International Journal of Social Work

1-9

Authors: Ali Saleh Alshebami, D. M. Khandare

The purpose of the study is to theoretically review the Islamic micro finance industry in Yemen and to identify the challenges and opportunities for this industry. The data collected is entirely based on secondary data collected from various sources such as books, websites, official reports and others. The study covered the period from 1997 to 2013. The study revealed that there is a promising demand for Islamic microfinance and at the same time there are some challenges facing its growth and development. The researcher finally concluded the study by providing some valuable suggestions that might help in progressing of the industry.

18-35

Authors: Augustina Naami

Gender and disability interacts to create several challenges and vulnerabilities for women with disabilities. This paper explores and compares the daily experiences of unemployed women with physical disabilities in Tamale-Ghana and Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States. Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 women with physical disabilities about their experiences with employment, unemployment and how unemployment affects their lives. Outcome suggests that the women encounter several challenges in their daily lives relating to mobility, family relationships, income, social participation and living arrangement. While some of the experiences undoubtedly differ between the two studies, some, interestingly, were similar across the two geographic regions regardless of the cultural differences.

1-21

Authors: Kumaresan V. Sathasivam, Mohd Dahlan Hj. A. Malek, Ahmad Faris Abdullah

Job stress is vastly present in today’s organizations, and the costs of these phenomena cut across all levels of society. In recent years, researchers considering job stress in the workplace have made great strides in understanding several aspects of the stress phenomenon in the field of organizational behavior. Thus, it becomes more important that the individual variables of these job stresses are well explored and directly linked to individuals experiencing this situation, in order to ensure the right stressors are well understood and other moderating functions are studied, like the personality variables. This research presents an integration of past research and theory that models the relationship of organizational stressors like conflict, work overload, unfavorable work condition, and the moderating role of personality traits among managers. The scope of this study is limited to managerial positions in electronics firms in Malaysia. A set of demographic factors like gender, marital status and educational background, are also studied as influencing factors to job stress. The final framework in this study includes the organizational stressors as the independent variable and job stress as the dependent variable, with the personality traits moderating that relationship. A proportional sampling plan will be done to cover the surveys to be covering all major locations of electronics firms in Malaysia. Theoretical and managerial implications of the study will be discussed in details. The implication of the study would be extremely beneficial for electronics organizations in not only identifying the organizational sources of job stress, but also to understand the personality behaviors of their management staffs and how that related to job stress. Organizational stressors play a big role in the study, in which understanding its influence to job stress and how to manage and cope would enable the leadership team in the electronics organizations to be able to handle job stress more efficiently.

36-44

Authors: Ali Saleh Alshebami, D. M. Khandare

The objective of this paper is to identify the challenges facing the empowerment of women in Yemen. This paper is mainly based on the secondary data collected from the records of the Yemeni Government programmes viz., Social Fund for Development, Microfinance books, websites, official reports and other sources related to the research subject. The mentioned study covers the period from 1997 to 2013 and the area for the study is Yemen. The result of the study reported that there are multiple factors affecting the empowerment of women in Yemen through microfinance such as customs and traditions, high interest rate, financial literacy, wrong religious perceptions, demanded collaterals. However, despite the difficulties and challenges facing women empowerment in Yemen, it is believed that women who are connected to microfinance programs have been positively affected with their households in various aspects as many studies revealed that.