Determinanten der Sportaktivität und der Sportart im Lebenslauf

This paper investigates the impact of social class, occupational and family life-course, relocation, age, generation and gender on exercise. Longitudinal, life course-oriented analysis enables identification of the (often diverse) conditions for (re-)uptake and discontinuation of exercise. The paper takes a detailed look at different types of exercise, enabling exploration of the various motivating influences and barriers involved. The database is a retrospective representative survey of the 50 to 70 year old population of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The results show that higher educational qualifications are associated with higher levels of exercise, whereas manual labor and – among women – childcare are associated with lower levels of exercise. With respect to the impact of education, cultural rather than economic capital seems to be the determining influence. Other factors – (un-)employment, partnership, relocation, age and cohort – tend to have more complex effects on exercise. Though being a member of the workforce reduces the likelihood of starting to exercise, it also reduces the likelihood of dropping out. Though partnership encourages the dissemination of exercise, initiation of a relationship is also associated with a higher incidence of discontinuation. Relocation prompts both initiation and discontinuation of exercise. Surprisingly, up to the over-50 age group, increasing age is associated with an increased prevalence of physical activity, especially among women. The results of analysis of social differences in terms of types of physical activity can be used in health programs to provide scientifically founded recommendations for the promotion of specific types of physical activity for lower educational groups, seniors, and other social groups whose lifestyle tends to be inactive.     

Skizzen zur Frage der Identität

Traditional forms of personal identity are tending to disappear or dissolve. The current development does not allow us to conceive identity with a specific content This process is often considered destructive for personality. I suggest, seeing it as a chance to stop glorifying identity and to approach the concept and reality of the ?Empty Self“.     

Erosion oder Stabilität der Beruflichkeit?

Regarding the changing patterns of mobility processes in the German labor market, this paper takes up the scientific debate on the declining significance of occupational qualifications. By comparing several labor market entry cohorts, the matching of the learned occupation and the practiced occupation is analyzed in both the horizontal and the vertical dimension of occupational mobility. In doing so, the question of a successful utilization of the skills acquired in the educational process can be addressed. Changes of occupations will be operationalized on the basis of a new professional classification by using the data set “Working and Learning in a Changing World” (ALWA). First, the Kaplan Meier survival curves show that the risks of horizontal occupational mobility have increased across cohorts. This indicates that the formerly close relationship between the education system and the employment system has weakened. Furthermore, according to our multivariate Cox regression analysis, the mobility towards inadequate status positions has increased. Thus, due to the expansion of atypical forms of employment and the increased volatility of the markets, altered mobility patterns of the younger cohorts entering the labor market can be shown. Consequently, the increase of unsuccessful transfers of skills in inter-firm mobility suggests a weakened cohesiveness between professionalism and a growing risk to loose professional qualifications.     

ZURUECKGEZOGEN: Veränderungen in der Mitgliedschaft der DGS

DGS-Nachrichten

ZURUECKGEZOGEN: Ver?nderungen in der Mitgliedschaft der DGS     

Vereinsmanagement in Zeiten der Veränderung

Associations and unions are under high optimisation pressure because of fewer public money and general changes in society. Many try to cope with this hard situation by looking for business management instruments. Quick solutions are however not easy to get. These organisations are for their members, to a high degree, social communities as well as political action communities and economic or services communities. These three different forms of communities constitute subsystems in associations with their own very specific organisatinal logic. If one of those subsystems get out of balance it would affect the two others. Modern management instruments are useless in changes projects handling changes, as long as the managing committee doesn’t initiate broad and extensive internal discussions about the future direction of the association. Project handling changes have only a chance to succeed, if they equally take into consideration all three subsystems.     

Bildungserfolg von Kindern in Abhängigkeit von der Stellung in der Geschwisterreihe

Based on grades in school and on parental educational aspirations the article investigates the influence of siblings’ birth order on educational opportunities and educational success of elementary school pupils. It is examined whether this influence varies by social strata, i.e., whether it is moderated by the socio-economic status of parental households. Theoretical background are the resource dilution model which focuses on siblings’ rivalry for scarce family resources, the confluence model which refers to the intellectual environment within families, and the family niche model which postulates effects of siblings on personality traits of children. Furthermore, status maintenance motives of parents are used to explain birth order effects. Empirical analyses are based on a study of 1369 pupils—4th graders of elementary schools—in the city of Wiesbaden, Germany. It can be shown that the birth order has negative effects on the chosen educational indicators (grades in school, parental educational aspirations). In accordance with prior research, grades of children get worse with their position in the birth order, other things being equal. The birth order also affects educational aspirations which parents hold for their children. In this context, the crucial result of the article is: When older siblings already guarantee the social status of the family in an intergenerational perspective, parents with high SES reduce their educational aspirations for younger siblings (elimination of the status maintenance motive). In families with low SES, however, parental educational aspirations for younger siblings increase, when older siblings successfully have reached higher educational credentials (social learning from role models).     

Zwischen Säkularisierung und religiöser Reorganisation – Eine Analyse der Religiosität türkischer und polnischer Neuzuwanderer in Deutschland

This paper addresses the role of religion in the process of immigrant integration in Germany. Based on novel data (SCIP 2010/11) from a survey among new Polish and Turkish migrants, it particularly focuses on the impact of the migratory event upon religious participation and private religious practice as well as on early trends of changing religiosity in the receiving context. The study confirms, first of all, that both groups of newcomers experience a decrease in religious practices after the migratory event. This decrease is more pronounced among Muslim Turks than among Catholic Poles and more pertinent for worship attendance than for prayer, thus attesting to the relevance of religious opportunity structure. Secondly, it can be shown that among new Polish immigrants, religious decrease is more pronounced among individuals with stronger social ties to the secular German mainstream, while this is not the case for Turks. For them, thirdly, it seems that religious practices are being re-captured after the rather disruptive first couple of months in what may a called a process of religious re-organizations. These group-comparative findings attest to limits of classical assimilation theory and to the relevance of symbolic boundary dynamics. Overall, they underline that publicly visible religious diversity will remain a permanent feature of modern immigrant societies.     

