal-influence the self-control process. The findings provide evidence for a restraint bias: a tendency for people to overestimate their capacity for impulse control. This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people's self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior. In Study 4, for example, the impulse-control beliefs of recovering smokers predicted their exposure to situations in which they would be tempted to smoke. Recovering smokers with more inflated impulse-control beliefs exposed themselves to more temptation, which led to higher rates of relapse 4 months later. The restraint bias offers unique insight into how erroneous beliefs about self-restraint promote impulsive behavior.

What’s inside the minds of securely and insecurely attached people? The secure-base script and its associations with attachment-style dimensions.

In 8 studies the authors explored the procedural knowledge (secure-base script; H. S. Waters & E. Waters, 2006) associated with secure attachment (i.e., low scores on attachment anxiety and avoidance). The studies assessed the accessibility, richness, and automaticity of the secure-base script and the extent to which it guided the processing of attachment-relevant information. Secure attachment (lower scores on anxiety and avoidance) was associated with greater secure-base "scriptedness" of attachment narratives, greater accessibility of the secure-base script in narratives and dreams about distressing experiences, deeper processing of script-relevant information, and faster and more confident script-relevant judgments. In addition, secure participants' tendency to process secure-base information more deeply was evident even 5 days after being exposed to it and was impervious to the depletion of cognitive resources, indicating automatic processing. The discussion focuses on implications of the findings for understanding the cognitive bases of secure people's affect-regulation strategies and behavior in social relationships.

HIV in South Africa: talking about the big thing ‐ by Squire, C.

<i>HIV in South Africa: talking about the big thing</i> ‐ by Squire, C.

Rural commons and livelihood strategies in dry regions of India

Rural common property resources (CPRs) in dry tropical areas of India form an important part of people's livelihood strategies, to adapt to harsh, stressful and high risk bio-physical conditions. However, despite their utility and contributions, CPRs have been neglected and declined in the recent decades, following economic, demographic and institutional changes. This has led to community's general disregard of rapidly degrading CPRs. Despite this general trend the CPRs are being productively rehabilitated by small user groups through focusing on specific CPR units in place of addressing the aggregates of CPRs. The paper reports this change by synthesizing the information collected from over 80 villages during 1982–85 and revisits during 1993–2003 to some of the earlier studied villages, in seven states falling in arid and semi-arid regions of India. The paper suggests the need for using the disaggregated approach to complement the usual aggregated approaches for better understanding of the dynamics of CP...

Managing Email: The UK Experience

While there are commercial and policy concerns about some of the negative aspects of email, there is a limited amount of research on the issues people face when actually managing their email. The concerns that have received some high public visibility relate to the damage that can be done by viruses and the issue of spam emails, although the latter is problematic in that what counts as spam is itself contested. This point will be explored in more depth later, but for the moment let us consider this to be unsolicited email from people outside of known social networks. However, more anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more issues involved in managing email that deserve some considerations; ones relating to emails from known social networks.After setting the scene by looking at findings from US research, this report aims to examine British people's experiences, evaluations and strategies when managing their email. It brings together the OII's own survey results for the UK and material from an exploratory, qualitative study conducted in Britain, details of which are given in the Appendix to this report. Hence, most of the quotations that follow are taken from a selection of in-depth interviews that examined email user experiences, while others come from staff in organisations asked to reflect on these issues.

Conceptualizing Young People's Strategies of Resistance to Offending as 'Active Resilience'

This paper draws on the Quest for Identity study, which comprised secondary analysis of interviews with young people who have never offended (‘resisters’) and young people who have offended, then ceased (‘desisters’), as well as peer led focus groups with resisters. However, the paper focuses solely on the semi-structured interviews with 62 young resisters and addresses the research question as to how they maintain their resistance to offending. Contrary to the passivity associated with non-offending, it is argued that in maintaining their resistance to offending young resisters engage in what I term ‘active resilience’. This is exemplified by a range of strategies employed by resisters, which includes: managing offending peers, taking temporal leaps, ‘othering’ offenders and telling atrocity stories. The concept of active resilience resonates with the key theoretical perspective associated with the social studies of childhood, which characterises young people as agentic social actors, and also with the resilience literature, with its recent perceptible shift towards acknowledging young people's contribution to their own resilience. The paper concludes with the implications of the findings for policy, practice and future research.

Vector encoding of color in visual system of human and animals

A new theoretical framework, the EPIC (Executive-Process/Interactive-Control) architecture, provides the basis for accurate detailed computational models of human multiple-task performance. Contrary to the traditional response-selection bottleneck hypothesis, EPIC's cognitive processor can select responses and do other procedural operations simultaneously for multiple concurrent tasks. Using this capacity together with flexible executive control of peripheral perceptual-motor components, EPIC computational models account well for various patterns of mean reaction times, systematic individual differences in multiple-task performance, and influences of special training on people's task-coordination strategies. These diverse phenomena, and EPIC's success at modeling them, raise strong doubts about the existence of a pervasive immutable response-selection bottleneck in the human information-processing system. The present research therefore helps further characterize the nature of discrete versus continuous information processing.

