This paper presents findings from 116 focus group discussions which took place in eleven districts in Bangladesh in mid-2006. It forms the first part of three phases of research in an integrated qualitative and quantitative study into poverty dynamics currently being undertaken by the author and partners from the CPRC, IFPRI and DATA Bangladesh. The central purpose of the focus group discussion...

BACKGROUND University students in Sweden routinely receive proactive mail-based alcohol Internet interventions sent from student health services. This intervention provides personalized normative feedback on alcohol consumption with suggestions on how to decrease drinking. Earlier feasibility trials by our group and others have examined effectiveness in simple parallel-groups designs. OBJECTI...

Microfinance institutions are used to claim that their impact goes beyond money since rescuing from exclusion uncollateralized poor borrowers significantly affects their dignity, self-esteem, social recognition and, through it, life satisfaction. Our paper aims to verify the validity of this claim by evaluating whether access to microfinance loans has significant direct impact on life satisfact...

Hunter Gehlbach, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University; Maureen E. Brinkworth, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University; and Anna Harris, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. This research was supported by generous funding through a grant from the Spencer Foundation and an Early Career Research Award by Division 15 of the American Psycholo...

Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter schools are neith...

The need for achieving optimal performance for database applications is a primary objective for database designers and a primary requirement for database end users. Partitioning is one of the techniques used by designers to improve the performance of database access. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of horizontal table partitioning on query Response Time (RT) using three ...

Losses in the market for private label residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) were at the epicenter of the financial crisis from 2007-2009. Existing research has shown that a substantial portion of the poor performance of the loans securitized in this market was caused by fraudulent origination practices, and that these practices were misrepresented to investors who purchased securities ...

Education researchers and policymakers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data set from North Carolina to explore a range of que...

In the 1990s in the UK, the problem of student plagiarism was addressed by telling students they must not do it, then by dealing with the small number who did not comply. Policies and institutional procedures drafted before 2000, designed to cope with this relatively straightforward situation, often did not define what was meant by plagiarism (Stefani and Carroll, 2001) or state how offenders w...

Background: the main purpose of medical education system is that the students achieve the highest levels of learning and professional competency. Training of skilled physicians is based on three domains including educational planning, environment, and psychological situation. Methods: Our study is a descriptive-analysis, conducted on 119 students including medical, nursing and midwifery groups ...