Societal determinants of health are of recognized importance for understanding the causal association of society and health of an individual. Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is a challenging public health problem across the globe instigating from a broader sociocultural background. It is more prevalent among pregnant women, children under the age of five years, and adolescent girls. Adolescent girls are vulnerable to develop IDA because of additional nutritional demand of the body needed for growth spurt, blood loss due to onset of menarche, malnourishment, and poor dietary iron intake. In this study, we explore the societal determinants of anemia among adolescent girls in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Pakistan. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the Muzaffarabad division of AJK on randomly selected 626 adolescent girls. The data were collected using a pretested self-administered interview schedule comprising mainly closed-ended questions with a few open-ended questions. Descriptive statistics was computed for describing the data, and bivariate regression and logistic regression were used to determine the association of anemia with its societal determinants. Multiple linear regression is used to determine the relationship of different determinants (independent variables) with the hemoglobin level (dependent variable) of the respondents. The prevalence of anemia among adolescent girls is 47.9%, of which 47.7% have mild anemia, 51.7% have moderate anemia, and 5.7% have severe anemia, which reveals that anemia is a severe public health problem among adolescent girls in the study area. The findings aver that anemia occurrence was significantly associated with the respondent’s and her parental education, economic well-being, prevalence of communicable diseases, menstrual disorder, exercise habits, meals regularity, and type of sewerage system.

The study investigates the socio-religious factors in the propagation of genetically inherited disease of Beta thalassemia. The disorder which reportedly has a significant protraction through repeated cousin marriages results in the social maladjustment of the parents of the sick children due to constant depression, anxiety, and weak social interaction and may lead to social isolation as well. This research aims to find out the significant effect of socio-religious trends on psychosocial burden of beta thalassemia major among cousin and non-cousin couples in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. It takes a sample of 932 parents of sick children, among whom 735 were married with cousins and 197 with non-cousins, for data collection. The findings reveal that inadequate knowledge of the disease, insufficient or misdirected social support, stigmatization, and marriage breakups caused by the disease, superstitions, and misinterpretations of religion and the subsequent practices accordingly as significant predictors of psychosocial burden of beta thalassemia major among non-cousins and cousin couples. Additionally, it also finds patriarchy as only significant predictors of outcome variable among cousin couples.

No abstract

No abstract

Higher education has two-fold mission. First is to train people for practical and technical work. Second is to foster public engagement. Following this, universities are committed to educating professional for moral and societal responsibility. In 21 st century University adopts a general mission of service to the public supported by new research discoveries. Globally, many national universities are now discovering that research based public service and outreach activities can improve society at local and regional levels. The quality of higher education around the world depends on quality of research produced by educational institutions. The recent development in quality of research frameworks developed by different researchers focused on evidence-based research. The current study was intended to explore quantitative growth and qualitative development of randomly selected social sciences disciplines in the recognized public sector universities of Pakistan located in Capital, Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtoon Khawa and Balochistan during 2002-2009 regarding research publications by faculty members. From the universe of sixty eight, twenty universities were drawn through proportionate stratified random sampling from entire country, three universities from capital, six from Punjab, four, five and two from Sindh, Khyber Pakhtoon Khawa and Balochistan, respectively. From these selected universities 97 social sciences departments were randomly chosen for data collection. The current research study was conducted by using quantitative approach of social science research method and the data was collected through survey method. The unit of analysis was individuals (heads of the departments). Uni-variate analysis was implied to provide general description of various variables. The significant increase was seen in quantitative indicators such as departmental growth, degree programs offered, student's enrollment and passed out and number of faculty members. On the whole, data analysis explores that there is a tendency of improvement in all indicators of higher education in social sciences in Pakistan.