Household Food Strategies and the Reframing of Ways of Understanding Dietary Practices

While the use of households as a study focus is not a new concept in nutrition research, recent sociological literature has highlighted methodological advances in household strategy research that deserve attention. This article introduces and examines the conceptual relevance and analytical scope of household food strategies (HFS) research. People's household food strategies and dietary practices go together as do legs and walking, and yet to listen to public commentary on, for example, the current public health cause célèbre- the childhood obesity epidemic- we hear little, if any, balanced discussion of domestic food provisioning work, but much ideological posturing re parental responsibility, resisting the temptation of the abundance of fast food in our environment, and the importance of cooking from scratch. Using HFS as a unit of analysis highlights the process of integrating two critical sets of factors: household resources and preferences on the one hand, and the broader social and cultural shaping of dietary practices on the other. Such an approach has the advantage of avoiding an overemphasis on agency. Specifically, this article outlines a search for a coherent and integrated theoretical and methodological framework suited to studying households and dietary practices under circumstances of resource constraint and rapid social or political change. Developments in cultural sociology and anthropology, particularly, have much to offer a research agenda to support contemporary food and nutrition policy making in a post-modern world.

Older people maintaining well‐being: an International Appreciative Inquiry study

This paper reports on the progress of an international study investigating older people's strategies for maintaining well-being in the UK, Germany, South Africa and Australia. It uses an Appreciative Inquiry framework for investigation.

Fluid modern ethnic spaces: contesting the spatial ordering of the State in Bolivia

Relationships between the Bolivian State and the emerging indigenous and peasant social movements have become increasingly fluid since the end of the 1970s. Although this process could be traced back to the 1953 Agrarian Reform, it was not until the world crisis of the 1970s and the surge in globalisation that it led to radical changes in the relationship between State and indigenous peoples. Seen from the point of view of the State, our case study of a group of Quechua communities seems to illustrate a process of fragmentation leading to ungovernability and disorder. This understanding has to do with a lack of ‘legibility’. However here I replace that ‘image’ of disorder with another ‘feeling’ of cultural ordering, one that emerges from indigenous people's livelihoods, strategies and governance from below. I argue for understanding the apparent lack of governance as the expression of an autonomous reorganising process that leads to the regrouping and expansion of indigenous localities linked into new forms of regionalisation.

Starting with Lives

• Summary: A recent summary of research findings concluded that social policy and practice should use older people's lives as the starting point to plan and evaluate services (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2004). Based on the findings of a small-scale qualitative study and related research, this article explores the strategies and ways of coping used by older people to manage changes and difficulties that accompany ageing. • Findings: It is suggested that older people's strategies and ways of coping can be understood as efforts to sustain a sense of self in later life and a model of some key processes involved is presented. The empirical findings of the study are related to theoretical models of ageing and identity management. Attention is directed to the interaction between structural resources and constraints, dominant cultural norms and values, and older people's individual capacities for reflexivity and interpretation. • Applications : It is argued that this understanding has significant implications for the planning and delivery of social work and social care services that aim to promote the well-being of older people. In particular, practitioners need to understand the meaning and significance that difficulties and different approaches to managing them have for individuals. Interventions should be sensitive to, and seek to support, older people's cognitive ways of coping, as well as their practical strategies.

The Transformation of a Social Movement into Law?: The SCLC and NAACP's Campaigns for Civil Rights Reconsidered In Light of the Educational Activism of Septima Clark

Abstract This article reconsiders the efficacy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP's) strategies for achieving civil rights by comparing and contrasting them to the approach favored by the educator, Septima Poinsette Clark. Focusing on the relationship between literacy and the ability of individuals to achieve political and socio-economic power, Clark argued that knowledge could empower marginalized groups in ways that formal legal equality could not. Although her educational activism inlocal communities was important to the overall success of the civil rights movement, Clark is a relatively obscure historical figure; her value to the movement was underappreciated by more prominent male leaders due to gender inequality, she believed. Whatever its origins, this failure fully to appreciate the worth of activists of Clark's caliber was mistaken, this article concludes. Inattenton to the perspectives of those with...

