‘Education is as important for me as water is to sustaining life’: perspectives on the higher education of women in Afghanistan

Progress in education in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has been described as ‘fragile, limited in reach, depth and uncertainty of sustainability' [UNICEF. 2013 UNICEF. 2013. Annual Report – Afghanistan. United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. http://www.unicef.org/about/annualreport/files/Afghanistan_COAR_2013.pdf. [Google Scholar]. Basic Education and Gender Equality: Afghanistan. United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. http://www.unicef.org/afghanistan/education_2206.htm]. This is particularly true for Afghan women participating in higher education, within a culture that remains resistant to women's education. This article documents the views and attitudes of Afghan women who have sought to gain a higher education, within a context where only 5% of the Afghan population attends university, and less than 20% of university students are female [The World Bank. 2013. World Development Indicators: Poverty Headcount Ratio at National Poverty Lines. The World Bank Group. http://data.worldbank.org/country/afghanistan]. It is an attempt to listen to the voices of Afghan women to ascertain what they see as the best ways to improve their educational outcomes. Findings illustrate that while progress has been made in enabling a small percentage of women to pursue higher education, there are still significant and enduring obstacles for Afghan women seeking such a path.     

‘If there's a dead rat,don't leave it’. Young children's understanding of their citizenship rights and responsibilities

Concerns about pupil disengagement from school and society have led to compulsory citizenship education in state schools in England. However, there is little evidence that the new citizenship education is meeting its goals. The research described here assesses a new approach to citizenship education that appears to overcome some of the identified obstacles in current practices. Hampshire's ‘Rights, respect and responsibility’ initiative is a rights‐based whole school reform of school policies and practices. Under this initiative the contemporaneous citizenship status of pupils is respected, pupils are taught about their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and democratic participation is made meaningful in classroom and school functioning. Of particular interest is that the initiative starts in infant schools. This research indicates that young children can understand their rights and responsibilities in ways that are meaningful to their everyday behaviour and that rights‐based whole school reform has the capacity to improve pupil learning and citizenship behaviours.     

Not quite normal: Consequences of violating the assumption of normality in regression mixture models

Regression mixture models are a new approach for finding differential effects which have only recently begun to be used in applied research. This approach comes at the cost of the assumption that error terms are normally distributed within classes. The current study uses Monte Carlo simulations to explore the effects of relatively minor violations of this assumption, the use of an ordered polytomous outcome is then examined as an alternative which makes somewhat weaker assumptions, and finally both approaches are demonstrated with an applied example looking at differences in the effects of family management on the highly skewed outcome of drug use. Results show that violating the assumption of normal errors results in systematic bias in both latent class enumeration and parameter estimates. Additional classes which reflect violations of distributional assumptions are found. Under some conditions it is possible to come to conclusions that are consistent with the effects in the population, but when errors are skewed in both classes the results typically no longer reflect even the pattern of effects in the population. The polytomous regression model performs better under all scenarios examined and comes to reasonable results with the highly skewed outcome in the applied example. We recommend that careful evaluation of model sensitivity to distributional assumptions be the norm when conducting regression mixture models.     

Recent Publications in Natural History

Principal Reviews: Everett, Michael. The Birds of paradise. Skipwith, Peyton. The Great bird illustrators and their art 1730–1930. Parry, Gareth and Rory Putman. Birds of prey. Vickers, Vincent Cartwright. The Google Book.