BackgroundThere exist ample of research literature investigating the various facet of contraceptive use behaviors in India but the use of contraception by married Indian women, prior to having their first pregnancy has been neglected so far. This study attempts to identify the socio demographic determinants and differentials of contraceptive use or non use by a woman in India, before she proceeds to have her first child. The analysis was done using data from the third National Family Health Survey (2005–2006), India.MethodsThis study utilized information from 54,918 women who ever have been married and whose current age at the time of NFHS-3 survey was 15–34 years. To identify the crucial socio-demographic determinants governing this pioneering behavior, logistic regression technique has been used. Hosmer Lemeshow test and ROC curve analysis was also performed in order to check the fitting of logistic regression model to the data under consideration.ResultsOf all the considered explanatory variables religion, caste, education, current age, age at marriage, media exposure and zonal classifications were found to be significantly affecting the study behavior. Place of residence i.e. urban - rural locality came to be insignificant in multivariable logistic regression.ConclusionsIn the light of sufficient evidences confirming the presence of early marriages and child bearing practices in India, conjunct efforts are required to address the socio demographic differentials in contraceptive use by the young married women prior to their first pregnancy. Encouraging women to opt for higher education, ensuring marriages only after legal minimum age at marriage and promoting the family planning programs via print and electronic media may address the existing socio economic barriers. Also, the family planning programs should be oriented to take care of the geographical variations in the study behavior.

This important book by Dr. Anjali Pandey places her among the pioneers of linguistic and interdisciplinary research into the multilingual stylistics of postcolonial, or-as Pandey defines the period following "9/11" (in 2001) and the financial melt-down of 2008-post-global, literature in English. The study examines ways multilingual content from "other" languages are presented and how these strategies are influenced by mass production, popular tastes and the exigencies of transnational publishers, themselves under the hegemonic sway of the UK and the USA. She takes stock of an array of extant approaches from which she borrows and fine-hones her own analytical tools, to delve into several interconnected language issues of the utmost pertinence in the 21 st century, as the world's languages vie for prominence or struggle to survive in the face of the global hegemony of a few. Pandey's ambitious study further examines the economics and implications for world languages of the culture of literary awards for English. Her main focus is on works published in the decade from 2003 to 2014, written in English by five transnational writers with roots in the Indian subcontinent who have been winners or nominees for the most prestigious awards. The literary-linguistic and the socio-cultural phenomena Pandey describes are evolving fast and furiously, yet until now have received surprisingly little scholarly attention, least of all at the crucial interdisciplinary nexus of sociolinguistics, micro-linguistics, cultural studies, postcolonial theory and political and economic influences. The most prominent forerunners here must be Chantal Zabus' seminal work on the representation of African languages in Europhone West African fiction, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West-African Europhone Novel, (1991; 2007); and for the merchandising ideology underlying the award-culture, that of Graham Huggan: The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001). My own book, Emerging Traditions: Towards a Postcolonial Stylistics of Black South African Fiction in English (2011), inspired by Zabus,' traced the impact of historical, cultural and political changes on the stylistics and multilingual content in black fiction in English. Pandey develops insightful, broad-based arguments regarding both causes and effects of the stylistic choices under scrutiny. She shows how the literary-linguistic and the socio-cultural phenomena that she addresses through her analysis of instances of multilingualism in the writings of multicultural authors writing in English reflect and sustain Western hegemonic monolingual preferences and complacency. They

Background: Indian women are more prone to first birth at a relatively younger age after marriage. Also, we do not have sufficient literature available that focuses on contraceptive use before first birth. The analysis of the present study was done using data from the fourth round of National Family Health Survey (2015-16), India. The objectives of the present study were to measure the levels and trends of contraceptive use before first birth among Indian ever married women, aged 15-34 years. Methods: The study includes 279,896 ever married women aged 15-34 years at the time of the NFHS-4 survey. To identify the socio-demographic determinants governing the pioneering study behavior, multivariable techniques have been used in the analysis. The statistical significance of the relationship between socio-demographic factors and contraceptive use prior to first birth was tested using a chi-squared test for association. Hosmer Lemeshow statistics and Nagelkerke R square have been used to check how well the logistic regression model fits the data. Map of India showing different zonal classification is made using the ArcGIS software version 10.3. Result: The trends of contraceptive usage show a decline in use before first birth and the various socio-demographic factors affecting the use of contraceptive before first birth are religion, caste, education, wealth index, media exposure, age at marriage and the zonal classifications. Conclusion: The noticeable result in this study is the comparative decline in contraceptive use by women in India before first birth in NFHS-4 with respect to previous NFHS done in India. The likelihood of using contraception before first birth is significantly affected by factors like place of residence, religion, caste, current age of women, age at marriage, education level of women, wealth index, media exposure and zonal classification.

The recent controversy over the issue of Ebonics has been well documented in both the print media and in the electronic media, in particular, on the internet. The impact of electronic discourse has been the focus of a number of researchers (Birkerts, 1998;Lakoff, 1998;Vitanza, 1999). However, the locus of research of most theorists has been on the metalanguage of this discourse genre, and on its role in the creation of unique discourse communities (Foertsch, 1995;Hawisher and Moran, 1993). Few studies have examined the extent to which this medium functions to create and sustain group ideologies. This study presents a content analysis of the electronic debate on Ebonics that spanned over eighteen months, drawing scholars from all over the world, and culminating in over seventy individual postings on an electronic bulletin board. What this study demonstrates is that in contesting issues, using the national social debate on Ebonics, linguists seek to assert their power as a group by excluding and marginalizing those parties that do not belong. The data analysis illustrates the linguistic devices through which such othering is constructed and maintained. The resultant electronic debate while overtly framed about Ebonics, covertly functions to assert the status of linguists as a group.

This study examines the extent to which college freshmen compositions seek to reflect and construct differences between the self and the other. The data sample consists of over 100 freshmen compositions on a variety of topics spanning a period of three years. The framework of analysis is derived from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1994;Riggins, 1997; van Dijk, 1993). This study demonstrates that lexicalizations of outsiders, of others, in freshmen writing can often reflect univocal attitudes of ambivalence, derision, or impersonalization. Usually, differences in social groups are resolved via linguistic categorizations that absolve feelings of guilt or shame particularly if the student writes as a member of the powered group. Sometimes, however, lexicalizations reflect a unique critical stance on the part of the student writer who creatively utilizes such linguistic representations of 'others' to challenge status quo othering practices. Access to and the use of othering strategies, it is argued, is a powerful rhetorical tool. As the excerpts examined in this study will demonstrate, overt as opposed to covert lexicalizations of othering-encoded in language evocative of hierarchy, subordination, and dominance-often reflect differential rhetorical ability on the part of the student writer. The implications of this study are pedagogical, and call for a re-imagining of the teaching of writing via an examination of the actual discursive tools accessible to different writers, and how these serve in judgments of rhetorical skills in particular, and creative and critical thinking in general.