Abstract
The process by which young people leave home in South Africa is central for understanding the lives of the country's young adult population, as well as, their role in the structural ...household change that has occurred over the post‐apartheid period. However, hardly any quantitative work has been conducted on this process and no work exists on trends. This study provides nationally representative trends of home‐leaving for young adults in South Africa for the first time using a stacked series of annual cross‐sections between 1995 and 2011. Different home‐leaving rates by race converged in the late 90s and steadied in the 2000s. Most South Africans only left home by age 25—but whether this can be interpreted as ‘delayed’ or not is complicated by diverse family patterns and the presence of stretched households. Home‐leavers are especially dependent on labour market income in the absence of social grants targeted at the large unemployed young adult population. Since young women face higher unemployment rates than young men, women were notably more reliant than men on marriage as a pathway out of the parental home. Over time, young male home‐leavers are living alone at higher rates, meaning they have contributed to general household proliferation.
In South Africa, households were formed at about twice the rate that the population grew be-tween census 1996 and census 2011 and the number of single-person households ballooned by 150%. Reweighted ...household survey data shows a surge in household formation in the late 1990s was driven by prime-aged and older women and Black African men, likely connected to new freedoms afforded to these groups after the transition to democracy. Household formation steadied in the 2000s, hiding variation in who formed what types of households. Astonishing growth in the rate at which South Africans live alone was led by Black African men, a group historically associated with circular labour migration. Women instead are heading up complex households including children. These changes connect to long-term marital decline. By 2011, most female heads were never-married and the growing majority population group of never-married adults increased their rate of household formation.
A methodologically sound systematic review is characterized by transparency, replicability, and a clear inclusion criterion. However, little attention has been paid to reporting the details of ...interrater reliability (IRR) when multiple coders are used to make decisions at various points in the screening and data extraction stages of a study. Prior research has mentioned the paucity of information on IRR including number of coders involved, at what stages and how IRR tests were conducted, and how disagreements were resolved. This article examines and reflects on the human factors that affect decision-making in systematic reviews via reporting on three IRR tests, conducted at three different points in the screening process, for two distinct reviews. Results of the two studies are discussed in the context of IRR and intrarater reliability in terms of the accuracy, precision, and reliability of coding behavior of multiple coders. Findings indicated that coding behavior changes both between and within individuals over time, emphasizing the importance of conducting regular and systematic IRR and intrarater reliability tests, especially when multiple coders are involved, to ensure consistency and clarity at the screening and coding stages. Implications for good practice while screening/coding for systematic reviews are discussed.
Background
Retailers routinely use security tags to reduce theft. Presently, however, there has been no attempt to systematically review the literature on security tags. Guided by the acronym EMMIE, ...this paper set out to (1) examine the evidence that tags are effective at reducing theft, (2) identify the key mechanisms through which tags are expected to reduce theft and the conditions that moderate tag effectiveness, and (3) summarise information relevant to the implementation and economic costs of tagging.
Methods
In this mixed-methods review, we performed systematic keyword searches of the published and unpublished literature, hand searched relevant journals, conducted forward and backward citation searches and consulted with four retailers. Studies were included if they reported an explicit goal of reducing the theft or shrinkage of items through the use of security tags in retail environments.
Results
We identified 50 eligible studies, eight of which reported quantitative data on the effectiveness of tags in retail environments. Across these eight studies, five showed positive results associated with the introduction of tags, but heterogeneity in the type of tag and reported outcome measures precluded a meta-analysis. We identified three mechanisms through which tags might plausibly reduce theft—increase the risks, reduce the rewards, increase the effort—which were found to vary by tag type, and their activation dependent on five broad categories of moderator: retail store and staff, customers (including shoplifters), tag type, product type, and the involvement of the police and criminal justice system. Implementation challenges documented in the literature related mainly to staffing issues and tagging strategy. Finally, although estimates are available on the costs of tagging, our searches identified no high-quality published economic evaluations of tagging.
Conclusions
Through applying the EMMIE framework this review highlighted the complexity involved in security tagging in retail environments, whereby different kinds of tags are expected to reduce theft through different casual mechanisms which are dependent on a distinctive configuration of conditions. Based on the available evidence it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of tags as a theft reduction measure, albeit there is suggestive evidence that more visible tags are associated with greater reductions in theft than less visible tags.
