Search

The Quality & Quantity was established in 1967 and in 2017 it completed its half century. The journal is interdisciplinary in nature and it mainly discusses methodological application of mathematics and statistics in the social sciences, particularly sociology, economics, and social psychology. It was created with the idea of advancing methodology of the various social studies. This study looks back journey of the journal from 1967 to 2017 aims to develop a bibliometric analysis of all the publications of the journal. Web of Science Core Collection database is used to collect data. The present study discovered the significant contributions of the journal in terms of impact, topics, authors, universities and countries. Utrecht University of Netherlands is the most productive university. Asian Universities are emerging and growing quickly in the recent years. Although USA leads among the countries but Europe leads among the six supranational regions. Finally, the visualization of similarities viewer software is used to present network visualization of the bibliographic coupling, co-citation, citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence of keywords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To extend existing research on the US health disadvantage relative to Europe by studying the relationships of disability with age from midlife to old age in the US and four European regions (England/Northern and Western Europe/Southern Europe/Eastern Europe) including their wealth-related differences, using a flexible statistical approach to model the age-functions. Methods: We used data from three studies on aging, with nationally representative samples of adults aged 50 to 85 from 15 countries (N = 48225): the US-American Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Outcomes were mobility limitations and limitations in instrumental activities of daily living. We applied fractional polynomials of age to determine best fitting functional forms for age on disability in each region, while controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and important risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, obesity, smoking, physical inactivity). Results: Findings showed high levels of disability in the US with small age-related changes between 50 and 85. Levels of disability were generally lower in Eastern Europe, followed by England and Southern Europe and lowest in Northern and Western Europe. In these latter countries age-related increases of disability, though, were steeper than in the US, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe. For all countries and at all ages, disability levels were higher among adults with low wealth compared to those with high wealth, with largest wealth-related differences among those in early old age in the USA. Conclusions: This paper illustrates considerable variations of disability and its relationship with age. It supports the hypothesis that less developed social policies and more pronounced socioeconomic inequalities are related to higher levels of disability and an earlier onset of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper assesses group differences in severe and fatal road-traffic accidents by using a unique database that merges road-traffic records with the Israeli census data. The database traces, over a period of 9 years, a group of drivers that comprises 20% of the Israeli population and explores the probability of their being involved in an accident. This unique database enables the investigation of drivers’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, while controlling for a variety of variables, such as estimated daily distance traveled and license type. Testing a previously published theoretical paper on the social bases of accidents, the findings expose significant group differences in estimated probabilities of being involved in severe and fatal accidents. For example, estimated probabilities of accident involvement are higher for males than for females, for non-Jewish drivers than for Jewish, and for drivers whose origins are in Africa and Asia than in America and Europe. Furthermore, the higher one''s education and socioeconomic status, the lower is the probability of accident-involvement. The implications of the findings for developing road-safety programs and suggestions for future research are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The relatively slim social science literature on drug treatment is reviewed. Attention is paid to the institutionalization of treatment at the meso (local community or clinic) level and the micro (client) level rather than to the more commonly examined macro (societal or national) level. The inter-penetration across these levels of ideologies and practices around drugs is revealed through discussion of the targeting of certain populations for treatment, methods of client control in treatment settings, and the client's view of treatment. In the literature, drug users are often presented as passive individuals, subject to various forms of restrictive social control in therapeutic settings. Their perspective on the processes or efficacy of treatment is rarely sought. The concept of drug treatment as necessarily beneficial to clients is questioned in this paper.

This article makes a critique of current interpretations of the crises of the western system of medicine and presents alternative explanations for those crises. It indicates that the crises of medicine--reflected in its ubiquitous problems of costs and ineffectiveness--are due to and reflect the crises of legitimation and capital accumulation of contemporary capitalism. The article is divided into six parts: the first two define the characteristics of the crises of western contemporary capitalism and of its system of medicine, with a critique of current theories which try to explain them. Parts three and four contrapose to these theories a Marxist interpretation of the crises, tracing their causes to the needs created by the process of capital accumulation and to the demands expressed by the working population. The needs and demands generated by Capital and Labor are intrinsically in conflict, and are realized in the daily practice of class struggle. The characteristics and consequences of that struggle for health and for the organization, content, and ideology of medicine are analyzed in the fifth part. This class struggle takes place within a political context in which Capital and its social expression, the bouregeoisie or corporate class, have the dominant influence on the organs of the State. The sixth part of the article shows how that dominance determines the nature of the State responses to the crises of medicine. A primary thesis of this paper is that social class, class struggle, capitalism, and imperialism are not passé categories, as most ideologists of capitalism postulate, but rather they are the most important paradigms for understanding the crises of the western system of power and its medicine.

In recent years, population health research has focused on understanding the determinants of later-life health. Two strands of that work have focused on (1) international comparisons of later-life health and (2) assessing the early-life origins of disease and disability and the importance of life course processes. However, the less frequently examined intersection of these approaches remains an important frontier. The present study contributes to the integration of these approaches. We use the Health and Retirement Study family of data sets and a cohort dynamic approach to compare functional health trajectories across 12 high-income countries and to examine the role of life course processes and cohort dynamics in contributing to variation in those trajectories. We find substantial international variation in functional health trajectories and an important role of cohort dynamics in generating that variation, with younger cohorts often less healthy at comparable ages than the older cohorts they are replacing. We further find evidence of heterogeneous effects of life course processes on health trajectories. The results have important implications for future trends in morbidity and mortality as well as public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the empirical and theoretical research on the rising inequality trend in American labor markets has occurred within labor economics despite long-standing sociological interest in the structure of inequality and despite strong evidence that the trend was produced by institutional as well as technological forces. Several reasons for this imbalance are discussed. The fact of differing inequality trends in the United States and Europe offers an additional perspective on the potential explanations for the American trends. This comparative perspective highlights the role of institutions in producing inequality trends and suggests strategies for potentially productive sociological research on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic's degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. environmental sociology has gone through a very different development path compared with its European counterpart. U.S. environmental sociology was dominant in establishing the field and setting the terms for the development and identity of this subdiscipline. Whereas U.S. environmental sociology still sets the tone in terms of internal organization, structure, and interaction, arguably Northwest European environmental sociology has been more innovative in the last decade of the former millennium with respect to theoretical and conceptual contributions. Although we can still witness significant differences between the environmental sociologies of the two continents, these differences are diminishing. During the past decade, a remarkable degree of interaction, exchange, and social learning has taken place between the two academic communities, facilitated by various aspects of globalization. The question of whether we are moving to one environmental sociology should, however, also take other—and especially the emerging Asian—environmental sociologies into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis on the usefulness of the world-system theory in accounting for the emergence of an American world empire based on the fundamental assumption of an overwhelming U.S. power in the contemporary period. It, however, unable to support its theory that the United States is becoming an empire over Europe. The United States is truly an uncontested military superpower but its economic hegemony is no longer the overwhelming presence it was once in the world economy. The persuasiveness of the world-system theory in explaining the changing global political economy, however, remains strong.

The article discusses the link between American and European political science since early 1970. It reports that in the last half century, the discipline developed in most industrialized democratic countries. In the U.S. the field of political science came into being in 1903 with the inception of the American Political Science Association. It informs that in Europe, the profession of political science grew with universities introducing separate political science departments. It reflects that the nature of the profession has links with the field of sociology, history, and philosophy in Europe and with the field of economics and social psychology in the U.S.