Violence against bisexuals, gays and lesbians in Mexico City

An essential premise of this work is that three dominant ideologies explain oppression against BGL, as a result of a gender system: adhesion to gender stereotypes, androcentrism and heterosexism. Three hundred eighteen bisexual and gay males (BG) and 188 bisexual and lesbian females (BL) were surveyed. By means of a self-applied questionnaire, variables of interest were researched. The following trends were observed: an important number of men and women interviewed suffered violence in their childhood and adolescence because they defied gender stereotypes, and not because of their sexual orientation; BG males were more often victims of violence than BL females. Within the BG group, those who challenged gender stereotypes were more frequently attacked than those who did not; men were identified as aggressors more frequently than women; and in the BG group, gender stereotype transgression was associated with the perception of suffering violence in the future.     

Subjective machines: Probabilistic risk assessment based on deep learning of soft information

For several years machine learning methods have been proposed for risk classification. While machine learning methods have also been used for failure diagnosis and condition monitoring, to the best of our knowledge, these methods have not been used for probabilistic risk assessment. Probabilistic risk assessment is a subjective process. The problem of how well machine learning methods can emulate expert judgments is challenging. Expert judgments are based on mental shortcuts, heuristics, which are susceptible to biases. This paper presents a process for developing natural language-based probabilistic risk assessment models, applying deep learning algorithms to emulate experts’ quantified risk estimates. This allows the risk analyst to obtain an a priori risk assessment when there is limited information in the form of text and numeric data. Universal sentence embedding (USE) with gradient boosting regression (GBR) trees trained over limited structured data presented the most promising results. When we apply these models’ outputs to generate survival distributions for autonomous systems’ likelihood of loss with distance, we observe that for open water and ice shelf operating environments, the differences between the survival distributions generated by the machine learning algorithm and those generated by the experts are not statistically significant.     

Voluntary childlessness in a society reluctant to change

Voluntary childlessness constitutes a social and generational rupture from tradition and culture, with significant effects on the reproduction of the so-called life and family cycle. This study aims at understanding the reasons why people decide to remain childless and the social pressures that this decision generates. A qualitative phenomenological study was conducted on the emerging decision of non-motherhood and non-fatherhood based on semi-structured interviews with 56 people who autonomously made the decision to opt out of parenthood. This paper underscores the multiple biographical situations involved in the decision, in addition to the concerns about personal development and future. The current social crisis context serves as a means of justification to lessen social and family pressure. We conclude that people who have made this decision promote a different meaning from that of reproduction as a mechanism of the social order.     

Putting experts in their place: Achieving policy impact as an outsider-academic in civil service reforms in Slovakia

This paper studies two processes of civil service reform in Slovakia during the period of 2014–2015 in order to reflect on the involvement of an ‘outsider-academic’ and her strategies to achieve policy impact. The context of such involvement are multi-level processes permeated by political interests and poor on evidence, which favour strategic interests, bargaining and political pressure and contestation (the mode of ‘powering’) and a mode of legal-based ‘puzzling’ as opposed to a conceptual, intellectual search for solutions friendly towards outside academics—and achieving only incremental results. We theorise on the success of these strategies (including helping serendipity, throwing ideas to see what sticks, mobilising allies, anchoring a non-binding concept, and finding and developing long-term connections) and sketch analogies and differences between the position of an outsider-academic and a policy entrepreneur. We rely on auto-ethnographic data and documentation of the work of the committees involved and their outputs.     

More than ideology: perceived unfairness differentiates supporters of a new anti-austerity party from supporters of traditional left-wing parties / Más que ideología: la injusticia percibida diferencia a los simpatizantes de un nuevo partido antiausteridad de los simpatizantes de los partidos tradicionales de izquierda

After the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, anti-austerity parties in South Europe have gained prominence and dramatically transformed the political landscape. In Spain, the emergence of PODEMOS, a left-wing, anti-austerity party, has jeopardized the traditional two-party system. However, little is known about the psychological reasons that prompted more than one million Spaniards to vote for a newly created party in its first elections. To fill this gap the present study examines why people intend to vote for PODEMOS as opposed to traditional left-wing parties. We found that in addition to conventional predictors of voting behaviour (ideological orientation and party identification), perceived unfairness — a key variable within the collective action theory — critically influenced the preference for PODEMOS as opposed to traditional left-wing parties. A qualitative analysis of the reasons that participants reported in an open question yielded similar results. These findings suggest that supporting an anti-austerity party might be considered a collective action aimed at promoting social change.     

Personal psychological resources,resilience and self-efficacy and their relationship with psychological distress in situations of unemployment / Los recursos psicológicos personales,resiliencia y autoeficacia,y su relación con el malestar psicológico en situaciones de desempleo

According to Hobfoll’s conservation of resources theory (1989), psychological resources such as resilience and self-efficacy could mediate the effects of unemployment on well-being. The objective of this study is to analyse the mediating role of self-efficacy and resilience on the relationship between the amount of time unemployed and psychological distress. A sample of unemployed persons from the Region of Murcia was used (N = 280). With a transversal design and using the macro PROCESS for SPSS (2013), a multiple mediation model is proposed which analyses the mediating role of psychological resources in relation to the amount of time unemployed and self-perceived health. The explained variance of this model is 23.79%. The results show that only self-efficacy partially mediates in the relationship between the two variables (β = .18, SD = 0.06, p < .01). The main contribution of this article is showing that personal psychological resources are an effective tool to cope with life stressors, such as, in this case, unemployment.     

Sensitivity analysis and choosing between alternative polytomous IRT models using Bayesian model comparison criteria

Polytomous Item Response Theory (IRT) models are used by specialists to score assessments and questionnaires that have items with multiple response categories. In this article, we study the performance of five model comparison criteria for comparing fit of the graded response and generalized partial credit models using the same dataset when the choice between the two is unclear. Simulation study is conducted to analyze the sensitivity of priors and compare the performance of the criteria using the No-U-Turn Sampler algorithm, under a Bayesian approach. The results were used to select a model for an application in mental health data.     

Unveiling Research Trends for Organizational Reputation in the Nonprofit Sector

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Public scrutiny and the need for funds in a more competitive environment are pressuring nonprofits to be more consciously...     

The redefinition of gender roles in immigrant women: the importance of local spaces in global processes

In today’s complex, intercultural, transnational, glocalized world, linking conceptual analyses and theoretical representations to the empirical study of female migration also requires, among other aspects, acknowledging the importance of the arrival context in the redefinition of gender roles, since it operates as an area of opportunity or containment mainly due to a number of specific features, which interacts with women’s economic, cultural and social capital, to produce different results in the situation of migrant women. The context of arrival and the subjects, conceived of as actors inserted in social structures where they have scope for action, is the focus of our analysis. This article addresses this issue through the study of two cases of migrant women in different contexts. One of the women is a Mexican migrant who settled in Sonoma County California in the US, and the other a Bulgarian who arrived in Ribera del Duero in the Autonomous Community of Castile and León in Spain. The research used mixed methods, which included the review of various censuses and documentary sources, ethnographic fieldwork and the qualitative technique of the life story to undertake the case studies.