Should I stay or should I go? Sibling effects in household formation

This paper analyzes peer effects among siblings in the decision to leave parental home. Estimating peer effects is challenging because of problems of reflection, endogenous group formation, and correlated unobservables. We overcome these issues using the exogenous variation in siblings’ household formation implied by the eligibility rules for a Spanish rental subsidy. Our results show that sibling effects are negative and that these effects can be explained by the presence of old or ill parents. Sibling effects turn positive for close-in-age siblings, when imitation is more likely to prevail. Our findings indicate that policy makers who aim at fostering household formation should target the household rather than the individual and combine policies for young adults with policies for the elderly.     

Should I stay or should I go now? Exploring Polish women's returns “home”

At a time when there are more people on the move than ever before, it is pivotal to explore people's motivations and experiences of return migration. Whilst motivations for migration are comparatively well explored, return migrants' experiences are less well‐known and migrants' gender is rarely considered. This article addresses these gaps. It is based on qualitative research and in‐depth interviews with 32 Polish women: 16 migrants and 16 return migrants. Considered through the lens of agency and structure, this research uncovers how fluid the process of migration has become; migration motivations and patterns are blurred and interlinked with one another while classic migration theories seem outdated. The study uses an “intersection of motivations” to show how inseparable migration‐related motivations have become. This article contributes to the growing literature on East–West return migration and highlights women as migrants and the gendered nature of their mobility.     

Assimilation,segregation, or integration? A teaching project examining approaches to religious and ideological diversity in the classroom

In this article, we describe the multiple phases of a project that was constructed around the real case of a young Muslim student who wished to be exempted from coeducational physical education on religious grounds. When the school refused her initial request, she decided to take legal measures which ended up in the German Federal Administrative Court. The court ultimately ruled in her favour. Her case was selected as the core ingredient for a new teaching project, which studies acculturation from different perspectives, and examines the complex balance between individual rights and societal duties, as defined by constitutional law in the Federal Republic of Germany. This case demonstrates that the majority society, represented in this study by the school, at times needs to change traditional educational policy in order to further national goals of integration; not as a compromise, but as a fair balance of interests. The project was implemented successfully as an integrated part of teacher preservice education occurring towards the end of the first academically based phase of their training.     

To click or not to click? A study of the innovation resistance of political emails

As a novel technology in the age of information, the Internet has become a fancy vehicle through which campaign messages can be delivered to prospective voters via multiple paths such as websites and emails. However, despite the effort put into making campaign messages as appealing as possible, studies show that the click-through rate of campaign emails remains relatively low. In the past, many studies concerning technology adaptation have focused on the aspect of “innovation diffusion” rather than “innovation resistance”. The aim of this study is to integrate ideas derived from the Technology Acceptance Model, the concepts of innovation resistance and the theory of ad avoidance to find the factors that influence voters' resistance of reading political emails. An online survey was conducted, in which a sample of 1012 voters in the 2009 local election in Taiwan was studied. The results showed that negative impression and perceived interruption were the factors behind people's resistance of politically-related emails. In addition, both of the above factors affected people's attitudes toward opening future political emails.     

“Should I Trust the Bank or the Social Movement?” Motivated Reasoning and Debtors' Work to Accept Misinformation

How can people believe corporate and state misinformation even if a social movement organization in their community has been countering this misinformation for years? Why do people knowingly accept misinformation without even being upset about it? I address these questions by analyzing ethnographic data and interviews with 84 Chilean low‐income housing debtors, whom, like many Chileans, are victims of financial misinformation. While the state and banks had significant agency in inducing the unproblematic acceptance of misinformation, debtors also played an active role in the processes. First, debtors had to decide whom to trust, which was not only a cognitive problem about evidence but also a behavioral and practical problem involving risks. Second, debtors engaged in “motivated reasoning”—affect‐driven biased information processing—to dismiss the possibility of being misinformed, to downplay the significance of misinformation, and to direct blame away from misinforming institutions. The latter two practices reduced debtors' anger about being misinformed. The findings have implications for studies of social movement framing and counterinformation, for the cognitive psychology of misinformation, and for the sociology and social psychology of acquiescence.