Suchergebnisse

Drawing on 24 interviews with single mothers in Turkey, this qualitative study examines various cultural and structural factors facing single mothers in a patriarchal society. It identifies strategies single mothers devise to handle the hardship of bringing up a child alone and stand up for themselves as single parents. Results demonstrate that single mothers in this study face numerous challenges, including the difficulty to maintain authority in their new family setting; the struggle to keep the sense of a complete family; and the experience of negative attitudes toward single mothers and their children. We argue that through the strategies they have devised, these mothers strive to rebuild their families in line with the traditional Turkish family system. We draw on the literature on boundary ambiguity as a theoretical framework for understanding these women's single parenting experiences. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We explore the role of paid work in women's empowerment in Turkey by analyzing the variation in employment status and occupational position of Turkish women according to socio-economic and geographic background characteristics, characteristics of their marriage, and gender role attitudes. Being employed is seen as a major instrument in making women less dependent on their families and freeing them from the suppressing influence of patriarchal ideologies. However, only 35% of married women are gainfully employed and half of them work as (family) farm workers. Women engaged in the formal economy are more highly educated, have husbands with higher occupations, have fewer children, live in the West and urban areas, are less suppressed by their families and have less traditional gender role attitudes. Not speaking Turkish is a major obstacle to economic independency for ethnic women. Findings basically support the U-curve hypothesis which predicts that with increasing modernization female employment first decreases and then increases. However, the effects of modernization are overshadowed by the strong influence of patriarchal ideology that tends to confine Turkish women to the private domain. The major way out of the web of patriarchal restrictions seems to be via education. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We study family background effects on participation in primary and secondary education of children in Turkey using large representative data sets. Educational participation, especially of girls, is found to be still a major concern, with non-enrollment being especially high in the countryside and the eastern part of the country. Parental education, number of siblings, household income, occupation of the father, traditionality of the mother and the mother's ability to speak Turkish are major factors affecting participation. For primary participation of girls, having a mother who has completed primary education and who can speak Turkish is most significant. Traditional gender role attitudes of the mother reduce the girl's chances to get secondary education. For participation of boys, the economic situation of the household is important. Findings indicate that a key role is played by the mothers of the children who are out of school. Reaching this group of mostly illiterate and traditional women is a major challenge for policy makers wanting to improve the situation. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Data from the 1998 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey are used to gain insight into the characteristics of the non-Turkish speaking individuals in Turkey and in the socio-economic consequences of not speaking Turkish for them. The very large majority of non-Turkish speaking individuals turn out to be Kurdish and Arabic women, living in East Turkey and in the countryside. The data indicate that of the married women aged 15-49 in Turkey, about 4 per cent, or one in 25, is not able to speak Turkish. More than 90 per cent of these women has not finished primary education. Regarding their social background, our results suggest that they were more under the influence of traditional cultural values, that their access to the public domain was limited, and that they were more heavily controlled by their family. Regarding the consequences of not speaking Turkish, we found the non-Turkish speaking women to be less employed in the formal economy, to have husbands with lower educational levels and occupations and to have lower family incomes. This result is in line with the predictions of linguistic capital theory.

Data from the Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys are used to study Turkish-Kurdish intermarriage in contemporary Turkey. We find a strong tendency to marry within the own ethnic group (or towards 'ethnic homogamy') which, however, has decreased significantly between the early 1960s and the late 1990s. So, in spite of the conflict in south-eastern Turkey, the groups seem to have grown together somewhat in recent decades. This result remains intact if we control for the difference in group size between the groups and for the presence of educational homogamy. An individual-level analysis shows that most Turkish-Kurdish intermarriage takes place between Kurdish males and Turkish females and that both Turks and Kurds intermarry more in the large cities and in regions where their own group is small. With regard to education, the highest intermarriage tendencies are found among Turks with a low educational level and among Kurds with a high educational level. This finding is in line with social exchange theory.

This article discusses the gender-specific effect of the changing economic structure of mountain villages in Turkey. Rural women, who are conventionally unpaid family workers, have begun entering into off-farm work due to declining household incomes in recent years. The implications of this for gender relations are found to be contradictory in much recent research. In this study, we employed the concepts of the hybridity of rural communities and the multiplicity of social exclusion in a globalising countryside. We used a qualitative methodology employing multiple sources of data. In addition to in-depth interviews with 27 village women, we conducted semi-structured interviews with village headmen and structured interviews with 218 village women to understand the structural context behind the women's narratives. We found that the dimension of social exclusion varies with gender and age within the community. While middle-aged men are increasingly unemployed and have withdrawn into uncompetitive rural life, young women engage in wage work and challenge geographical disadvantages by spending their meagre earnings on transportation and communication technologies. The reconfiguration of marginality within the community, rather than the total marginalisation of villagers, is an ongoing process.

Rapana venosa is a non-indigenous invasive predator on bivalves in the Black Sea. A Rapana fishery has developed in the Black Sea since the 1980s, primarily in Turkey and Bulgaria. The Rapana fishery provides a complex management problem with three groups of objectives: 1. Good economic status; 2. Good environmental status and 3. Cost of implementation. To address the various conflicting objectives of this management problem an ecosystem approach was taken to analyze the problem. Stakeholder workshops were set up in Varna (Bulgaria) and Samsun (Turkey) to discuss and evaluate management alternatives based on environmental (MSFD), economic and implementation objectives. Workshops were attended by fishers, factory owners, nature conservation NGOs, biologists and government representatives. In these workshops multi-criteria analysis was used to communicate information on trade-offs between objectives to generate feedback from the stakeholders. This proved useful as a means to retrieve information from the stakeholders and to identify areas of consensus and conflict. Although the process differed substantially between the Bulgarian and Turkish case studies both workshops showed limited conflict between environmental status and socio-economic status. Analysis showed that the real-trade-off was between these two objectives and the cost of implementation both in terms of monetary expense as in terms of resistance from stakeholders. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Choke points are social, cultural, political, institutional, or psychological obstructions of social-ecological systems that constrain progress toward an environmental objective. Using a soft systems methodology, different types of chokes points were identified in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the Baltic, and the North and Mediterranean seas. The choke points were of differing types: cultural and political choke points were identified in Barra and the Mediterranean, respectively, whereas the choke points in the North Sea and Baltic Sea were dependent on differing values toward the mitigation of eutrophication. We conclude with suggestions to identify and address choke points.

Choke points are social, cultural, political, institutional, or psychological obstructions of social-ecological systems that constrain progress toward an environmental objective. Using a soft systems methodology, different types of chokes points were identified in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the Baltic, and the North and Mediterranean seas. The choke points were of differing types: cultural and political choke points were identified in Barra and the Mediterranean, respectively, whereas the choke points in the North Sea and Baltic Sea were dependent on differing values toward the mitigation of eutrophication. We conclude with suggestions to identify and address choke points.