College Education and Social Trust: An Evidence-Based Study on the Causal Mechanisms

This paper examines the influence of college education on social trust at the individual level. Based on the literature of trust and social trust, we hypothesize that life experience/development since adulthood and perceptions of cultural/social structures are two primary channels in the causal linkage between college education and social trust. In the first part of the empirical study econometric techniques are employed to tackle the omitted-variable problem and substantial evidence is found to confirm the positive effect of college education. In the second part contemporary information is used to examine the hypothetical mechanisms in the causal inference. That life experience is a primary channel via which college education promotes social trust fails to find support in our examination, while individual perceptions of cultural and social structures explain up to 77% of the causal effect.     

Examining the Impact of Demographic Factors on Air Pollution

This study adds to the emerging literature examining empirically the link between population size, other demographic factors and pollution. We contribute by using more reliable estimation techniques and examine two air pollutants. By considering sulfur dioxide, we become the first study to explicitly examine the impact of demographic factors on a pollutant other than carbon dioxide at the cross-national level. We also take into account the urbanization rate and the average household size neglected by many prior cross-national econometric studies. For carbon dioxide emissions we find evidence that population increases are matched by proportional increases in emissions while a higher urbanization rate and lower average household size increase emissions. For sulfur dioxide emissions, we find a U-shaped relationship, with the population-emissions elasticity rising at higher population levels. Urbanization and average household size are not found to be significant determinants of sulfur dioxide emissions. For both pollutants, our results suggest that an increasing share of global emissions will be accounted for by developing countries. Implications for the environmental Kuznets curve literature are described and directions for further work identified.     

Comparative Case Study as Social Impact Assessment: Possibilities and Limitations for Anticipating Social Change in the Far North

Social impact assessment (SIA) is increasingly an accepted component of environmental impact assessment and project evaluation throughout North America. Tools and methodologies utilized to conduct such assessments vary greatly and continue to evolve with time and experience. This paper follows the evolution of case study methods in social impact assessment, focusing primarily on the comparative diachronic method. Exploring the utility of this method, this paper compares the potential social and economic impacts of the Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP) in the community of Inuvik, Northwest Territories, with the known social and economic impacts of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) in the community of Valdez, Alaska. Through such comparison, insights into potential impacts from the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project are assessed while also drawing attention to, and discussing, the specific strengths and weaknesses of a comparative case study approach to social impact assessment.     

A Simplified Indicator of Social Well-Being in the United States: Examining the Ecological Impact of Family Formation within a County Level Framework

In 1995, a study entitled ??Does Marriage Matter??? was published by Linda Waite in the journal of Demography, which was concerned with the direction of such causal relationships. While Waite??s examination of the causal relationships associated with marriage, and most other analyses of this type, is primarily concerned with the individual level effects of marriage on a variety of outcomes, little is understood concerning the ecological effect of community marriage rates on levels of aggregate well-being. This study aims to contribute to this gap through the implementation of a recent conceptualization of social well-being as a multi-dimensional measure incorporating both biological, operationalized as average life expectancy, and social phenomena, operationalized as, community level crime rates (Raphael, Making the links: what do health promotion, crime prevention, and social development have in common? in 2004). It is important to understand such aggregate level effects in the face of the existing literature, which relies heavily on relational associations which could be subject to ecological fallacy. Analytic techniques incorporate Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and spatial regression techniques, due to the high existence of spatial autocorrelation often evident in census data, as a way of understanding the effect of the aggregate level marriage rate on the constructed social well being indicator.     

The Experience of Social Mobility: Social Isolation,Utilitarian Individualism,and Social Disorientation

The dissociative thesis states that social mobility is a disruptive and detrimental experience for the individual. Despite the absence of convincing evidence either for or against it, this thesis is generally accepted in sociology. I investigate this thesis by considering three dimensions of dissociation—i.e., social isolation, utilitarian individualism, and social disorientation. I use data from a large-scale survey in Flanders (Belgium) and apply Diagonal Reference Models to study consequences of intergenerational social mobility. I find support for asymmetric acculturation for each dimension, i.e., upwardly mobile individuals adapt more to the new social status position, compared to downwardly mobile individuals. Moreover, both for social disorientation and utilitarian individualism, I find detrimental effects of the experience of downward social mobility. As I find no detrimental consequences of both upward and downward mobility, the results do not provide evidence for the dissociative thesis.     

