Robustness of the Poverty Measures: Evidence from Farm Households in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

The use of a plethora of poverty indexes is sometimes fraught with difficulties. The purpose of this research was to quantitatively assess poverty and to examine the robustness of the poverty metrics. Selecting representative farm homes required a multistage sample technique, which was implemented. A total of 150 rural homes were surveyed using questionnaires. Stochastic dominance and the weighted poverty measures of Foster, Greer and Thorbecke were used in this work to examine the weighted poverty measures' resilience and sensitivity to changes in the poverty line. According to the findings, as people become older and their families get larger, the likelihood, severity, and depth of poverty increases. An asymptotic sampling distribution was utilized to infer whether poverty was larger across a variety of hypothetical poverty lines by stochastic dominance analysis. First-order stochastic dominance was found, with the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of households headed by people over 60 years old lying totally above the other distribution functions (CDFs). The CDF of single families was lower than the CDF of married households, according to the findings. At any poverty level, the CDF of families with more than 10 household members stochastically dominated those with fewer family members. Many households will be lifted out of poverty if poverty-reduction initiatives are targeted at those over 60 and those with big families.

The Anatomy of Workplace Advice Network in Relationship With Employees Personal Characteristrics, Psychological Profile and the Perceived Leadership Styles

Advice networks are integral part of an organization as they channel a highly valuable resource, advice, across the workplace in the form of information, ideas, knowledge, guidance and instructions among employees in an informal social network augmenting the formal communication channels. This thesis attempted to explore some commonly observed morphological structures of workplace advice networks including tie forming tendency, reciprocity, gender-based homophily, popularity and activity spreads and transitivity in the real-world context of personal (gender, education, experience and expertise), psychological (personality, emotional intelligence and positive psychological capital) attributes of employees and the perceived leadership styles- thus the term anatomy. Using purposive sampling, 20 service-sector organizations were surveyed as WANs and 100% response rate was achieved. Network data were collected using a sociometric matrix employing the roster method. On the other hand, the conventional data for the personal characteristics were collected using a section for the demographic variables. The questionnaire for personality, emotional intelligence and positive psychological capital were borrowed from Donnellan, Oswald, Braid and Lucas (2006), Wong and Law (2002) and Luthans Avolio, Avey and Norman (2007) respectively. The scales were tested for their validity and reliability employing exploratory and then confirmatory factor analyses for validity and Cronbach’s alphas for reliability of the scales. Finally, to map the real-world effects of actors personal characteristics, psychological profiles, and perceived leadership styles upon the selected structural paradigms of the workplace advice networks, this thesis resorted to Exponential Random Graph (or p*) Models. The results showed that actors in the advice networks followed a meticulous approach in seeking advice from given colleagues in the networks. The advice seekers also tended to form reciprocal ties besides the general tendency to form advice seeking ties with a common advice giver. As far as the nodal attributes were concerned, employees with higher scores on the personality scales tended to seek advice rather than give; whereas employees with higher scores on emotional intelligence were more inclined towards advice giving. Nonetheless, employees with higher positive psychological capitals were less inclined towards advice giving. All other structural elements and attributes were insignificant. Anatomy of workplace advice network xi The study mainly focused on the total effects of the psychological constructs including personality, emotional intelligence and positive psychological capital, there still is a need to measure the effects of the individual components of each of these constructs separately. Similarly, the effect to different types of leadership styles perception can also be independently studied with reference to the anatomy of workplace advice networks. Finally, structures like transitivity can be studied independently in a study for its various triangular forms.