Alarm about the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity has focussed attention on individual lifestyle behaviours that may contribute to unhealthy weight. More distal predictors such as maternal employment may also be implicated since working mothers have less time to supervise children's...

The distribution of leisure time between the sexes is contested. Becker's theory of specialisation suggests that there is an underlying gender equity in leisure, while the competing view suggests that women are now bearing a 'dual burden' as both family providers and family carers. Using...

Many employees experience a strained relationship between their paid work and personal lives. Information and communication technologies present new opportunities for reshaping this relationship. In particular, they challenge the spatial and temporal boundary that typically separates the realms....

Focus groups are widely used in the field of public health as a quick, low-cost means of obtaining information from selected groups in the target population for programmatic purposes. Much has been written about techniques for conducting focus groups, but there is limited practical information...

Both projects described here, Matadi and Kananga, helped health providers in those two cities offer clinical family planning services. But their approaches differed markedly. The family education program in Matadi concentrated on pioneering community-based distribution of contraceptives, with...

Time use data (TUD) are distinctive, being episodic in nature and consisting of both continuous and discrete (exact zeros) values. TUD is non-negative and generally right skewed. To analyze such data, the Tobit, and to a lesser extent, linear regression models are often used. Tobit models assume...

Both men and women in central Zaire like a 'dry, tight' vagina because it increases pleasure during sexual intercourse. In focus group interviews, they described wiping and washing procedures, as well as 30 different substances, mostly leaves and powders, that women can insert into the vagina to...

Feminist theories of technology have come a long way over the last quarter of a century. The expanding engagement at the intersection of feminist scholarship and science and technology studies (STS) has enriched both fields immeasurably, and I will largely focus my reflections on the literature...