Krisencoaching zur Bewältigung von beruflichen und privaten Krisensituationen

A crisis, which develops over a longer time, normally affects the professional and the private area in a negative and durable way. The article describes the process of a crisis coaching with a 38 years old self-employed woman, who experiences herself as completely unable to take action because of the difficult situation. The coaching intends to disentangle and to structure the different problems and to change the feelings of chaos and missing orientation into clarity and solution confidence. Besides it is necessary to support and to make success experiences possible.     

Crisis communication online: How medium,crisis type and emotions affected public reactions in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

Social media play in today's societies a fundamental role for the negotiation and dynamics of crises. However, classical crisis communication theories neglect the role of the medium and focus mainly on the interplay between crisis type and crisis communication strategy. Building on the recently developed “networked crisis communication model” we contrast effects of medium (Facebook vs. Twitter vs. online newspaper) and crisis type (intentional vs. victim) in an online experiment. Using the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster as crisis scenario, we show that medium effects are stronger than the effects of crisis type. Crisis communication via social media resulted in a higher reputation and less secondary crisis reactions such as boycotting the company than crisis communication in the newspaper. However, secondary crisis communication, e.g. talking about the crisis communication, was higher in the newspaper condition than in the social media conditions because people consider traditional media as more credible. We also found higher levels of anger in the intentional crisis condition than in the victim crisis condition. Anger in turn was related to reputation, secondary crisis communication and secondary crisis reaction. The results stress the need for more complex models of crisis communication.     

Perceptions of Parental Intimate Relationships and Their Affects on the Experience of Romantic Relationship Development Among African American Emerging Adults

The quality of romantic relationships that parents maintain has an impact on their children. Emerging adult children base their relationships on similar values and/or opposing beliefs of their parental romantic relationships. This phenomenological study aimed to identify how African American emerging adults experience their parental romantic relationships and how they find meaning in the romantic relationships of their parents. Results suggest that African American emerging adults develop both positive and negative perceptions about romantic relationships from their parents’ relationships, which affect the way these adults perceive, develop, and maintain their own romantic unions. African American emerging adults also find meaning in their parental couple relationships as they share similar experiences in their relationship quality, mate choice, and/or personal or mate characteristics and personality traits as their parents.     

Unchaining the human of the humanities

This paper is a statement of concern about the problems of gender relations in the Western Cape Hostels which are seen as exaggerations of the general problems of gender in the wider South African society. The paper traces the historical reasons for the existence of hostels and draws heavily on the analysis by Elias of the legislative machinery utilized by various administrations to achieve this. An attempt is made to link gender relations to overall power relations in society. The particular class position of the men in the hostels seems to be significant in creating the specific content of the oppression experienced by women in these hostels.

The distinctions and the discrimination that hostel dwellers perceive in relation to township dwellers also impacts on their social behavioural patterns. The competition between urbanised women and the rural wives of hostel dwellers also places additional strains on the coping mechanism of these hostel dwellers. There is no pretence that this is anything but a preliminary survey, but it is meant to raise issues for further analysis and study.     

Eskalierendes Commitment bei Gruppenentscheidungen: Begünstigende Faktoren und Maßnahmen zur Reduktion

Escalating commitment to a course of action that is failing or incurring great costs is at least as prevalent in group decision making as in individual decisions. The first experiment studies factors influencing escalating commitment in groups in the context of social identity and dissonance theory. 36 3-person-groups had to decide about further investigations into a risky urban development project. The amount of investigations as an indicator of escalating commitment depended as well on social identity (strong vs. weak) as on the responsibility for initiating the project (high vs. low). The second study investigated the effectiveness of two interventions aimed at reducing escalating commitment: introduction of an advocatus diaboli and pre-information about psychological insights into escalating commitment. Further, interaction processes correlating with escalation or reduction of commitment are studied.     

Testing for Measurement Invariance in the Satisfaction with Life Scale: A Comparison of Russians and North Americans

This study examined the comparability of Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) [Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985, Social Indicators Research, 34: 7–32] scores across U.S. and Russian student and community groups. Criteria for weak measurement invariance were met when comparing U.S. and Russian groups (combining student and community samples). Criteria for weak and strong measurement invariance were met when comparing the U.S. and Russian student samples. However, when comparing the U.S. and Russian community samples, the results showed a significant statistic for a baseline model, indicating a lack of comparability across samples. The costs of failing to meet criteria for weak, strong, and strict measurement invariance are discussed. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Gender Minority Stress: A Critical Review

ABSTRACT

Past studies that compare cisgender to transgender (or trans) and gender diverse people have found a higher prevalence of mental health problems among the latter groups. This article uses Testa’s gender minority stress framework, which is an expansion of minority stress theory, to assess minority stressors that are specific to the experiences of trans and gender diverse people. The concept of cisnormativity, an ideology that positions cisgender identities as a norm, is used in relation to the gender minority stress framework to describe the marginalizing nature of social environments for trans and gender diverse people. This article provides a critical review that integrates and expands on past theoretical perspectives on gender minority stressors and protective factors. Specifically, this article demonstrates the relevance of cultural and ethnic backgrounds to complement the application of intersectionality in research on health disparities experienced by trans and gender diverse people.     

Leistung, Unsicherbeit und Ohnmacht

The European research project SIREN analysed subjective perceptions and interpretations of changes in working life and their interrelation with political orientations. This article presents the results of the qualitative part of the research in Austria. The findings lead to a better understanding of the appeal to various population groups of rightwing populism and allow an empirical scrutiny of related theses. In particular, the contribution describes, by way of a typology, the variety of reasons as to why people take on authoritarian-exclusivist orientations and accept right-wing populist political propositions. The core question is how subjective perceptions and interpretations of socioeconomic change are transformed into political subjectivity.     

Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media

Value changes and the rapid emergence of media innovations (internet, social web) in society lead to an institutionalization of crisis communication, in which especially new media play a crucial role. The key contributions of the paper include deepening and refocusing the theoretical foundations of crisis communication by experimentally analyzing the effects of traditional and social-media strategies on the recipients’ perceptions of reputation; and by analyzing the effects or crisis responses on the recipients’ secondary crisis communications (e.g., sharing information and leaving a message) and reactions (e.g., willingness to boycott). The results indicated that the medium matters more than the message. For all three dependent measures - reputation, secondary crisis communication and reactions - main effects of medium occurred, whereas the message had only a significant main effect on secondary crisis reactions.     

Der Aufbau von interpersonalen Beziehungen in MUDs: Die Rolle von Motiven und Kommunikationsstrategien

This paper focuses on the question how friendships can be built up in virtual communities, especially in multi-user dungeons (MUDs). According to the Social Information Processing Perspective (SIP; Walther, 1992), users of computer-mediated communication learn how to compensate the lack of nonverbal cues by using specific communication strategies (e.g. emoticons). The predictions derived from SIP were tested in a sample of MUDders. Additionally, the role of motives was studied. Results revealed that emoticons in fact are seen as helpful in expressing socioemotional contents. The use of emoticons also correlates with development of online-friendships. However, this correlation was moderated by the primary motivation to participate in MUDs.