The October Household Surveys (OHS) (1994–1999) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) (2002–present) collected by StatsSA comprise South Africa's only nationally representative time series with ...information on both people and households for (almost) every year of the post‐apartheid period. However, the quality of these data has been compromised by how the survey weights have been calibrated. We document these problems and their implications in detail and then use cross‐entropy estimation to recalibrate the survey weights for a stacked version of these surveys between 1995 and 2011 to address these weaknesses. The first issue with the weights is that calibration procedure breaks with sampling practise by calibrating person and household weights separately. This creates conceptual problems because the data are not properly representative of the population. It also creates statistical problems, including that a series of total population and household counts cannot be reliably extracted from the series, which is typically a first‐order output for such a time series. Second, the series of household counts extracted from the GHS is probably too low. Third, no compensation is made by the survey weights for the chronic undersampling of small households over the entire period. Our new weights make headway in resolving these issues.
Overseas diasporas have long been exploited by terrorist organisations seeking funding and support from areas beyond their operation. The Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), active in south-eastern ...Turkey, is no exception and maintains a significant international presence. This paper uses seventy-three survey responses and thirteen interviews amongst London's Turkish and Kurdish diaspora to provide an original and comprehensive insight into the PKK's overseas operations, including their offending patterns, methods, hotspots, offender/victim profiles and existing countermeasures. Respondents were also consulted on new community-based prevention measures designed to address limited law enforcement responses and the laissez-faire approaches of diaspora host countries. This strategy, which combines crime science and behavioural economic theories, consists of Clarke's "Situational Crime Prevention" theory and Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge" theory (SCP+N). The results indicate that the PKK creates criminal opportunities by "legitimising" itself across diasporas by invoking ideological sympathy and social dependence (conceptualised as "constructed legitimisers"), ensuring minimal resistance to its activities. SCP+N is motivated as an effective counterstrategy, addressing both the rational and impulsive nature of offending. The overall theoretical contribution of this paper is to assess overseas terrorist financing through a prevention-oriented, situational and behavioural framework, and to propose a community-based strategy to effectively counter such activities.
We propose modifications for scoping (and by extension systematic) review methodologies to improve their contribution to horizon scanning exercises. As a means of systematically collecting, coding ...and synthesising literature, we argue that scoping reviews are ideal for conducting initial environmental scans of a topic of interest, trend analyses and scenario developments. To demonstrate this utility, this paper uses a futures-oriented scoping review of technology-enhanced money laundering and terrorist financing risks as an example. At the forefront of the proposed modifications is a quality assessment framework assessing reviewed publications for their neutrality, evidence, relevance and clarity (NERC). This proposed framework is not only ideal for appraising publications but also as an indication of likelihood, namely whether their discussed insights constitute possible, plausible or probable alternative futures. The validity of the NERC framework in achieving these aims is assessed successfully through statistical correlation tests. The overall aim of this paper is to motivate the proposed modifications, the NERC framework and (modified) scoping reviews more generally as a formidable tool for informing horizon scanning, decision-making and pre-emptive policy development.
•With some methodological enhancements, systematic and scoping reviews can become effective initial horizon scanning tools.•This article proposes six such modifications, including study selection, quality appraisal and expert verification.•The NERC framework (neutrality, evidence, relevance, and clarity) is proposed to assess publication quality.•The utility of NERC scores to identify weak signals, possible, plausible and probable future scenarios is demonstrated.•This can have significant impact on informing future studies, policy, prioritisation and understanding of futures issues.
•Technology advances are creating new money laundering and terrorist financing risks•This Delphi study identifies these risks, relevant stakeholders and countermeasures•Weaknesses in current ...countermeasures and dissent across industries are explored•A new prevention standard (3P) and framework (DECODE) are devised as policy solutions•These solutions aim to pre-emptively counter new risks and address points of dissent
Financial innovation and technological advances are growing at a pace unrivalled by any other period in history. However, as more stakeholders enter these markets, criminals are exploiting their inadvertent security deficiencies to launder illicit funds or finance terrorism. This three-round policy Delphi study involved consultations with 52 experts from different industries and countries to understand future risk-prone technological developments, possible prevention measures and relevant stakeholders. Results highlight a range of money laundering and terrorist financing risks being enabled by advances in distributed ledger technologies (predominantly through cryptocurrencies), new payment methods and financial technology (FinTech). These threats include privacy-enhanced cryptoassets, transaction laundering, e-currencies and digital-only financial services. Findings also suggest that detection-based countermeasures (currently the primary preventative approach) can be coupled with more diverse countermeasures to increase effectiveness. However, the unique circumstances and constraints specific to different stakeholders will affect the nature, utility, and extent to which they can implement certain countermeasures. As such, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to prevention is undesirable. Drawing on expert insight from the study, we propose a framework and a 3-point standard of implementation to motivate cost-effective, user-friendly, and innovation-friendly measures to improve suspicious activity detection and futureproof technologies before their criminal exploitation becomes mainstream.
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