Genomics has the potential to revolutionize medical approaches to disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, but it does not come without challenges. The success of a national population-based genome program, like the Qatar Genome Program (QGP), depends on the willingness of citizens to donate samples and take up genomic testing services. This study explores public attitudes of the Qatari population toward genetic testing and toward participating in the QGP. A representative sample of 837 adult Qataris was surveyed in May 2016. Approximately 71% of respondents surveyed reported that they were willing to participate in the activities of the QGP. Willingness to participate was significantly associated with basic literacy in genetics, a family history of genetic diseases, and previous experience with genetic testing through premarital screening. Respondents cited the desire to know more about their health status as the principle motivation for participating, while lack of time and information were reported as the most important barriers. With QGP plans to ramp up the scale of its national operation toward more integration into clinical care settings, it is critical to understand public attitudes and their determinants. The results demonstrate public support but also identify the need for more education and individual counseling that not only provide information on the process, challenges, and benefits of genomic testing, but that also address concerns about information security.

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How do foreign workers navigate competing pressures when deciding to remain in a place or leave for a new destination? Here, we explore migration decision-making across a diverse set of migrant nationalities using an innovative survey experiment implemented in the Arab Gulf state of Qatar. Extending recent work that highlights the contribution of experiments to the study of complex migration decision-making choices, we employ a conjoint survey experiment that asks respondents whether they would remain in the country or seek to leave under randomised scenarios. Responses to conventional migration questions about past and future migration decisions are compared with experimental findings, covering a range of economic, social, and political factors. Both the conventional and experimental results are analysed across nationality subgroups. We find that local security and stability underpin both the reasons that migrants were attracted to Qatar and their propensities to leave, conditional on regional background. This has major implications for migrant decision-making calculus in light of regional economic and political deterioration. The results confirm the importance of a variety of economic factors for complex migration decision-making and suggest that survey experiments present a fruitful option for future research on this topic.

Western media globalization is implicated in the spread of the thin body ideal to traditional societies. Qatar—a small conservative Middle-Eastern country—has recently witnessed rapid Westernization, but the influence of Western media icons on women’s body image dissatisfaction has rarely been studied here. A 2 (celebrity or model) × 3 (thin, average, or heavy) plus a control condition between-subject experiment tested the primary hypothesis that exposure to images of thin Western models or celebrities promotes a thinner body ideal compared to neutral images. A sample of young women (n = 1145) was randomly assigned to experimental images as part of an online survey. After exposure to images, participants rated their current and desired body size and shape, reported celebrity liking, and evaluated their favorite celebrity’s body. We found little support for the desire of thinness. Viewing thin- and average-sized celebrities was significantly associated with desiring a heavier and a thinner look (respectively) among those favoring thin celebrities. Images of thin models induced the desire for a curvaceous body figure with hips especially among those favoring celebrities with hips. The findings highlight important nuances in the influence of Western media icons on body image among women in a non-Western culture.

This article introduces the concept of bargaining power as a framework for understanding varieties of migration experience and behavior. We argue that migration and settlement experiences vary according to a migrant’s leverage — or bargaining power — afforded by their individual cultural and socioeconomic capital (internal bargaining power) and their home country’s political and physical security characteristics (external bargaining power). These two dimensions of bargaining power interact with a host country’s social and political structures to produce specific experiences of (dis)advantage. We apply our framework to the Arab Gulf states, where large and diverse foreign populations experience complex and interconnected forms of inclusion and exclusion. Utilizing data from a nationally representative survey of a highly diverse sample of foreign residents in Qatar, we use our framework, first, to generate a typology of Gulf migration experience and, then, to statistically predict migrants’ reported life satisfaction in the host country and intentions for long-term settlement. We also use widely available secondary data to examine objective correlates of bargaining power, offering an alternative pathway for future research that does not require individual-level survey data. We conclude by describing the relevance of our bargaining power framework to the study of varieties of migration experience in other migration regimes.