1,720,963 research outputs found

    Water carrying in hills of Nepal-associations with women's musculoskeletal disorders, uterine prolapse, and spontaneous abortions.

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    More than a third of women in Nepal have to carry water from source to home to satisfy their families' daily needs. A cross-sectional study was carried out in a hilly area in Nepal to assess water-carrying practices and their association with women's health. Quantitative interviews were conducted with 1001 women of reproductive age and were complemented with health surveys carried out by health professionals and structured observations of water carrying. Multivariate mixed logistic regression models were used to assess the associations between water-carrying-related risk factors and health issues for women. Around 46% of women faced considerably increased to excessive physical stress due to water carrying during the dry season. Women suffered from a disproportionately high prevalence of back pain (61%), with about 18% of this pain being horrible to excruciating; pain in the knees (34%); uterine prolapse (11.3%); and at least one spontaneous abortion (9%). The risk category of water carrying was significantly associated with uterine prolapse (OR = 1.44, 95%CI = 1.12-1.85, p = 0.031) and pain in the hips (OR = 1.69, 95%CI = 1.27-2.26, p<0.001). Receiving help with water carrying during pregnancy and during the first three months after delivery was associated with reduced odds ratios for uterine prolapse (OR = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.01-0.87, p = 0.037), and strong back pain (OR = 0.32, 95% CI = 0.12-0.87, p = 0.026). Improvements to water supply infrastructure and the promotion of social support for carrying water during pregnancy and after delivery are recommended to reduce water-carrying-related health risks

    Establishing Solar Water Disinfection as a Water Treatment Method at Household Level

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    1.1 billion People worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water and therefore are exposed to a high risk for diarrhoeal diseases. As a consequence, about 6,000 children die each day of dehydration due to diarrhoea. Adequate water treatment methods and safe storage of drinking water, combined with hygiene promotion, are required to prevent the population without access to safe drinking water from illness and death. Solar water disinfection (SODIS) is a new water treatment to be applied at household level with a great potential to reduce diarrhoea incidence of users. The method is very simple and the only resources required for its application are transparent PET plastic bottles (or glass bottles) and sufficient sunlight: microbiologically contaminated water is filled into the bottles and exposed to the full sunlight for 6 hours. During solar exposure, the diarrhoea causing pathogens are killed by the UV-A radiation of the sunlight. At present, SODIS is used by about 2 Million users in more than 20 countries of the South. Diarrhoea incidence of users significantly has been reduced by 30 to 70 %. A careful and long-term community education process that involves creating awareness on the importance of treating drinking water and initiates behaviour change is required to establish the sustainable practice of SODIS at community level. In Madagascar, more than 160 children younger than 5 years die each day from malaria, diarrhoea and acute respiratory illnesses. The application of household water treatment methods such as SODIS significantly could contribute to improve their health

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Interrelatedness of women's health-behaviour cognitions: A dyadic study of female family members on carrying heavy loads during pregnancy in Nepal.

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    OBJECTIVES Decisions about reproductive health are often influenced by women's female family members, particularly in low-resource contexts. However, previous research has focused primarily on individual behavioural determinants. We investigated the interrelatedness of female family members' reproductive health behaviour with a dyadic version of an extended health action process approach. We investigated this for carrying heavy loads during pregnancy and postpartum, a risk factor for reproductive health in many low-income countries such as Nepal. DESIGN This cross-sectional study included dyads of daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law in rural Nepal (N = 476, nested in 238 dyads). METHODS Dyads of daughters- and mothers-in-law were surveyed about avoiding carrying heavy loads during pregnancy and postpartum. The effects of a woman's cognitions and her female dyadic partner's cognitions on their intention and behaviour about avoiding carrying loads were estimated using linear mixed models. RESULTS The results showed that a mother-in-law's cognitions were related to her daughter-in-law's intentions and vice versa. The mother-in-law's cognitions were also related to the daughter-in-law's behaviour. The mother-in-law's self-efficacy and injunctive norms related to the daughter-in-law's intention and behaviour over and above the daughter-in-law's own self-efficacy and injunctive norms. CONCLUSION Female Nepali family members' cognitions about carrying heavy loads during pregnancy and postpartum are interrelated. Including female family members in interventions to help women manage their reproductive health in low-resource populations seems promising. These novel findings add to the growing body of research indicating the importance of including a dyadic perspective when understanding and changing health behaviour

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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