Suchergebnisse

Legislation concerning immigration draws clear distinctions between legal and irregular forms of migration, yet many migrants in practice are confined to 'in-between' migrant categories. This paper examines how the economic crisis has affected the legal status and mobility of Nigerian migrants in Spain and argues that it is producing new 'semi-legal' migrations and situations. The study is mainly based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with 40 Nigerians living in Madrid and Malaga. Findings suggest that there are four new categories of semi-legal migrant appearing amongst Nigerians in Spain: (i) migrants who lost their work in the formal economy and slipped back into irregularity, thus becoming forcibly immobile; (ii) Nigerians using their short-term residence permits to become perpetually mobile as 'tourists' between Spain and other Schengen countries; (iii) those who struggle to obtain the EU long-term residence permits in Spain and also come up against discretionary labour market restrictions when they move to a second member state; and (iv) Nigerian children who remain undocumented due to the long administrative waiting times and are being left in the care of friends while their parents temporarily relocate to other member states to earn money for their families in Spain and Nigeria. All these migrants share in common the fact that their semi-legal status is the result of a Spanish legalisation process which does not function in times of economic recession and is hampered by an overstretched immigration bureaucracy. The paper contributes new empirical insights to the literature on 'status-mobility', 'semi-legality' and the intra-European movement of third-country nationals.

To bring their understanding of patterns in students' study and work abroad up to date, HEFCE and the British Council, the UK National Agency for Erasmus, commissioned a review of international student mobility. Professor Russell King and Jill Ahrens of the University of Sussex, and Professor Allan Findlay of the University of Dundee undertook the review which includes new evidence from interviews with staff in higher education institutions (HEIs). A group of several UK stakeholders in international student mobility, including the organisations BUTEX (British Universities Transatlantic Exchange) and HEURO (the Association of UK Higher Education European Officers), and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) oversaw the work. The report brings together recent literature and data on student mobility. It looks at the trends in UK international students' mobility and compares these internationally. It also considers the causal factors for students' choice to spend time abroad, the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of mobile students, and the impact that time abroad has on their employability; and it highlights policy and practice in HEIs in respect of student mobility.

Signed central α‐moments of integer valued rv with decreasing density are considered. These are all positive if α≥3/2. We state sharp universal bounds on α depending only on the expectation of the random variable. For special cases the bounds are also evaluated numerically.

AbstractThe idea of combining relatively simple continuous methods with discrete procedures is used for the construction of suboptimal algorithms for quadratic assignment problems. Depending on the nature of the special problem these steps may vary in complexity. The simplest procedures require minimum storage space and result in tolerable computation times. Different choices of parameters and random variations may be used in order to obtain statistical distributions of suboptimal solutions. Computational results for sample problems indicate improvements on results of Steinberg, Gilmore, and Hillier and Connors.

This paper examines the attitudes and plans of Year 13 (final-year secondary school or 'upper sixth form') pupils towards studying at university abroad. Our main empirical base is a questionnaire survey of more than 1400 Year 13 pupils in a stratified sample of schools and sixth-form colleges, both state and independent sector, in two parts of England (Brighton and Sussex, and Leicester and Leicestershire). In addition, 15 face-to-face interviews were taken with teachers and HE advisers in the schools surveyed, and follow-up telephone interviews were made with 20 pupils from the questionnaire survey. The objectives of the research were, firstly, to discover the proportions of school-leavers who are applying to study at a non-UK university, or who had considered doing so but not actually gone ahead with the application, and which countries and universities they were attracted to. Against this orientation to (think about) studying abroad as the key dependent variable, the paper analyses several independent variables, based on quantitative data drawn from the questionnaire results and informed by insights from the qualitative interviews. These include pupils' academic profile, type of school, gender and ethnic heritage, parental socio-economic class, and family and personal links (prior residence abroad, travel experiences, friends or relatives who had studied abroad etc.). Results show that students applying abroad, or who considered this option, are academic high-achievers and high-aspirers, more likely to come from independent schools, have parents who are in the higher socio-occupational classes (managers, directors, professionals, teachers etc.) and who are themselves graduates, and have family links and extensive travel experience abroad. Females are slightly more likely to consider the study-abroad option. The relationship with ethnicity is not clear, except that foreign-domiciled non-UK nationals have a greater propensity to apply to non-UK universities, as do UK-nationals studying at international schools. ...

