Efficacy,Action, and Support for Reducing Climate Change Risks

A growing body of research demonstrates that believing action to reduce the risks of climate change is both possible (self‐efficacy) and effective (response efficacy) is essential to motivate and sustain risk mitigation efforts. Despite this potentially critical role of efficacy beliefs, measures and their use vary wildly in climate change risk perception and communication research, making it hard to compare and learn from efficacy studies. To address this problem and advance our understanding of efficacy beliefs, this article makes three contributions. First, we present a theoretically motivated approach to measuring climate change mitigation efficacy, in light of diverse proposed, perceived, and previously researched strategies. Second, we test this in two national survey samples (Amazon's Mechanical Turk N = 405, GfK Knowledge Panel N = 1,820), demonstrating largely coherent beliefs by level of action and discrimination between types of efficacy. Four additive efficacy scales emerge: personal self‐efficacy, personal response efficacy, government and collective self‐efficacy, and government and collective response efficacy. Third, we employ the resulting efficacy scales in mediation models to test how well efficacy beliefs predict climate change policy support, controlling for specific knowledge, risk perceptions, and ideology, and allowing for mediation by concern. Concern fully mediates the relatively strong effects of perceived risk on policy support, but only partly mediates efficacy beliefs. Stronger government and collective response efficacy beliefs and personal self‐efficacy beliefs are both directly and indirectly associated with greater support for reducing the risks of climate change, even after controlling for ideology and causal beliefs about climate change.     

A Multivariate Indicator to Compute Middle Class Population

Social Indicators Research - Monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 requires the global community to disaggregate targets along socio-economic lines, but little has...     

What are you thinking? Acculturation as an activating event for negative evaluative beliefs among Latinos/as

Negative evaluative beliefs and other cognitive structures have been tied to psychological distress across various populations but have not been sufficiently incorporated into acculturation models. The current study examines the relationships between acculturation and various activating events and mediating sources of support related to negative evaluative beliefs among people of Mexican descent (N = 319). Overall, model variables explained 26% of the variance in negative evaluative beliefs. Acculturation, marital commitment, and social capital associated with friends were negatively related to negative evaluative beliefs. Conversely, single relationship status, marital reward value, psychosocial stressors, and bridging social capital were positively related, and likely serve as activating events for negative evaluative beliefs. Identifying mechanisms related to psychological distress as well as supportive structures may help in constructing interventions that will address the specific needs of different groups. Future research should continue to explore appraisal and associated beliefs in acculturation models to understand why acculturative experiences may become stressful.     

Confidence intervals,significance values,maximum likelihood estimates,etc. sharpened into Occam’s razors

Abstract

Confidence sets, p values, maximum likelihood estimates, and other results of non-Bayesian statistical methods may be adjusted to favor sampling distributions that are simple compared to others in the parametric family. The adjustments are derived from a prior likelihood function previously used to adjust posterior distributions.     

Aging in the Era of Regenerative Medicine: Analysis of Aging‐Related Representations among Canadian Researchers

Explicitly aimed at understanding and controlling molecular and cellular processes at the root of senescence and biological aging, regenerative medicine aspires to artificially reproduce the biological processes that enable the body to regenerate itself. This no longer involves conserving the body's state of balance by combating disease, as in clinical medicine, but rather fighting degeneration itself. From stem cell research to gene therapy to the production of replacement tissues, regenerative medicine perfectly corresponds to the logic of biomedicalization specific to postmodern society. Based on a series of 18 interviews conducted with Canadian researchers and clinicians in the field of regenerative medicine, this article seeks to understand representations of the aging body among researchers in this field. Seen from a strictly negative angle, aging is assimilated by researchers to an inevitable catastrophe that nevertheless must be combated. More closely observing the theoretical model of regenerative biology and the types of treatments developed, it can be observed, however, that this medicine of the future does not target the elderly, but rather promises youth the ability to regenerate themselves to avoid aging.     

Leader-employee congruence of expected contributions in the employee-organization relationship

Employees' expected contributions can be incongruent with those of their leader. We examine the congruence effect of leaders' and employees' expected contributions on job satisfaction. Results of cross-level polynomial regressions on 947 employees and 224 leaders support the congruence effect. When expected contributions are congruent, employees are more satisfied with their job. Our findings suggest that employees enjoy high challenges, as long as these challenges are in harmony with the expected contributions of their leaders. Employees are less satisfied with their jobs both when their expected contributions were higher than their leaders' and when their expected contributions were lower than those of their leaders. Beyond the relevance of having high expected contributions, the findings highlight the crucial role played by the congruence of expected contributions of leaders and employees.     

Effectiveness of training to promote routine enquiry for domestic violence by midwives and nurses: A pre-post evaluation study

Background

Asking women about experiences of domestic violence in the perinatal period is accepted best practice. However, midwives and nurses may be reluctant to engage with, or effectively respond to disclosures of domestic violence due a lack of knowledge and skills.