Author: guanyinmiao

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting. Carlos Castaneda.
Silhouette of a man

“Multistressed families in Singapore: A focus on transnational families”: What does it mean to be “multistressed”?

Posted on by guanyinmiao

Broadly, the study by Chiu et al. (2019) makes two unsurprising but important findings: First, that multi-stressed families (or MF) – compared to the average Singaporean family – have lower levels of financial, human, and social capital to meet their needs; and second, that among these MF, transnational families have even more needs related to system barriers compared to their non-transnational counterparts. Even though these findings have useful implications for family interventions, it might also be productive to consider our definitions and understandings of “multi-stress”, to study MF who might not be receiving social services, and to evaluate the well-being of the youths across different environments.

Half-opened laptop

Sampling and construct validity: Singapore as the world’s “smartest” city?

Posted on by guanyinmiao

The news report that Singapore is the world’s “smartest” city (ST, Oct. 3) – based on the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) Smart City Index 2019, published by the IMD World Competitiveness Centre and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) – is useful for exploring the two concepts of sampling and construct validity. First, how did the IMD and SUTD team collect the survey data and to what extent are the samples representative of the 102 cities (including Singapore); and second, how did the team define and operationalise “smart” and to what extent are the survey questions and responses reflective of whether a city is truly “smart”?

A burning cigarette

Evaluating an HPB intervention to reduce youth smoking rates in Singapore

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Last week, the headline of an article from a Malaysia-based website screamed: “How Singapore cut youth smoking with this one weird trick”. And given growing public policy interest in nudges – the behavioural-psychology idea that changes to seemingly small details can have major impacts on people’s behaviour – the finding that Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB) was able to cut smoking rates at juvenile detention centres by 30 percentage points was impressive.

View of a block of HDB flats

“They Told Us to Move”: Challenging the contributions of academia

Posted on by guanyinmiao

Focused on the relocation of Dakota Crescent residents to Cassia Crescent, “They Told Us to Move” (2019) by Ng Kok Hoe and the Cassia Resettlement Team (CRT) – a volunteer team founded in 2017 to help these residents settle into their new homes – is a powerful collection of resident and volunteer narratives, unfortunately let down by the uneven and seemingly disconnected academic contributions, especially in the final third of the book. In this vein, the book is both a testament to the strong resident-volunteer forged through the relocation, resettlement, and redevelopment process as well as to the challenges of drawing meaningful connections between developments on the ground and the work of academia to effectively translate research into practice or policy change.