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For purposes of convenience, this book has divided three levels of analysis on migration and post-migration processes — micro, macro, and meso. This study has focused on the meso level or meso link that provides a connection between the two other levels of analysis. Such a meso link offers mechanisms for disaggregating macro- into micro- and aggregating micro- into macro-level analysis. Deliberately abjuring a more ambitious synthesis for the sake of simplicity, the meso-level considerations presented in the preceding chapters are a step in linking the micro- and macro-levels and thus enlarge the possibilities of analysis. As the discussion of migration system theories already indicated, more comprehensive approaches cover more than one level of analysis. It is now time to bring the other two levels back in and wrestle with connecting all three layers.

Too often, the macro-level picture obscures reality at micro level. It is particularly true in the context of complex issues of disparities in access to educational opportunities. The macro-level pattern of differential access to educational opportunities can be misleading and therefore may have serious implications for policy and planning aiming at addressing social disparities in education at micro level. This chapter fleshes out educational attainment of the two religious groups under study-Muslims and Hindus-with the help of primary data collected in the villages of Patna and Purnia districts of Bihar. It elaborately examines and discusses the educational status of religious groups under study. This chapter sets the ground for the central argument of this book.

While there is no doubt that Muslims of India, as a whole, lag behind other religious communities in the sphere of education as in other aspects of life, the ways in which their educational backwardness is explained are overly simplistic and designed to buttress specific perspectives. A closer look at macro-level educational statistics seems to suggest that educational status of the Muslims as a whole does not follow any uni-linear pattern. Their relative educational backwardness varies considerably across spatial contexts. As the findings of this study suggest, such spatiality exists even at the micro-level. The macro- and micro-level factors interact in complex ways to determine access of socio-religious communities to educational opportunities. To be brief, the complex issue of schooling as a social variable needs framing in multi-layered and nuanced manners and has to be placed within a wider conceptual and analytical framework.

This chapter analyses how redistributive preference relates to actual income and to its distribution. For measuring redistributive preference a composite index is developed using public opinion (Eurobarometer) survey data. An empirical analysis of the data is presented, covering 17 European countries, on both the macro and micro level. To measure the relationship on the macro level, distance-based measures of income inequality (P-ratios, based on data from LIS) are defined and used to estimate contextual effects on individual redistributive claims. At the individual micro level, mechanisms such as self-interest, failure attribution, inequality sensitivity, and value preferences are tested. The results presented in this chapter can contribute to a refinement of the predictions developed in the frame of the median voter theorem and, via this, to a better understanding of political processes.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of macro-level influences on health. Topics discussed include birth, life, death, and the environment; historical perspective; basic requirements of a healthy environment; measuring environmental quality, human exposure, and health impact; patterns of illness throughout the world; impact of environmental factors on health; obstacles to and opportunities for resolving environmental health problems; and the role of the environmental health professional.

This chapter is concerned with the end of the macro stage — the referendum vote itself and its aftermath. The build-up to the referendum may engage the public, citizens may be involved in helping to set the issue and even the question to be asked, educational material may be distributed to try to encourage macro-level deliberation, fair campaign funding and expenditure rules may be in place, but in the end a final decision must be taken by way of a vote. It is therefore important to address the different ways in which constitutional rules can shape this final stage of the process, assessing these for their democratic credentials, particularly in light of the three democratic objections to referendums that have been used throughout.

The bulk of the introduction is devoted to identifying the scope, themes, and objectives of the book, each section and chapter being described in brief. An assessment of current maternal and infant mortality rates in the United States is presented and the book’s geographic realm and historical context are isolated. The micro-level and macro-level components of maternity care used throughout as an analytic tool are defined, as are the various classifications of American midwives. The historiography of African American lay midwifery and the professionalization of midwifery is discussed.

This chapter discusses the obvious conflicts between political culture as a long-term historical only, slowly changing phenomenon in times of rapid regime changes. It specifies this concept more closely and points to the linkages between macro and micro levels of analysis. In this respect, broadly representative research methods at the micro level, such as survey research, must be brought in line with broader historical developments and their consequences for political cultures at the macro level. At its core, this affects the question of the legitimacy of the old regimes and the future and stability of the emerging institutions. All this has to be seen in the context of the recent ‘wave’ of democratization in different parts of the world, but also taking into account the causes of democratic ‘backsliding’ and the reassertion of authoritarian regimes. Finally, the question is raised where these developments lead in the age of globalization and increasing intercultural exchanges.

This chapter reports a multilevel framework for understanding the recruitment of foreign health care professionals, consisting of the global or macro-level; the national, single country or meso-level; and the organizational and authority or micro-level. This framework can help build more efficient and ethical recruitment policies, and provide a detailed analysis of the role of recruiters in Canada. Macro-level policies have launched ethical principles for international health human resources (HHR) recruitment. The provincial and territorial health ministries of Canadian provinces and territories could adopt and impose HHR recruitment policies but none of the provinces and territories has done so. The notion of ethical recruitment clashes with the operation of HHR labor markets in Canada. Evidence of unethical recruitment shows a need for ongoing critical review and attention to the complexity of influences that can subvert ethical recruitment policy.

The epilogue brings hope of positive change as the American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaecology work on common ground to solve the pressing issues of American maternity care. A reassessment of the essential inclusion of both macro-level and micro-level components of care leads to the conclusion that Dr. J. Edward Hill subscribes to: good health care is local and when community activism is supported by state and federal funding and integrated into the structures of medicine and politics change will happen.

