There are disproportionately higher and inconsistently distributed rates of recorded suicides in rural areas. Patterns of rural suicide are well documented, but they remain poorly understood. Geographic variations in physical and mental health can be understood through the combination of compositional, contextual, and collective factors pertaining to particular places. The aim of this study was...

INTRODUCTION Recognition of the factors related to women's health is necessary. Evidence is available that the social structure including social capital plays an important role in the shaping people's health. The aim of the current study was to investigate the association between self-rated health and social capital in women of reproductive age. METHODS This study is a population-based cross-...

We, a diverse group of South African academics, study embodied reflexivity through poetry, and this article is an account poetic inquiry inspired by assemblages created the participants in symposium, Object Inquiry for Social Cohesion Public Higher Education. As symposium’s cofacilitators, we wondered how what might learn from reading poetically as explorations social cohesion. We describe symp...

Many sub-Saharan African countries are confronted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This article reviews academic literature in the social sciences and health to discover why HIV/AIDS has become an epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and not in other parts of the world. This was studied by examining the social determinants of diminishment of tradition and social cohesion in terms of political, social and ec...

Numerical models indicate that collective animal behavior may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional positions of individual birds in airborne flocks of a few thousand members, we show that t...

We develop a theory of legislative representation in open and flexible list proportional rule electoral systems (OFPR). Our framework highlights how representatives’ desire to cultivate a personal vote may undermine or strengthen the pursuit of collective party goals. We show that whether collective and individual goals are in conflict depends on the flexibility of the list—the extent to which ...

In business and sports, teams often experience periods of positive and negative momentum while pursuing their goals. However, researchers have not yet been able to provide insights into how psychological and behavioral states actually change during positive and negative team momentum. In the current study we aimed to provide these insights by introducing an experimental dynamical research desig...

The authors argue that Wilkinson's model omits important variables (social class) that make it vulnerable to biases due to model mis-specification. Furthermore, the culture of inequality hypothesis unnecessarily "psychopathologizes" the relatively deprived while omitting social determinants of disease related to production (environmental and occupational hazards) and the capacity of the relativ...