Klassenführung und Gruppendynamik in der Grundschule – Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Popularität und Trivialität von Klassenführung

Teacher surveys indicate continued intense discipline problems in elementary school classes. What can you do about it? As the teacher behavior has a strong relationship with active cooperation and misbehavior of students, a skillful group or classroom management of the teacher for an undisturbed instruction is important. However evidence suggests that some in the research literature as particularly relevant documented behaviors hardly appear in teachers’ subjective theories of reducing discipline problems. It is therefore presumed that the level of awareness regarding these insights is low in elementary schools and that it is difficult for teachers to recognize their extraordinary relevance solely by teaching practice. The present study tests this hypothesis on a sample of 101 elementary school teachers. The potentially far-reaching implications of the results are discussed.     

Zwischen Normativität und Komplexität

The spheres of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) related to development policy have changed significantly in past years. Therefore NGOs are confronted more and more with areas of tension and contradictions that they influence and challenge with their work. In this context, NGOs that are active in education for sustainable development face a special challenge. All of the contradictions and areas of tension appear condensed in this field and need to be examined and processed adequately from the point of education. The resulting areas of conflict and tension mark the central border area and problems of educational work related to development policy that far outreach the practice of NGOs.     

Mobilität oder Immobilität?

An ongoing controversy in transformation research concerns the relative importance of firm-internal versus occupational segmentation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) employment system compared to the West German system. In a first step, institutions of vocational education and of the employment system focusing on their impact on labor market segmentation are analyzed. Then, the occupational careers of different birth cohorts of East and West Germans are examined. Empirical results show that the importance of internal mobility increased over time in the GDR. But this change cannot primarily be attributed to personnel policies of firms. It was mainly due to social policies, i.e. the introduction of compulsory army service and of maternity leave, since companies were obliged to take the army recruits and mothers back afterwards. Obviously, the way social policies were institutionalized affected the levels of labor market mobility in both countries more than changes of employment strategies.     

Soziologie der Forschung,Methoden, Sozialstrukturanalyse,Soziologie der Mobilität,Soziologie des Essens

Literaturbesprechungen

Soziologie der Forschung, Methoden, Sozialstrukturanalyse, Soziologie der Mobilit?t, Soziologie des Essens     

„Solidarität“ in südasiatischen Gesellschaften

Taking South Asia as an example, it is shown how efforts to designate “solidarity” as a universally valid category are handicapped on the one hand by the ambiguity of the concept, on the other by its culture-specificity. Based on a linguistic, historical and social overview, it is demonstrated that the discourse parameters for “solidarity” as they dominate in the German language discourse are little suited for the South Asian reality. This leads to critical deliberations on the assumption that concepts and notions of the so-called West are to be seen as universally valid and universally binding.     

Der Einfluss der Gruppengröße auf die Aktivität von Parteimitgliedern

In this paper, we aim to test Olson’s (The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965) assumptions of group size effects on free-riding tendencies in political parties. Multilevel analyses of the Deutsche Parteimitgliederstudie (German Party Membership Study) 2009 reveal that for members of the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, the assumed negative relationship between the number of party members in the district association and their individual level of activity can only be shown for the eastern states of Germany. Moreover, we show that selective incentives are not suitable for reducing the negative impact of a increasing membership figure, while normative incentives are associated with an increasing free-riding tendency with increasing number of members in the western and eastern Bundesländer. Our results only partly support the assumptions on collective action problems and point to a need for further theoretical and empirical research on group size effects and on the role incentives’ play in explaining the activity in political parties.     

Primäre und sekundäre Effekte der sozialen Herkunft beim Übergang in die Hochschulbildung

Following Boudon social disparities at educational transitions can be linked to primary and secondary effects of social origin. Whereas primary effects describe social differentials in scholastic performance, secondary effects represent social differences in educational choices that are independent of performance. We use four panel surveys of graduate cohorts that have obtained eligibility for higher education between 1983 and 1999, provided by the German Higher Education Information System (HIS). By applying counterfactual decomposition methods we estimate the relative importance of primary and secondary effects at the transition to tertiary education. Our results indicate that secondary effects are the main driving force in the creation of social disparities at the transition to tertiary education, accounting for more than 80% of the differential between service class and working class offspring. Particularly financial aspects connected to the choice of post-secondary alternatives, interest in academic work and the type of Abitur degree can explain these effects. Furthermore, even though we observe a small increase in social selectivities at the transition to higher education, the relative importance of primary and secondary effects does not change within our observation period.     

Religiöse Identität und Wertbindungen von Jugendlichen in Deutschland

In analysing the religiousness of youth positions vary between the hypothesis that religiousness has decreased and the hypothesis that there is a specific youth religion. In this paper it is assumed that the development of religious identities and convictions depends on social contexts and family environments. The paper analyses different religious interpretative patterns adolescents generate in order to position themselves in relation to concepts of life and meaning in societies who are marked by the pluralization of values, the secularization of social relations and the individualization of life styles. Through case studies of youth from West Germany, East Germany and youth from migrant’s milieus—each group of which are brought up religiously in a different environments—it is shown how the religious identities of youth become established under specific social-historical conditions and conditions of socialisation.     

Willentliches Vergessen – Voraussetzung für Flexibilität und Veränderungsfähigkeit in einer sich permanent verändernden Welt

Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) - Dieser Beitrag im Journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. stellt dar, wie willentliches...