Suchergebnisse

Over the past decades, biomedical researchers have made great progress in finding the treatment for many diseases which have been considered in the past as incurable. The struggle for longevity and positive health has been addressed by medical science. People who can afford it are assured by the promise of genetic engineering. But while there has been considerable development in the treatment of diseases, the number of mortalities in poor countries remains high, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia. Around 8 million people die each year worldwide due to poverty-related health issues. Despite the advancement in the treatment of diseases, poor people in most of the developing countries worldwide are dying each year. This article will argue that human poverty and the existence of infectious diseases are inseparable social phenomena that affect the fate of the poor in developing countries. Following Amartya Sen, this article will argue that access to advanced health care services should be affordable to all, and should form part of individual freedoms that the national policies of a country must secure.

The aim of this paper is to analyze, from a sociological viewpoint, the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by Amartya Sen in his textbook Development as Freedom. The concept of freedom, according with Sen, includes what he calls the «opportunity aspect» and the «process aspect» of freedom. My argument is that the human development paradigm has been more focused in exploring the former than the latter, ignoring the relational dimension of human agency. In order to extend the reach of the capability approach in this direction, I propose to accept three complementary premises: 1) that freedom is a social relationship; 2) that the fights for equality are always constrained by power relations; 3) that the agents in these scenarios are collective actors, rather than individuals.

Abstract
Understanding disability as a social phenomenon opened up the way for disability studies and social justice theories to mutually benefit from each other. One of the most significant recent advancements in the field of social justice has been the capability approach (CA) of Amartya Sen. The present paper builds on the CA to analyse disability form a social justice perspective. We argue that the CA provides several advantages when conceptualizing disability and furthering justice for disabled people. The objective of the paper is to develop a framework for analysis on the basis of the CA and to apply it through the case of D/deaf and hardof- hearing children and their carers in Szeged, Hungary. We demonstrate that the advancement of justice occurs through the scrutiny and comparison of feasible alternatives instead of arguing for principles or institutional guarantees of perfectly just societies.

Poverty is a problem which concerns not only the affected individual, but also a whole society. Poverty tends to hinder or even prevent the economic growth and social development of a country. Therefore, undertaking action which could reduce poverty is of great importance, as is the provision of ongoing help to impoverished individuals (households). The main aim of the research presented in the paper is a multidimensional analysis of poverty risk in the framework of capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. The article also aims at defining the determinants of poverty which increase or decrease the risk of its occurrence, and comparing the poverty risk estimations obtained through the adoption of the multidimensional and unidimensional approach. The research concerning Poland (e.g. by regions) used data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, carried out by Statistics Poland in 2018. The measurement was operationalised by means of a special variant of structural equations modelling (SEM) – the multiple indicators and multiple causes model (MIMIC). The MIMIC model used deprivation symptoms that reflected the degree to which respondents were unable to satisfy their needs. The model also took into account the factors that increase or reduce the risk of poverty.
The results of the estimations demonstrate that the level of education has the most significant impact on reducing the risk of poverty, while a low activity on the job market, i.e. being a pensioner or unemployed, increases the odds of becoming poor to the greatest extent. The regions most prone to poverty in multidimensional terms are: the Eastern macro-region, rural areas, pensioners' households and non-family multi-person households. The aforementioned results have been compared with the measurement of poverty according to the unidimensional approach. The study shows the differences between the rankings of poverty risk by macro-region, size of the place of residence, source of household income and by household type from obtained through multidimensional and unidimensional approaches. This comparison demonstrates that the unidimensional approach is insufficient for the identification of the poor.