Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Background
Integrating a sex and gender lens is increasingly recognized as important in health research studies. Past failures to adequately consider sex in drug development, for example, led to medications that were metabolized differently, proved harmful, or ineffective, for females. Including both males and females in study populations is important but not sufficient; health, access to healthcare, and treatment provided are also influenced by gender, the socially mediated roles, responsibilities, and behaviors of boys, girls, women and men. Despite understanding the relevance of sex and gender to health research, integrating this lens into study designs can still be challenging. Identified here, are nine opportunities to address sex and gender and thereby strengthen research proposals.

Methods
Ontario investigators were invited to submit a draft of their health research proposal to the Sex and Gender Research Support Service (SGRSS) at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. The service works to build capacity on the integration of sex, gender, and other identity factors, in health research. Using the SAGER Guidelines and the METRICS for the Study of Sex and Gender in Human Participants as guides, proposals were reviewed to enhance their sex and gender considerations. Content analysis of the feedback provided these investigators was subsequently completed.

Results
Nearly 100 hundred study proposals were reviewed and investigators provided with suggestions on how to enhance their proposal. Analyzing the feedback provided across the reviewed studies revealed commonly overlooked opportunities to elevate consideration of sex and gender. These were organized into nine suggestions to mirror the sections of a research proposal.

Conclusion
Health researchers are often challenged on how to integrate a sex and gender lens into their work. Reviews completed across a range of health research studies show there are several commonly overlooked opportunities to do better in this regard. Nine ways to improve the integration of a sex and gender lens in health research proposals have been identified.

There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the noncooperative equilibrium, and recent empirical work has supported this conclusion in the context of the Montreal Protocol. This paper reaches the opposite conclusion, by means of the comparison of the CFC emissions implicit within the cooperative and noncooperative management paths. The cooperative path is implicit within the terms of the Montreal Protocol. The noncooperative path is implicit in countries' behaviour during the period of unilateral management of CFC emissions. This study estimates the relationship between countries' propensities to produce CFCs and income per capita over the period 1976-1988 (prior to the entry into force of the Montreal Protocol). It then extrapolates this path of unilateral management beyond 1988, and compares it to the obligations adopted under the cooperative regime. This comparison of the projected noncooperative path with the obligations adopted under the Montreal Protocol allows a qualitative test of theories on the economic foundations of self-enforcing IEAs. We find that, in the absence of the Protocol, CFC production (and hence emissions) would have increased by a factor of three over the next fifty years. This study also supplements existing environmental Kuznets curve analyses by providing estimates for the unilateral management for a global externality. In this manner we are able to assess the distributive impacts of the Protocol, in addition to its effectiveness. Using dynamic estimation methods on a panel of around 30 countries over 13 years, the turning point in the relationship between CFC production and income is found to lie around (1986) US$16,000. This implies that developing countries bear the greatest costs in the implementation of the Montreal Protocol.

Little research has examined how migration affects marital relationships, or the processes by which immigrant couples adapt to their new circumstances. This paper presents data from a research project conducted with newcomer Ethiopians in Toronto, both married and divorced or separated. The objective of this paper is to document post-migration changes in the lives of newcomer couples and to examine the impact of post-migration changes on marital relationships. The study sample consisted of 25 participants, all of who were Ethiopian immigrants to Toronto. Both individual and focus group interviews were conducted. The major types of post-migration changes described by study participants were losses of household help, emotional support, income and status, and changes in gender roles. The impacts of these change on marital relationships were described as increased marital conflict, increased autonomy for women, increased mutual dependence, more joint decisionmaking, and changes in communication and intimacy. Study findings challenged the notion that the impact of post-migration changes on marital relationships is all negative. Recognising the potential for positive and negative changes in marital relationships following migration can inform the practices of settlement organizations and the development of violence prevention strategies for newcomer couples and communities. Findings also have implications for the development of theory on the etiology of IPV. However, future research is necessary to confirm study findings with other immigrant communities representing different migration and resettlement experiences to identify commonalties and synthesize results across communities.