Suchergebnisse

Die steigende Bedeutung qualitativer Methoden auch für die angewandten Bereiche der Markt-, Medien- und Meinungsforschung bildet den Ausgangspunkt für diese Schwerpunktausgabe von FQS. Die Vielzahl und Verschiedenheit der veröffentlichten Beiträge macht das kreative Potenzial qualitativer Forschung nicht nur im akademischen Umfeld, sondern und auch gerade im Anwendungsbezug deutlich und zeigt, wie Wissenschaft und Praxis in einen für beide Seiten fruchtbaren Austausch miteinander treten können. Der vorliegende Beitrag liefert durch kurze inhaltliche Beschreibungen einen Überblick über die in FQS 5(2) aufgenommenen Artikel. Themen, die trotz vorheriger Ausschreibung im Call for Papers durch Beitragseinreichungen nicht aufgegriffen wurden, weisen auf Lücken, Problemstellen und "blinde Flecken" angewandter qualitativer Forschung hin, die abschließend skizziert werden.

Finding safe, affordable housing is one of the greatest obstacles that women who leave abusive partners face. In response, advocates for battered women have begun to offer transitional supportive housing (TSH) programs. This article reports on interviews with 55 key stakeholders of these programs (direct service staff, current participants, former participants, and shelter residents) to examine the degree to which TSH programs fulfill the needs of the women who use them. Consistent with other research on empowerment-based services, the study found that the women were most satisfied when services were provided in a respectful and individualized manner. The women's recommendations included the implementation of safety protocols and the need for a variety of support services that should be offered but not mandated.

AbstractThis paper presents several models for the location of facilities subject to congestion. Motivated by applications to locating servers in communication networks and automatic teller machines in bank systems, these models are developed for situations in which immobile service facilities are congested by stochastic demand originating from nearby customer locations. We consider this problem from three different perspectives, that of (i) the service provider (wishing to limit costs of setup and operating servers), (ii) the customers (wishing to limit costs of accessing and waiting for service), and (iii) both the service provider and the customers combined. In all cases, a minimum level of service quality is ensured by imposing an upper bound on the server utilization rate at a service facility. The latter two perspectives also incorporate queueing delay costs as part of the objective. Some cases are amenable to an optimal solution. For those cases that are more challenging, we either propose heuristic procedures to find good solutions or establish equivalence to other well‐studied facility location problems. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.

This article describes what it means to feel poor from the perspective of low-income lone mothers. The construct of feeling poor is complex and multifaceted for these mothers, whose common behaviors include self-sacrifice and coping. The authors identify 10 feeling domains for these mothers: feeling deprived, righteous, the need for occupational choice, relatively better positioned than others, the need to manage the appearance of poverty, judged/degraded, guilty, isolated, dependent, and despondent.

Objective. Students of political behavior have often found that the primary use of languages other than English impedes many forms of political participation in the United States. We develop expectations about how language choice operates with social context to influence an individual's decision to vote. Although choosing to speak a language other than English—in this case, Spanish—may affect the amount of political information individuals have at their disposal, this choice also represents their access to social and community resources that enable, rather than impede, political participation.Methods. We examine the voting behavior of Latinos, almost entirely Mexican Americans, living in south Texas counties on the U.S. border and reconsider the consequences of language choice for political behavior.Results. Controlling for past residential tenure, we find that Spanish‐speaking Latinos will be more likely to vote than English‐speaking Latinos.Conclusions. The establishment of ties to an ethnic group in a majority‐minority context over time mitigates the negative relationship between the use of Spanish as a primary language and voting.

In this study, propagation through various distributions of lossy particles in clouds is investigated. Clouds may contain several types of crystal forms which can be modelled in the physical optics scattering region such as thin long cylinders and flat plate. The bistatic scattering patterns and emissivities of various types of clouds are computed for waves of selected polarizations passing through clouds with specified sizes, shapes and distributions. The results are in good agreement with the literature.

Students of political behavior have often found that the primary use of languages other than English impedes many forms of political participation in the US. We develop expectations about how language choice operates with social context to influence an individual's decision to vote. Although choosing to speak a language other than English -- in this case, Spanish -- may affect the amount of political information individuals have at their disposal, this choice also represents their access to social & community resources that enable, rather than impede, political participation. We examine the voting behavior of Latinos, almost entirely Mexican Americans, living in south TX counties on the US border, & reconsider the consequences of language choice for political behavior. Controlling for past residential tenure, we find that Spanish-speaking Latinos will be more likely to vote than English-speaking Latinos. The establishment of ties to an ethnic group in a majority-minority context over time mitigates the negative relationship between the use of Spanish as a primary language & voting. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 41 References. Adapted from the source document.

At the end of 2002, more than 13.500 Wind Turbines (WTs) with an installed capacity of 12.000 MW generated approx. 17.300 GWh and supplied about 3.6 % of the German electricity consumption. Today, the electrical power generated from wind already covers the total grid load in some grid areas temporarily. According to Federal Government planning, in the long-term wind turbines will be erected with a total power of up to 25 GW in the North and Baltic Seas, which would cover around 15% of the German electricity consumption. For the capability of these immense powers to be integrated into the energy supply system, however, the wind turbines installed on land are also to be considered. Here, an installed wind power of around 10,000 MW is to be reckoned with, alone in the area of the grid operator E.ON Netz GmbH, up to the year 2007. These large intermittend generation have growing influence on the loading and security of grids, the operation of other power plants and on the economics of the complete German supply system. It is today already foreseeable that these demands must be reacted on with both technical and regulative measures. Large (offshore) wind farms will therefore require access to a central operational control unit in order to coordinate and control the operation of many individual wind turbines with correspondingly defined demands. The paper will present new operational control strategies to provide a multitude of new possibilities to enable simple, flexible and undisturbed reaction to the demands of participants (wind farm operators, grid operators). These operational control strategies are mainly based on ISETs successful employed wind power prediction tools (E.ON Netz, RWE Net, Vattenfall Europe Transmission) and will enable energy and power control, as well as the provision of reactive power, in order to maintain comparable properties to conventional power plant types.