Sociology

Background: Pakistan is among those countries where the number of caesarean section births has increased unusually in the past two decades. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to analyse the trend of caesarean section deliveries among child-bearing women (aged 15-49 years) in Pakistan and to identify maternal sociodemographic factors and pregnancy-related variables associated with the change in caesarean deliveries from 1990 to 2018. Methods: Secondary data from Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (1990-2018) were analysed. The analysis of data was confined to child-bearing mothers. Sample sizes were 4029, 5721, 7461 and 8287 for the time periods of 1990-91, 2006-07, 2012-13 and 2017-18, respectively. Socio-demographic information of the mothers and pregnancy-related variables were taken as independent variables for the present study. The association between independent variables and caesarean deliveries was measured in terms of unadjusted odds ratios (OR) and adjusted OR (AOR). Results: The percentages of the mothers who had at least one delivery during the 5 years prior to each survey who had caesarean deliveries increased continuously from 3.2% in 1990-91 to 19.6% in 2017-18. Results indicate that mothers over 24 years of age, located in Punjab, from the richest socioeconomic class and living in urban areas were more likely to have delivered by caesarean section. Mothers with a first child in birth order and who had five and more children, as well as mothers who had more antenatal care visits and delivered babies in private hospitals showed a higher probability of caesarean section births.

The use of plagiarism avoiding techniques can be helpful to maintain academic
integrity, a better learning environment and intellectual honesty. This
explored the use of plagiarism avoiding techniques for creating ethical scholarship
among research students. It also measured the association between
the frequency of using plagiarism avoiding techniques and the satisfaction
about knowledge of plagiarism. Data were collected from seven universities
through an online self-structured questionnaire. Ordinal logistic regression
analysis was used to explore the variance. The association between the frequency
of using plagiarism avoiding techniques and satisfaction about knowledge
of plagiarism was indicated. Differences were also found on the basis
of gender, discipline, level and stage of study.

The objectives of this confirmatory study were to investigate the association of socio-economic demographics
(age, education of respondent, gender, monthly family income, parentage education), motives
(communication and information, self-actualization and outward looking) of using Social
Networking Sites (SNSs) and attitudinal and behavior variable (intensity of using SNS, self-esteem,
gratification with university life, duration of use, and number of ties) with the formation of bonding
and bridging social capital. Total 461 students, aged 18e35 years filled the questionnaire, from randomly
selected departments of University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. Regression analysis was used to
assess the association among variables. The study indicated that Facebook is the most popular SNS
among university students in Pakistan. Intensity of using SNS, duration of using SNSs, and motives of
using SNSs were found to be positively associated with formation of bonding and bridging social capital.
Self-esteem and gratifications with university life were found to be significant predictors in formation of
bonding social capital only. The demographics variables (education, parentage education, monthly family
income) had no influence on formation of both bonding and bridging social capital.