Martin Chautari

Background: Self-reported health (SRH) is a subjective measurement tool of overall health status. It integrates with the biological, social, mental, and functional aspects of individuals. The aim of this article is to assess the SRH and its correlates among community-living older men from Nepal. Methods: This study uses the secondary data collected by the Central Department of Population Studies at Tribhuvan University (TU). This study includes community-dwelling male elderly aged 60+ in the Pharping area of Kathmandu. For this study, there were 657 valid responses. A simple and direct question was used “In general, how do you rate your general health?” Its answer was recorded on the 5-point Likert scale “Very Good to Very Bad”. Results: The mean age of the participants was 69.51 years. The majority of respondents (75.9%) live with family members. People who reported poor SRH were 17.0%. Many of them have physical health problems (73.2%) and mental health problems (57.2%). Mental health problems, age of respondents, physical health problems, satisfaction with current living arrangements, walking efficiency, adequate income sources, Insecurity feelings, Income sufficient to fulfill the basic needs, and current working were correlated with SRH. However, linear regression shows that satisfaction with walking efficiency, physical health, and working situation, were significant predictors of SRH. Conclusion: This analysis suggests that working, walking ability, physical health problems, and financial adequacy are significantly associated with self-rated health. Identifying these variables through self-rated status can support the planning of actions aimed at improving the health of the community living older adult men in Nepal.

Introduction As is well known, the first Jan Andolan (People's Movement) of 1990 put an end to the autocratic reign of the Shah monarchy in Nepal. The subsequently promulgated Constitution of Nepal, 1990, reflected this political transition and, in turn, legally guaranteed many changes in the nature of the Nepali state. These changes made possible the realization of a different kind of public sphere in Nepal in which critical commentary on erstwhile off-limit subjects became a routine affair. We use the term ‘public sphere’ in a very general sense to refer to the public domain in a descriptive and empirical manner. Hence, for the current purpose, the term ‘public sphere’ encompasses all of the arenas and media in which public discourses take place. The transformed public sphere of Nepal during the early and late 1990s manifested itself in both print and audio-visual media but we are only concerned with the print media here. The transformed print public sphere was constituted by, among other things, mainstream media produced by newly formed private companies with commercial interests (Onta, 2002; Mainali, 2006), ‘alternate’ media produced by not-for-profit non-governmental organizations claiming to work for the public good (Basnet, 2003), critical commentary and journalism from an explicit ‘left’ political persuasion (Shrestha, 2007), and social movement-assisting media that emerged from and was part of the women's (Dhakal, 2013), Dalit (Ramtel, 2013; Biswokarma, 2013, Chapter 2) and Adivasi Janajati movements. In this chapter, we look at the contents of magazines published by Janajatis during the 1990s to show how they managed to transform the hitherto dominant public sphere of the Panchayat era (1960–90). We do so by paying attention to various texts published in these magazines that provided critical commentaries on or analyses of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious aspects of Nepali identities from various Janajati perspectives. In other words, issues that had been hardly available for critical public scrutiny from these perspectives during the Panchayat years were reported, discussed and analysed in the pages of newly started Janajati magazines after the political transformation of 1990.

Methodology after post-modernism must meet three challenges: (a) complexity / heterogeneity in the natural and social world; (b) bewildering mix of the true, false and fictive in the narratives; and (c) incompatible ideology and ethics in researchers. I argue that plurality in laws-generating models and methods takes care of natural and social complexity. Criticism of testimony enhances our capacity to discriminate truth from falsehood and from fiction. Ethnography of the self is a way to unburden ideologies from researcher’s practice. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jtrr.v1i1.10010 Journal of Technology Research and Review Volume 1, Number 1, 2014, pp 1-10

Academic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are already one of the most important institutional sites of knowledge production in the countries of the global South. This article defines academic NGOs as those NGOs which produce not only documentation but also academically engaging articles, reports, edited volumes, bibliographies, journals and monographs. It argues that their growth in the recent decades has taken place amidst the mammoth growth in the number of NGOs in general for structural and personal reasons. A case study from Nepal is provided to illustrate, both at the level of procedures and at the level of outcomes, the kinds of contributions academic NGOs have made to the knowledge enterprise. The article ends by suggesting that the links between editorial control over what academic NGOs produce and the funding they receive are more complex than is usually assumed, and that the issue of their accountability needs to be rendered in a multiple-constituency model similar to that at work in conventional universities.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/dsaj.v5i0.6356 Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 5, 2011: 49-80