1,720,962 research outputs found
Perceptions of causes of poverty among rural and urban households in Zomba Malawi
No full textAn important macro-economic objective of a country is poverty reduction. This objective is shared by its development partners. Many policies have been introduced at the international and national levels to tackle poverty, especially hard core and abject poverty. Each policy is theory- driven. These theories that shape and inform the policies are developed by practitioners whom in most cases have not directly experienced poverty themselves. Thus, it is no surprise these policies fail to solve or minimise the problems via the resultant intervention. There is therefore a mismatch as it were, that requires a reset, or at the very least, adapting as opposed to adopting the theories and their prognosis therein. Based on the Feagin scale, there are three main categories related to perceptions of poverty: Individual, Structural, and Fatalistic. The objectives of the paper are to examine the perceptions of causes of poverty among households in Malawi, and the factors influencing those perceptions. A special focus is on rural and urban households to see if there exists a significant difference in their perceptions. The results show a variation in perceptions, with household income, location of the household and gender of the head of household proving to be significant predictors. Additionally, by location, people in the rural areas allude to the individualistic causes of poverty. Thus, approaches to tackle poverty can be effective if these perceptions are taken into account
A Gender and Marital Status Analysis of Household Income in a Low-Income Township
No full textAbstract
The analysis of income at household level is highly important for understanding the poverty and for supporting the efforts to deal with poverty. Poverty measures can be calculated from a multitude of approaches. A common approach is to use household income and draw a minimum level of income required for a household to be considered above or below poverty. This paper looked at income at household level from a gender perspective and a marital status perspective in order to draw conclusions of the nature of household’s characteristics that are associated with higher or lower income as a proxy for poverty. Based on data collected in a low income township in South Africa, the regression analysis was applied to investigate the differences between different marital statuses and gender and how they are associated with different levels of income. The regression results reveal that female headed households have, on average, lower incomes compared to male headed households, and also, that married heads of households have higher incomes compared to the single, divorced, and widowed. The widowed had the lowest average income.</jats:p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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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