scholarly journals How Different Motivations for Making Informal Out-Of-Pocket Payments Vary in Their Influence on Users’ Satisfaction with Healthcare, Local and National Government, and Satisfaction with Life?

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Nazim Habibov ◽  
Alena Auchynnikava ◽  
Lida Fan ◽  
Yunhong Lyu

Background. The dominant view in the literature is that informal payments in healthcare universally are a negative phenomenon. By contrast, we theorize that the motivation healthcare users for making informal payments (IP) can be classified into three categories: (1) a cultural norm, (2) “grease the wheels” payments if users offered to pay to get better services, and (3) “sand the wheels” payments if users were asked to pay by healthcare personnel or felt that payments were expected. We further hypothesize that these three categories of payments are differently associated with a user’s outcomes, namely, satisfaction with healthcare, local and national government, satisfaction with life, and satisfaction with life of children in the future. Methods. We used microdata from the 2016 Life-in-Transition survey. Multivariate regression analysis is used to quantify relationships between these categories of payments and users’ outcomes. Results. Payments that are the result of cultural norms are associated with better outcomes. On the contrary, “sand the wheel” payments are associated with worse outcomes. We find no association between making “grease the wheels” payments and outcomes. Conclusions. This is the first paper which evaluates association between three different categories of informal payments with a wide range of users’ outcomes on a diverse sample of countries. Focusing on informal payments in general, rather than explicitly examining specific motivations, obscures the true outcomes of making IP. It is important to distinguish between three different motivations for informal payment, namely, cultural norms, “grease the wheels,” and “sand the wheels” since they have varying associations with user outcomes. From a policy making standpoint, variation in the links between different motivations for making IP and measures of satisfaction suggest that decision-makers should put their primary focus on situations where IP are explicitly asked for or are implied by the situation and that they should differentiate this from cases of gratitude payments. If such measures are not implemented, then policy makers may unintentionally ban the behaviour that is linked with increased satisfaction with healthcare, government, and life (i.e., paying gratitude).

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-505
Author(s):  
Narayan Tripathi ◽  
Denny John ◽  
Prabir K Chatterjee ◽  
Shruti Murthy ◽  
Nitish Parganiha ◽  
...  

Background: Informal payments are unauthorised ‘unregistered’ out-of-pocket payments, outside the official payment system, for purchase or service meant to be covered/provided by the healthcare system. This study attempts to measure and report the extent and magnitude of informal payments based on the entitlements in Janani-Shishu Suraksha Karyakram (JSSK) in the Indian context. Methods: A cross-sectional study using convenience sampling and a semi-structured interview schedule was conducted among 281 participants in 2016 in 26 JSSK-notifying health facilities from all five divisions of Chhattisgarh. Pregnant women and women who delivered in the previous year, and provided informed consent, were included. After reviewing various definitions, informal payment was operationally defined in the context of JSSK for India as ‘payments made in cash or kind, unregistered or non-reimbursed, made by/on behalf of the beneficiary or someone related thereof, for free and cashless entitlements in a JSSK-listed health facility, to an individual or institutional healthcare provider/staff who provides/arranges for provision of the service’. Results: Of 281 participants, 91.8 per cent reported informal payments across all JSSK entitlements categories. A relative majority of these payments was made at the district hospital (37%), ranging from ₹2 to ₹6,500 (US$0.03–101). Investigations incurred the greatest median amount of informal payments, at, ₹455 (US$7). Informal payments ranged between three and seven times higher than the JSSK price cap in Chhattisgarh. No significant association was found between participant characteristics and informal payments. Conclusion: Further research is required to understand the magnitude and motivation of informal payments made in programmes like JSSK.


