While factors affecting smoking are well documented, the role of religion has received little attention. This national study aims to assess the extent to which religious affiliation is associated with current-smoking and ever-smoking, controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Variations between adult and youth populations are examined using secondary analysis of individual-level data from 5 years of the Health Survey for England for adult (aged[20, n = 39,837) and youth (aged 16-20, n = 2355) samples. Crude prevalence statistics are contrasted with binary logistic models for current-smoking and eversmoking in the adult and youth samples. Analyses suggest that Muslims smoke substantially less than Christians. Highest levels of smoking characterise people not professing any religion. Associations between smoking and the Muslim religion attenuate to statistical insignificance in the face of ethnic and socio-economic factors. An association between smoking and the absence of a religious affiliation is sustained. An understanding of the association between smoking and religion is essential to the development of tobacco control programmes.

The paper assesses the impact of recent attempts to reform Russia's system of Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET). Having become dislocated from industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vocational Training Colleges (Profuchilishche, or PU) 1 recently became the subject of decentralizing reforms intended to make them more responsive to local labour market demand. Drawing on research conducted in the Ul'yanovsk region of Russia in 2004, the paper argues that in some respects the system has become more flexible. However, the reform process as a whole, particularly in its emphasis on 'social partnership', is too dependant on change taking place spontaneously. Qualitative change is further hindered by continuing efforts to engender an excessively close fit between labour market supply and demand, a tendency that owes its rationale to Soviet-era planning, and which ignores the way many graduates of PU approach their transitions into work.

This article contributes a global perspective to the emerging literature on girlhood in Western contexts by examining the changing shape of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young women in St. Petersburg, Russia. As in many Western countries, new forms of service sector employment and an increasingly accessible higher education system appear to offer young women new prospects for social mobility. In contrast to the increasingly impoverished and denigrated traditional pathways into work, the young women in the study derive significant value from these new opportunities, constructing narratives of self-actualisation and approximating notions of respectable femininity. Nevertheless, actual social mobility is elusive, as familiar patterns of classed and gendered stratification limit their prospects. Despite its specificity, the case thus further illustrates the limited nature of the transformations available to young women through the new forms of education and work characteristic of global neo-liberal contexts.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract