Search

Using data from the Nairobi Urban Health and Demographic Surveillance System (NUHDSS), this paper seeks to understand the characteristics of adolescent girls who are circumcised in Kenya. The paper discusses the determinants of female circumcision in two Nairobi informal settlements. It is based on detailed information collected from young persons aged 12-24 targeting major transition events such as first sex, childbirth, marriage, and circumcision. Out of 4058 adolescents and young people interviewed 2010 were adolescent girls and young women. Out of the total number of interviewees, the 527 girls and young women on whom this paper is based are from ethnic communities that practice circumcision. We used the life-table technique to estimate the median age at circumcision and logistic regression to analyse the relationship between female circumcision and adolescent sexuality, controlling for other characteristics. The type of stay within the demographic surveillance area (DSA), religion, ethnicity, residential location and mother's education were associated with being circumcised. Current school attendance was not associated with being circumcised but if one had never attended school then they were more likely to be circumcised. For policy making, it is imperative to explore the nature of social networks within which circumcision decisions are taken and enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costner (1965) showed that many of the most commonly used measures of association may be conceptually interpreted as indicating proportional reduction in prediction error. But because it is verbally cumbersome, and conceptually complex for some measures, the proportional reduction in error interpretation has not been widely incorporated in research reports where appropriate. Instead, measures of association continue to be interpreted in abstract terms distinguishing between broad levels of strength. This paper demonstrates that all proportional reduction in error measures of association may be alternately interpreted as indicating the percent of variation explained. Because this interpretation is conceptually meaningful in a manner highly relevant for scientific investigation, more convenient to apply in research reports, and already familiar to most social scientists, it is argued that it be standardly applied to all proportional reduction in error measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of regular equivalence has advanced over the last 15 years on a number of different fronts. Notation and terminology have developed often making it difficult to obtain a coherent view of the area as a whole. This paper attempts to provide a framework in which to develop and explore the general mathematical theory of regular equivalence and to place a number of the more important results into that framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]