The chapter deals with the link between names and three notions in the social world: Self, identity, and conflict. Dealing with three categories of names: personal names, toponyms or place names, and code-names, this study starts from the assumption that it is the symbolic meanings of names, rather than their indexicality, that make them suitable to investigate from a sociolinguistic perspective. In identifying and analysing these meanings, the chapter uses a variety of data, including name pools, web-based materials, self-report data and literary compositions. Two modes of analysis will be applied in this chapter. Marco-level analyses will be provided to outline the major themes in names and naming from the twin perspectives of identity and conflict. These analyses will be augmented with the micro-level deconstruction of selected data to show the multi-layered nature of these perspectives.

This chapter reviews the political and economic context of the global financial crisis (GFC). We first examine the origins and immediate effects of the GFC and the ‘Great Recession’ that it spawned. Ranging beyond the European focus of the research so far, we examine the impact of the crisis across the member countries of the OECD and the ways in which that variation is shaping the contexts of individual-level behaviour. We then examine patterns of electoral volatility and the changing nature of party systems before turning to consider the reasons why some governments were defeated and why others survived. Across these outcomes, analyses show that the impact of economic factors on political outcomes varied depending on their timing: before, during, or after the GFC. The chapter concludes by introducing our main sources of data: cross-sectional individual-level survey data from twenty-five national elections in OECD democracies from 2011 to 2016 sourced from Module 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES); macro-data for thirty-five OECD democracies from 1990 to 2016; and a pooled set of 113 post-election surveys from twenty-four OECD countries between 1996 and 2017.

This chapter examines principles for health resource allocation and suggests some philosophical foundations for these principles. These issues arise at both a micro level (where decisions are made about particular individuals in particular cases) and a macro level (where decisions affect many people, perhaps in advance of particular cases).

Drilling down to the individual level, this chapter deals with the relationship between African American lay midwives and the physicians, who were usually white, upon whom they relied for medical support. Self-belief, a commitment to the women they served, and their adherence to the standardization of midwifery resulted in the lay midwives demanding medical assistance when required. Using what little anecdotal evidence available, the chapter provides examples of the mutual respect that existed between lay midwives and physicians, but also demonstrates the weakness of a care model heavily weighted in micro-level components but with little access to macro-level facilities and knowledge.

This chapter introduces a large-scale “big data” approach to identify and study possible early effects of the New Silk Road (NSR) initiative on research cooperation patterns between China and other countries. The quantitative data are extracted from publication output in the international research literature, for the years 2010–2018, covered in the Web of Science database. This source contains thousands of research articles co-produced and co-authored by Chinese researchers and their international partners. Following an introductory global overview of collaboration trends, the in-depth part of macro-level analysis relates to research cooperation between China and European countries, where we test six hypotheses about the nature of those collaborative relationships (two of which are confirmed). We observe some minor changes in the smaller countries of Central and Eastern Europe that suggest some emerging NSR effects. However, it is too early to identify structural changes and engage in systematic in-depth assessments of collaborative science.

This chapter provides a schematic overview of the constituent elements that make up the Bush ‘War on Terror’ Narrative and shows how they fit together to form a coherent text. While data are taken from specific speeches, these examples are representative of the larger body of speeches about the ‘war on terror’ delivered by George W. Bush during the last seven years of his presidency. Thus, while the analysis draws from situated narrative performances, the result is to distill from these representative examples the larger cultural narrative, or macro-level discourse about the ‘war on terror’ shared by the nation as a whole.

This chapter outlines several questions as well as the author's answers following the lectures covered in the previous chapters. The topics are based on the lectures themselves, from the micro-level characteristics of individuals who participate in terrorism, to the ways terrorism emerges within society, and finally to the impacts of terrorism upon target countries. The chapter expands on the topics listed in the previous chapters. These question and answer segments also address some issues not directly tackled in the lectures, such as the coverage of terrorism from a more Middle Eastern perspective. The chapter also references some studies and materials for further clarification.

The Introduction takes as its starting point the state-of-the-art of non-territorial autonomy (NTA) research with regard to conceptualization. It argues that the lack of clarity and accuracy in defining NTA derives from the fact that institutional descriptions are missing from the academic literature. This fact is due in part to the approaches to NTA studies that have dominated the field for decades. While the securitization of minority issues has dictated a top-down approach, the more recent justice discourse in terms of minority rights protection has maintained that approach by focusing on international organizations. Thus, the rigid attention to the macro level has limited knowledge production to aspects of state- and nation-building rather than statecraft. Drawing on Lapidoth, who in 1997 argued that without self-regulating institutions autonomy does not exist, the Introduction provides a brief overview, albeit not an exhaustive list, of relevant institutions whose purpose is to support NTA implementation.

Chapter Two outlines the 2012 study ‘Public Perceptions of Threat in Britain’ designed in order to address the gaps in the literature identified in Chapter One, along with the approach to analysis of the data. The study combined representative macro-level insights into public opinion with non-representative micro-level thick descriptive accounts of individuals’ everyday stories, experiences, and (de)constructions. The chapter sets out how an initial tranche of ten mini-focus groups, or ‘triads’, of three people, was conducted to explore questions such as how participants conceptualise ‘security’ and ‘security threat’ and whether they agree or disagree with and/or are affected by a range of government messages about security. Observations of the mini-focus groups and analysis of the transcripts were used to reflexively inform the development of an online survey that was administered to 2004 respondents in June 2012. The chapter outlines the questions asked, and why. A second wave of ten mini-focus groups was then conducted in September 2012, which concentrated on more specific areas of concern in the light of the first two stages of research. The last part of the chapter discusses the approach to analysis.