欧盟社会标准化工程在社会保障制度改革中的意义

文章认为社会标准化可能涉及到社会保障研究的三大领域:(1)社会需求的合理确定;(2)社会行为主体的价值取向和利益平衡;(3)社会保障机制的正确选择。社会标准化挑战社会保障行为主体的行为方式,引起功能转换,从而在社会保障制度之间产生接轨现象和趋同现象,同时在传统的民族国家之上又产生了一个新的、不使用传统政策工具的社会行为主体。社会保障主体的角色转换和功能转换是社会保障制度改革的症结,欧洲联盟的社会标准化已经开始触动这个症结,并且给世界带来了值得思考的经验。     

Examining Mediator Role of the Social Safeness on the Relationship Between Vengeance and Life Satisfaction

The aim of the present study is to examine the mediating role of social safeness on the relationship between vengeance and life satisfaction. Participants were 305 university students who completed a questionnaire package which includes the Vengeance Scale, the Social Safeness and Pleasure Scale, and the Life Satisfaction Scale. According to the results, social safeness and life satisfaction were predicted negatively by vengeance. On the other hand, life satisfaction was predicted positively by social safeness. In addition, social safeness mediated the relationship between vengeance and life satisfaction. Together, the findings illuminate the social processes underlying the association of vengeance with life satisfaction.     

Demands of Social Change as a Function of the Political Context,Institutional Filters,and Psychosocial Resources

Individually experienced demands of current social change in the domains of work and family were assessed in a large sample of adults from two Western and two Eastern federal states of Germany. For each domain of life, a cumulated index was computed representing the load with highly endorsed demands and this was compared across political regions, employment, partnership status and participants’ level of education. Generally, a higher load of demands was found in Eastern Germany for participants who were unemployed or outside the labor market, those who were separated or divorced, and those with lower education. The political context and education aggravated the load of demands in the domain of work (but not in the domain of family) as indicated by significant two-way interactions between the different factors. The results prove that the demands of social change due to globalization or individualization differ in a systematic way across ecological niches.     

The Value of Trust: An Analysis of Social Capital in Natural Areas

This paper defines and analyses the characteristics of social trust that develop in natural areas, examining the connections and interactions between the people and institutions involved. It offers a deeper understanding of the different degrees of trust and the identification of those attributes that affect the generation of this trust at three different levels: strategic, normative and cognitive. The study of the value of trust allows, or at least contributes to, an understanding of different levels of development. The study population consists of local associations, as a sample of existing social structures, and is taken from two areas in Andalusia, Spain. From the application of the proposed method a null hypothesis for the runs and Mann–Whitney tests is accepted at the three levels of trust for both areas. For strategic and cognitive trust, the behaviours of both areas are homogenous, while in the case of normative trust for the Chi square test the alternative hypothesis is accepted. The methodology that is developed demonstrates the interest presented by trust as a study variable in research dealing with social capital and its direct influence on the development of territories. Trust should be considered alongside physical, natural and human capital, since none of these alone is sufficient for complete territorial development.

     

Family interaction of the young-old: Social exchange as an explanation of the qualitative and quantitative experience

Very frequent family interaction, daily or more often, significantly lowered the morale scores in a sample of retired men and women who were highly satisfied with their family life, even after controlling for health, income and other measures of satisfaction. In contrast to other research which has shown that it is the quality not the quantity which affects morale, these findings suggested that both quantity and quality of family interaction were important to morale. An explanation from the social exchange perspective indicates that there is an optimal level of family interaction beyond which the costs outweight the benefits.     

Social Protection Spending in Context of Structural and Institutional Performance: A Global Empirical Analysis

Social Indicators Research - An understanding about the dynamics of social protection spending is made in the context of structural and institutional performances. A dataset of 134 countries for...     

Estimating the Effect of Perceived Risk of Crime on Social Trust in the Presence of Endogeneity Bias

This study aims to estimate the effect of perceived risk of crime on the social trust probability for Italian men and women, accounting for both observed and unobserved confounding. We use microdata collected by the Italian National Statistical Office for the year 2010 during a multi-scope survey of Italian households. The relationship under investigation is estimated after controlling for observed confounding by using a propensity score weighting approach. To control for both observed and unobserved confounding (better known as endogeneity), a semiparametric recursive bivariate probit approach is ultimately employed instead. Our findings show that the perceived risk of crime has a significant negative effect on the social trust probability regardless of gender and that endogeneity seems to be present for both genders. The paper represents the first such application in which the effect of interest is estimated accounting for the presence of endogeneity.     