Public participation in water management in northern Thai highlands

In the early 1990s, Thailand launched an ambitious program of decentralized governance, conferring greater responsibilities upon sub-district administrations and providing fiscal opportunities for local development planning. This process was reinforced by Thailand's new Constitution of 1997, which explicitly assures individuals, communities and local authorities the right to participate in the management of natural resources. Drawing on a study of water management in the Mae Sa watershed, northern Thailand, this article analyzes to what extent the constitutional right of participation has been put into practice. To this end, a stakeholder analysis was conducted in the watershed, with a focus on local people's interests and strategies in water management and the transformation of participatory policies through government agencies at the local level. While government officers stressed the importance of stakeholder inclusion and cooperation with the local people, there is a sharp contrast between the official rhetoric and the reality on the ground. The analysis reveals that government officers, particularly in the conservation-oriented agencies, are not disposed to devolve power to lower levels and that participation of local people in water management seems currently to be passive or, at best, consultative in nature. In order to deal with the increasingly severe water problems in northern Thailand, decision makers have to recognize the value of participation and promote a profound change in government officers' attitudes towards local people through training programs and incentives.

Towards a better understanding of past fertility regimes: the ideas and practice of controlling family size in Chinese history

Thanks to the progress that has been made in the study of population history, it has been gradually accepted that fertility in historical China was only moderate in comparison with the recorded high fertility. However, scholars still disagree on whether the Chinese could have intentionally controlled their family size. This article first summarizes recent findings about fertility patterns in historical China. Then the author provides further evidence of people limiting their family size in the past, before discussing the impact of traditional beliefs on people's fertility behaviour and summarizing the antinatalist ideas and suggestions put forwarded by Chinese officials and intellectuals over China's long history. This evidence is then used to comment on a number of suggestions that have been made about China's traditional reproductive behaviour and culture. The article challenges the views that people's reproductive strategies aimed in the past to maximize the number of surviving offspring and that the demand for children (or sons) was always high in historical China.

Coping with disaster: Rehabilitating coastal livelihoods and communities

This paper examines lessons from past approaches to natural disasters, as well as early lessons from the post-2004 Asian tsunami rehabilitation, to draw out general principles for rehabilitating livelihoods in poor coastal communities. We contend that avoiding the mistakes of the past requires: (1) a framework for understanding the diversity of coastal people's livelihood strategies and the sources of their vulnerability, (2) a process for designing interventions that build on this understanding in order to strengthen and revitalize coastal communities, including a means of assessing and selecting the most promising livelihood options, and (3) a focus on the longer-term challenge of building future resilience and sustainability in the communities by addressing the root causes of vulnerability.

Negotiating social identities: The influence of gender, age and ethnicity on young people's ‘street careers’ in Tanzania

This paper explores the diverse ways that children and young people negotiate their social identities and construct their life course trajectories on the street, based on ethnographic research with street children in Tanzania. Drawing on the concept of a ‘street career’, I show how differences of age, gender and ethnicity intersect with the time spent on the street, to influence young people's livelihood strategies, use of public space, access to services, and adherence to cultural rites of passage. Using the notion of ‘gender performativity’, I analyse how young people actively reconfigure gender norms and the concept of ‘the family’ on the street.

Rethinking the European countryside—can we learn from the South?

A new paradigm of multi-dimensional rural development has emerged which advocates a broader conception of the rurality where the rural is no longer the monopoly of the farmer. This new, broader paradigm needs to be reflected in the methodology of social scientific research, both generic and applied. In this paper we are primarily concerned with transfer of research methodologies utilised in development studies in the South to explore their usefulness for rethinking the European countryside. Such a transfer of methodology may be helpful, because integrated rural development can build on a long legacy in the South, while it has only recently been advocated in the EU context. The paper reflects upon the application of two such analytical concepts originating from development studies, which we have applied for research on the rural geographies in the European countryside, namely Sen's livelihood capabilities approach and Chambers’ concept of participatory rural appraisal (PRA). Having the sustainable livelihoods approach as overall framework, both methodologies are qualitative in nature and address people's survival strategies and livelihood practices with a focus on micro-level analysis at individual, household (Sen) and community level (PRA), while reflecting their embeddedness in wider social, political and economic structures. Our comparative studies suggest that the prospects for bottom-up development, as orchestrated by PRA or similar approaches, is constrained by structural factors, which define the boundaries for local development. The capabilities approach is useful to detect the capabilities to act and be within which bottom-up approaches may take their—though limited—role in rural development.

Explaining about … older people's strategies

Explaining about … older people's strategies

Informal Networks in Youth Transitions in West Germany: Biographical Resource or Reproduction of Social Inequality?

This article deals with informal networks and their role in young people's strategies of coping with the uncertainties of transitions to work. The underlying hypothesis is that informal networks have a high potential in this regard that, however, is strongly differentiated according to class and education. Drawing on West German data from the framework of a European research project, the transitions of young people with ‘choice biographies’ are compared with those of young people with low resources and at risk of disengaging with the transition system. The question extends to asking whether or not policy interventions for so-called ‘disadvantaged youth’ can compensate for these disadvantages by building and reinforcing network structures that bridge the gap between peer relationships and the more formal world of education, training and the labour market.