Gender differences in social workers’ assessments and help-giving strategies towards single parents

The study investigates Swedish male and female social workers’ assessments and help-giving strategies towards single parents applying for income support. The study was carried out with the help of a vignette distributed as a mail questionnaire. Results show that social workers tend to conform to assessments and help-giving strategies that are consistent with expectations linked to their own gender role.     

Quality of work and job satisfaction: comparing female part-time work in four European countries

Adding to the debate on the integrative or marginalizing nature of female part-time work, this article provides a comparative analysis of the implications of female part-time work for different intrinsic job quality dimensions and job satisfaction. Drawing on national micro-data from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, our multivariate analyses show cross-national similarities in terms of lower job learning opportunities for female part-timers. We found a significantly higher incidence of repetitiveness only among Swedish female part-timers and lower degrees of task discretion among British, Dutch, and Swedish women working part-time hours. Female part-timers were either equally satisfied with their work as female full-timers or even more satisfied. This held true also after accounting for the lower intrinsic job quality of part-time work. While women working part-time hours were as affected by their job quality characteristics as were full-timers, we conclude that the shorter hours of work per se provide an important additional source of job satisfaction.     

Diffusion Indexes With Sparse Loadings

The use of large-dimensional factor models in forecasting has received much attention in the literature with the consensus being that improvements on forecasts can be achieved when comparing with standard models. However, recent contributions in the literature have demonstrated that care needs to be taken when choosing which variables to include in the model. A number of different approaches to determining these variables have been put forward. These are, however, often based on ad hoc procedures or abandon the underlying theoretical factor model. In this article, we will take a different approach to the problem by using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) as a variable selection method to choose between the possible variables and thus obtain sparse loadings from which factors or diffusion indexes can be formed. This allows us to build a more parsimonious factor model that is better suited for forecasting compared to the traditional principal components (PC) approach. We provide an asymptotic analysis of the estimator and illustrate its merits empirically in a forecasting experiment based on U.S. macroeconomic data. Overall we find that compared to PC we obtain improvements in forecasting accuracy and thus find it to be an important alternative to PC. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Urban and peri-urban agriculture and its implication on food and nutrition insecurity in northern Ghana: a socio-spatial analysis along the urban–rural continuum

Food and nutrition insecurity remains a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. Several studies have examined food and nutrition insecurity in urban or rural areas but have not captured the whole continuum. Between November and December 2013, 240 households were surveyed along the urban–rural continuum in Northern Ghana. The study objective was to understand the socio-spatial dynamics of household food and nutrition insecurity and to investigate the role played by urban, peri-urban and rural agriculture. The study found that there was more involvement in agriculture in rural areas compared to peri-urban areas and urban areas. Households from urban areas were more food insecure (HFIAS >?11) compared to their counterparts in peri-urban and the rural areas. Stunting increased by 3.4 times (p?=?0.048) among households located in the peri-urban area. Wasting was reduced by 0.16 times among household that produced staple food or vegetables (p?=?0.011). Overweight was reduced by 0.04 times among households that produced livestock (p?=?0.031). The results reveal a socio-spatial dimension of food and nutrition insecurity that is related to agricultural activities.     

Producing public goods in networks: Some effects of social comparison and endogenous network change

As actors participate in the production of public goods, processes of social comparison may affect the decisions about the individual contributions as well as the endogenously changing structure of an underlying social network. This leads to the transformation of an ordinary n-player Prisoner's Dilemma of collective action into an n-player coordination game. The paper uses agent-based simulations to trace the formation of public goods while varying network characteristics, such as density, segregation, or the strength of relationships. Additionally, the usage of both a forward- and a backward-looking agent model shows possible implications of different assumptions about the actors’ decision making.     

On the reciprocity of connections in weighted and unweighted networks

Bivariate Bernoulli and bivariate geometric distributions are proposed to model reciprocity in weighted and unweighted networks. Sampling properties of commonly used reciprocity measures are studied, under both presence and absence of reciprocity. Extensions to situations where link parameters depend on outgoing and incoming nodes are investigated. Results are illustrated with a data set, on 50 anesthesia providers at a hospital, that describes the number of times an anesthesia provider starting an operation transfers his/her responsibilities to another anesthesia provider.     

Social identity and alcohol in young adolescence: the perceived difference between youthful and adult drinking

This paper examines the evolving social identities of young adolescents in regard to alcohol and drinking culture in Norway. Detailed analysis of 29 focus group interviews and 32 individual interviews with 12–13-year-olds reveal a thorough negative attitude towards alcohol, especially when enjoyed by young people. Young adolescents found young people to be too irresponsible and immature to drink, while adults were portrayed as capable of enjoying alcohol without losing control or experiencing other negative effects. Through symbolic boundary work, they distanced themselves from adolescents who drank. The young adolescents rejected the idea that drinking alcohol was a sign of maturity; instead, they exhibited maturity by distancing themselves from drunk adolescents. We discuss how these findings reflect the participants’ socio-cognitive development, and how symbolic boundaries are often drawn against those closest in social distance. We conclude that boundaries between ‘adolescents’ and ‘adults’ are fundamental when understanding emerging adolescent social identities, especially when it comes to drinking and drinking culture.     

Experiences,Burdens, and Support Needs in Siblings of Girls and Women with Anorexia Nervosa: Results from a Qualitative Interview Study

For many years, siblings of women and girls suffering from anorexia have been regarded as “the forgotten kin,” as they have been overlooked by both researchers and clinicians. Therefore, the goal of this explorative study was to investigate siblings’ experiences, burdens, and support needs in a differentiated manner. Siblings (n = 16) of patients with an ICD-10 diagnosis “anorexia nervosa” (F 50.0) took part in a qualitative, in-depth interview study; the data were assessed using content analysis. The results of this study should be especially interesting for clinical social work. Using the findings, a variety of concrete recommendations for psycho-social practice can be made, for example regarding the inclusion of siblings in treatment settings, as well as specific support concepts for siblings of anorexic women and girls in different age groups.     

No‐Bubble Condition: Model‐Free Tests in Housing Markets

We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic rational bubble. We study housing markets in the United Kingdom and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either leaseholds or freeholds. Leaseholds are finite‐maturity, pre‐paid, and tradeable ownership contracts with maturities often exceeding 700 years. Freeholds are infinite‐maturity ownership contracts. The price difference between leaseholds with extremely‐long maturities and freeholds reflects the present value of a claim to the freehold after leasehold expiry, and is thus a direct empirical measure of the transversality condition. We estimate this price difference, and find no evidence of failures of the transversality condition in housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, even during periods when a sizable bubble was regularly thought to be present.