BACKGROUND The concept of honour has cultural, social and moral underpinnings that determine its expression and perseveration. Women are viewed as the bearers of family honour with chastity equated with abstinence from premarital or extramarital relationships and obeying norms determined and dictated by traditions and societies. The objective of this study was to determine the opinions of men a...

BACKGROUND The genital complaint of abnormal vaginal discharge is common in South Asia. We describe the risk factors for the incidence of the complaint in women of reproductive age. Method Population-based cohort study in Goa, India. Out of 3000 randomly selected women, 2494 women participated. The outcome was an incident case of the complaint of abnormal vaginal discharge at 6 months (T1) and ...

BACKGROUND The incidence of STI is high and increasing in Bhutan. Poor understanding of risky sexual behavior could be a cause. Comprehensive community surveys have not been previously done. This study was conducted to assess local knowledge on STIs and sexual risk behaviour in two rural districts of Bhutan: Gasa and Zhemgang. METHODS The study population included residents aged 15-49 years i...

In social advertising, ads are targeted based on underlying social networks and their content is tailored with information that pertains to the social relationship. This paper explores the effectiveness of social advertising using data from field tests of different ads on Facebook. We find evidence that social advertising is effective, and that this efficacy seems to stem mainly from the abilit...

We consider a setting where agents select among competing products of unknown quality by costly sequential search. The agents are active on an online social network, and late movers benefit from possibly being able to see early movers’ purchase decisions. In this setting we consider the impact of advertising by firms, and the incentives of the underlying social network platform. We consider dis...

BACKGROUND Consistent with the deinstitutionalization-of-marriage thesis, studies report a decline in support for marital conventions and increased approval of other relationship types. Generalizations are limited by the lack of cross-national research for a broad domain of attitudes on marriage and alternative arrangements, and by the lack of consensus on what counts as evidence. OBJECTIVE A...

Premarital health examination (PHE) is ideally to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases (STD) within a couple; to detect reproductive problems or hereditary illness which may pass to offspring; and to provide counseling on family planning and genetic health. However, little is known about the implementation of PHE program. We conducted a selfadministered questionnaire survey to participants who...

In this paper we conduct descriptive aggregate analyses to revisit the relationship of low and lowest-low period fertility to cohort fertility and key fertility-related behaviour such as leaving the parental home, marriage, and women's labour force participation. Our analyses show that the cross-country correlations in Europe between total fertility and the total first marriage rate, the propor...