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manasi Kumar ◽  
Erica Burman

We welcome readers to the first special issue (11.1) of the Journal of Health Management. We hope the readers find the articles and various reviews enriching and provocative, both in terms of the range of ideas and critical approaches addressed. The key theme of this double issue concerns the political limits of mega-development projects such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The primary focus of the articles collected here is to provide an insightful, constructive and in-depth critique of the United Nations (UN) MDGs along with critical deliberations on their short- and long-term implications not only for health management but also for a wide range of issues around development and social change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manek Kolhatkar

Describing cultural change and variability and inferring sociocultural dynamics about past people and communities may be among archaeology’s main goals as a field of practice. In this regard, the concept of skill has proved its usefulness to, time and again, expand the breath of archaeologists and lithic technologists’ analyses. It covers a wide range of applications, from apprenticeship, cognition, paleo-sociology, spatial organization. It is one of the main causes for material culture variability, up there with raw material constraints, design, technological organization or cultural norms. Yet, while skill has certainly been the focus of some research in the last decades, it remains quite peripheral, when considering how central the concept should be to technological inquiries. Whatever the reasons may be, this book, edited by Laurent Klaric and fully bilingual (French and English), aims at changing that, and argues for skill to become a central concern in lithic technology. Its chapters do so strongly and the end-result is a book that should become a reference for lithic technologists, whatever their research interests or schools of thought may be.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hervé Lethier

The World Heritage thematic study for Central Asia has been produced as a contribution to supporting the implementation of the World Heritage Convention in Central Asia. It provides a response to a Decision of the World Heritage Committee in order to identify outstanding areas with potential for future nomination to the World Heritage List with primary focus on criteria (ix) and (x) at the regional scale. The approach applied in this study, focusing on criteria (ix) and (x), follows that from the 2013 study on terrestrial biodiversity and the World Heritage List. Criteria (ix) and (x) are clearly the primary ones for recognition of extant biodiversity values, and they have been applied to a wide range of biodiversity features, including ecosystems, species, and ecological and/or biological processes. Although this study is an initial assessment, most areas and sites recommended here have appeared repeatedly as being of particular interest for biodiversity conservation during the work process, whether through literature analysis or in discussions with experts and specialists. The recommendations reflect the current level of knowledge that should be strengthened in the future, to ensure that the identified areas and sites are well supported with the necessary data and empirical evidence to address the requirements of the Operational Guidelines.


Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanda Wilcox

Emotion plays a vital role in any rounded history of warfare, both as an element in morale and as component in understanding the soldier's experience. Theories on the functioning of emotions vary, but an exploration of Italian soldiers' emotions during the First World War highlights both cognitive and cultural elements in the ways emotions were experienced and expressed. Although Italian stereotypes of passivity and resignation dominated contemporary discourse concerning the feelings and reactions of peasant conscripts, letters reveal that Italian soldiers vividly expressed a wide range of intense emotions. Focusing on fear, horror and grief as recurrent themes, this article finds that these emotions were processed and expressed in ways which show similarities to the combatants of other nations but which also display distinctly Italian features. The language and imagery commonly deployed offer insights into the ways in which Italian socio-cultural norms shaped expressions of personal war experience. In letters that drew on both religious imagery and the traditional peasant concerns of land, terrain and basic survival, soldiers expressed their fears of death, isolation, suffering and killing in surprisingly vigorous terms.


Bringing together a wide diversity of authors based on three continents and from different disciplinary backgrounds, this book offers analyses of a wide range of factors that characterize and that are shaping the future of the African Sahel. In forty chapters, organized in nine sections, the book examines this complex and rapidly changing region on multiple dimensions. Collectively, the book attempts to offer an understanding of the specificity of the Sahel, and to examine its core characteristics as shaped by the geographic, cultural, and political parameters that define it. Following a series of chapters focused on the shaping of the Sahelian space as a region, six chapters explore the distinct national trajectories of the countries of the political Sahel: Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Chad. The extraordinary combination of environmental, economic, and political challenges, and the ways in which Sahelian states and societies have responded, are the primary focus of the three subsequent sections, while the various parameters of the lived realities of these societies in motion are explored in the four final sections of the book. Transversally throughout, the chapters aim to offer an interdisciplinary and holistic view of the challenges and the dynamics that are shaping a region at a historical crossroads, and an understanding of the many factors that feed and perpetuate its vulnerabilities and fragilities, as well as its sources of resilience.