There is limited evidence on the acceptability, feasibility and cost-effectiveness of task-sharing interventions to narrow the treatment gap for mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale, aims and methods of the Africa Focus on Intervention Research for Mental health (AFFIRM) collaborative research hub. AFFIRM is investigating strategies for narrowing the treatment gap for mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa in four areas. First, it is assessing the feasibility, acceptability and cost-effectiveness of task-sharing interventions by conducting randomised controlled trials in Ethiopia and South Africa. The AFFIRM Task-sharing for the Care of Severe mental disorders (TaSCS) trial in Ethiopia aims to determine the acceptability, affordability, effectiveness and sustainability of mental health care for people with severe mental disorder delivered by trained and supervised non-specialist, primary health care workers compared with an existing psychiatric nurse-led service. The AFFIRM trial in South Africa aims to determine the cost-effectiveness of a task-sharing counselling intervention for maternal depression, delivered by non-specialist community health workers, and to examine factors influencing the implementation of the intervention and future scale up. Second, AFFIRM is building individual and institutional capacity for intervention research in sub-Saharan Africa by providing fellowship and mentorship programmes for candidates in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Each year five Fellowships are awarded (one to each country) to attend the MPhil in Public Mental Health, a joint postgraduate programme at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University. AFFIRM also offers short courses in intervention research, and supports PhD students attached to the trials in Ethiopia and South Africa. Third, AFFIRM is collaborating with other regional National Institute of Mental Health funded hubs in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, by designing and executing shared research projects related to task-sharing and narrowing the treatment gap. Finally, it is establishing a network of collaboration between researchers, non-governmental organisations and government agencies that facilitates the translation of research knowledge into policy and practice. This article describes the developmental process of this multi-site approach, and provides a narrative of challenges and opportunities that have arisen during the early phases. Crucial to the long-term sustainability of this work is the nurturing and sustaining of partnerships between African mental health researchers, policy makers, practitioners and international collaborators.

There is limited evidence on the acceptability, feasibility and cost-effectiveness of task-sharing interventions to narrow the treatment gap for mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa. The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale, aims and methods of the Africa Focus on Intervention Research for Mental health (AFFIRM) collaborative research hub. AFFIRM is investigating strategies for narrowing the treatment gap for mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa in four areas. First, it is assessing the feasibility, acceptability and cost-effectiveness of task-sharing interventions by conducting randomised controlled trials in Ethiopia and South Africa. The AFFIRM Task-sharing for the Care of Severe mental disorders (TaSCS) trial in Ethiopia aims to determine the acceptability, affordability, effectiveness and sustainability of mental health care for people with severe mental disorder delivered by trained and supervised non-specialist, primary health care workers compared with an existing psychiatric nurse-led service. The AFFIRM trial in South Africa aims to determine the cost-effectiveness of a task-sharing counselling intervention for maternal depression, delivered by non-specialist community health workers, and to examine factors influencing the implementation of the intervention and future scale up. Second, AFFIRM is building individual and institutional capacity for intervention research in sub-Saharan Africa by providing fellowship and mentorship programmes for candidates in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Each year five Fellowships are awarded (one to each country) to attend the MPhil in Public Mental Health, a joint postgraduate programme at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University. AFFIRM also offers short courses in intervention research, and supports PhD students attached to the trials in Ethiopia and South Africa. Third, AFFIRM is collaborating with other regional National Institute of Mental Health funded hubs in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, by designing and executing shared research projects related to task-sharing and narrowing the treatment gap. Finally, it is establishing a network of collaboration between researchers, non-governmental organisations and government agencies that facilitates the translation of research knowledge into policy and practice. This article describes the developmental process of this multi-site approach, and provides a narrative of challenges and opportunities that have arisen during the early phases. Crucial to the long-term sustainability of this work is the nurturing and sustaining of partnerships between African mental health researchers, policy makers, practitioners and international collaborators.