Improving the Health Coverage of the Rural Poor: Does Contracting-Out Mobile Medical Teams Work?

Low population density in rural developing countries coupled with deficient infrastructure, weak state capacity and limited budgets makes increasing health care coverage difficult. Contracting-out mobile medical teams may be a helpful solution in this context. This article examines the impact of a large-scale programme of this type in Guatemala. We document large impacts on immunisation rates for children and prenatal care provider choices. The programme increased substantially the role of physician and nurses at the expense of traditional midwives. The results indicate that mobile medical teams substantially increased coverage of health care services in Guatemala, and could be effective in other developing countries.     

Power and Paradox: Asian Geopolitics and Sino-American Relations in the 21 Century

The pattern of Asian geopolitics can be examined by employing three analytical perspectives. The first employs East Asia and the vigorous debate over the meaning of the rise of China as an intellectual prism to observe the currents of geopolitical continuity and change that are currently abroad in the Asian region. The second explores the extent to which the interacting forces of geopolitics and military modernization foster the rise of new force projection capabilities that may affect the strategic environment in Asia—particularly in East Asia. Here, the focus is mainly on the arsenals of the three indigenous Asian giants, China, Japan and India, all of whom have developed, or are in the process of developing, significant air and maritime assets whose operations have the potential to intersect in East and South East Asia. Russia is not as much a presence because it no longer possesses its powerful Soviet-era Pacific Fleet and has, in essential respects, retreated to its traditional role as a Eurasian land power.¹ The third examines the future of Sino-American relations in Asia in the context of the debate over China's ascent and U. S. decline—a discussion that has intensified since the implosion of the U.S. financial system in 2008 and the onset of the worst global recession since the 1930s.     

Sleep and Delinquency: Does the Amount of Sleep Matter?

Sleep, a key indicator of health, has been linked to a variety of indicators of well-being such that people who get an adequate amount generally experience greater well-being. Further, a lack of sleep has been linked to a wide range of negative developmental outcomes, yet sleep has been largely overlooked among researchers interested in adolescent delinquency. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between hours of sleep and delinquent behavior among adolescents by using data from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 14,382; 50.2% female, 63.5% white). A series of negative binomial regressions showed that youth who typically sleep seven or fewer hours per night reported significantly more property delinquency than youth who sleep the recommended 8–10 h. Further, youth who reported sleeping 5 or fewer hours per night reported significantly more violent delinquency than youth who reported sleeping the recommended number of hours per night. The findings suggest that sleep is an important, and overlooked, dimension of delinquent behavior and studies that focus on adolescent health should further investigate the effects of insufficient sleep. Finally, the authors recommend that sleep and other relevant health behaviors be considered in the context of more comprehensive approaches to delinquency prevention and intervention.     

Promoting strengths, prevention, empowerment, and community change through organizational development: lessons for research, theory, and practice

SPEC Learning and Changing by Doing is a three-year, action research, and organizational change project designed to ultimately promote social justice and well-being in the community. SPEC is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Prevention, Empowerment, and Community Change. The project consists of five organizations tackling internal organizational change in order to better promote justice and well-being in their respective constituencies. In this article we present a formative evaluation of this multicase study of organizational change in human services. This article contributes to the empirical and theoretical literature on organizational change in the nonprofit human service milieu.