Author(s):  
Bernadette Baker ◽  
Clare O'Farrell

William James (1841–1910), working primarily out of the United States, and Michel Foucault (1926–1984), working primarily out of France, are two very different figures who both made an impact on current theories of education. Even if the primary focus of their work is not education, their ideas challenge what it is that makes education recognizable as education and takes issue with its very identity as a discipline. William James, who began publishing in the 1870s, is generally described as a philosopher and psychologist. He remains well-known for his work on pragmatism in the wake of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism and for his work on religion, ethics, and mind theory, but he also devoted considerable time to the study of parapsychology and gave some attention to teacher education. Foucault has been variously described as a philosopher, historian, historian of ideas, and a social and political theorist. His work addressed an impressive array of fields across the sciences, literature, art, ethics, and institutional, political, and social history, and spanned a wide range of historical periods mainly in European and French history from the 13th century to the 20th century with later excursions into the Ancient Greek and early Christian eras. Foucault’s work has been widely, but selectively, deployed within education studies across the globe, with a strong focus on his notions of power, governmentality, surveillance, subjectivity, discourse, and ethics in their various iterations. James’s work has been relatively less deployed, with emphasis on the application of his version of pragmatism, theories of mind, and talks to teachers. The work of the two thinkers may be considered to overlap in two important ways: first, in their respective approaches to the notion of practice, namely the idea of philosophy as strategic and located in day-to-day concrete experience rather than occupying the rarefied realms of abstraction; and second, their interest in the margins of knowledge – knowledge that has been excluded by mainstream science and accepted ways of thinking. In the case of James, this interest manifests in his long-term studies in the field of parapsychology and in the case of Foucault in his interest in the meandering byways and monstrosities of the history of ideas, of long-forgotten knowledge rejected by the scientific mainstream or formulated on the margins of society.


2020 ◽  

The authors of the joint monograph "The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878: Hopes – Vicissitudes – Lessons", historians, culturologists and literary scholars, based on historical documents, archival materials, facts of public life and fiction writing, as well as "field work", give an updated vision of the sesquicentennial events, which played a significant role in the transformation of the geopolitical map of Europe and interethnic relations, and whose echoes are still heard today, often re-acquiring the acute relevance. The primary focus is on the Balkan policy of Russia and other major European countries; the Russian-Bulgarian military cooperation; the Russian-Bulgarian social and cultural ties; the refraction of historical realities in artistic creation, journalism and diaries. The book will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, university students and readers interested in the development of international relations, the history and culture of the Balkans, the Russian-Bulgarian dialogue.


1981 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 629-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Burns

While social scientists have examined in some detail the income earning activities of Chinese peasants in communes, the primary focus of these studies has been to describe the general pattern of peasant behaviour – the orthodox, legitimate, legally sanctioned methods for increasing collective (and household) income. What these studies ignore, however, is the existence of a “second economy” in rural China, characterized by a wide range of informal, extra– or illegal strategies also designed to enhance collective income. In Guangdong from 1962 to 1974 these included: altering the size of production units; speculation; fraudulent loan applications; corruption; theft; withholding goods or services; false reporting; and violence or demonstrations. While acknowledging that these activities did not represent the norm, nonetheless, a systematic discussion of informal and perhaps deviant behaviour, highlighting time and participant variations, is necessary to form a more accurate picture of Chinese peasant behaviour.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-223
Author(s):  
Armand Léon van Ommen

Abstract Prayers of intercession cover a wide range of topics, yet prayers for mental health or issues around sexuality or divorce prove to be taboo and stigmatised. This article interprets this finding from empirical research with the theories of taboo as outlined by Alasdair MacIntyre and Mary Douglas. The article offers pastoral-theological reflections on the problem of taboo and stigma – caused by doctrine or cultural norms – in intercession. The article argues that the practices of solidarity, naming, and hospitality reframe the way taboo and stigma can be thought about theologically and therefore eventually might influence intercession in public worship.


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