Education and Life Satisfaction in Relation to the Probability of Social Trust: a Conceptual Framework and Empirical Analysis

We employ cross-sectional microdata from 2010 through 2012 collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics to investigate the proposed conceptual framework regarding the joint relationship between education, life satisfaction and the probability of social trust. The analysis has been carried out using two alternative specifications of the logit model: parametric and semiparametric. Our findings suggest that (a) both modelling methods that we utilise yield consistent results in terms of the positive effects of education and life satisfaction on social trust; (b) for unsatisfied individuals, social trust is generally low and largely unresponsive to the individual’s education level, whereas for ‘sufficiently satisfied’ individuals, social trust increases strongly with education; (c) there are some gender differences in the joint relationship between education, life satisfaction and social trust and (d) the parametric approach tends to mask some interesting patterns that are captured by the semiparametric specification. This finding implies that the parametric approach leads to a biased interpretation of the results, with an apparent failure of some of the assumptions made in the conceptual framework.     

社会支持对老年人心理健康影响的研究

为了探究社会支持对老年人心理健康的影响,本研究采用社会支持评定量表、症状自评量表(SCL-90)和生活再适应量表(SRRS),对武汉市随机抽取的442位60岁以上老年人进行了问卷调查。研究结果表明:社会支持对老年人心理健康具有主效应和缓冲作用;在有轻度及以下心理压力的情况下,较多邻居、同事、家人、经济和活动支持能显著改善男性老人的心理健康水平,较多朋友、同事和活动支持能显著改善女性老人的心理健康状况;在有中度及以上心理压力的情况下,较多家人支持和较多安慰支持能分别显著改善男性老人和女性老人的心理健康状况。     

社保基金违规的制度分析与改革思路

文章通过透视社保基金的不同违规情况,对中国社保制度存在的制度缺陷进行分析。文章认为,社保制度设计的不科学与存在的问题是导致社保资金违规的根本原因,主要表现为社保统筹层次太低,投资制度不合理,立法缺位等。目前中国社保资金面临的主要是管理风险和制度风险;风险控制的关键在于改革基本社保制度的大框架:一是要大幅调整和改造统账结合的制度结构,使其能够提高统筹层次;二是要尽快改革基金投资制度,以提高账户资金投资收益率;三是要尽快立法,以规范社保制度运行管理成本及其机构运行的行为。     

The Impact of Past Conflicts and Social Disruption on the Elderly in Cambodia

Cambodia experienced violence during the rule of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Many who died were the children or spouses of today's elderly. This may have resulted in an erosion of family support in a country where formal channels of assistance are virtually absent. This article examines the extent to which current Cambodian elderly experienced deaths of children or spouses, forced migration, and separation from family during the Khmer Rouge period and the extent to which these experiences are associated with adverse welfare conditions of older adults. Data come from a 2004 representative survey of persons aged 60 years and older. More than one in four report that a child died from violent causes during the Khmer Rouge period. More than one in five report death of multiple children. A striking, and on the surface counterintuitive, conclusion is that the impact of deaths on welfare is modest. The reasons, elucidated in the article, include close family integration, high fertility among the current generation of older adults, the probability that losses depended on family size, and the pervasiveness of poverty.     

The Relationship Between Islam and Democracy in Turkey: Employing Political Culture as an Indicator

During the last decade the agenda of local and global politics is heavily marked by the encounter of two powerful currents, namely democracy and political Islam. On the one hand Islam as a religion itself is facing a cultural dialectic between a modern and an authentic form, producing a synthesis which is only to be criticized again by a new radical antithesis. Within that framework political Islam is perceived to be a tool for this current antithesis, attacking the states for impiety and materialism. Democracy, on the other hand, is becoming dominant as a criterion of good government, the “only game in town”, with its inherent complexity which reveals itself in each particular context. The two currents are not necessarily irreconcilable, but they produce a number of different effects on each other whenever they meet. The fundamental contention of this article is to demonstrate this relationship within the Turkish setting.     

Strategies and Traditions in Swedish Social Reporting: A 30-Year Experience

Social Indicators Research -     

Crafting Mixed Sexual Advertisements for Mainstream Media: Examining the Impact of Homosexual and Heterosexual Imagery Inclusion on Advertising Effectiveness

ABSTRACT

This research applied both qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of mixed sexual advertisements that explicitly feature both homosexual and heterosexual models within the same message. Drawing on theoretical framework of social identity theory, this study predict mixed sexual advertisements could create a perceptual social categorization that includes both homosexual and heterosexual identities and reduces intergroup competitions between homosexual and heterosexual viewers. Results indicate that mixed sexual advertisements elicit better ad evaluation than strictly gay-themed advertisements when evaluated by a mix of homosexual and heterosexual participants. The findings suggest mixed sexual advertisements could balance between homosexual-themed advertising and gay window advertising by addressing homosexual audiences without alienating heterosexual viewers.