Adverse Health Experiences,Environmental Attitudes,and Pesticide Usage Behavior of Farm Operators

Water pollution from agricultural pesticides continues to be a public concern. Given that the use of such pesticides on the farm is largely governed by voluntary behavior, it is important to understand what drives farmer behavior. Health belief models in public health and social psychology argue that persons who have adverse health experiences are likely to undertake preventive behavior. An analogous hypothesis set was tested here: farmers who believe they have had adverse health experiences from pesticides are likely to have heightened concerns about pesticides and are more likely to take greater precautions in dealing with pesticides. This work is based on an original survey of a population of 2700 corn and soybean growers in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania using the U.S. Department of Agriculture data base. It was designed as a mail survey with telephone follow-up, and resulted in a 60 percent response rate. Farm operators report experiencing adverse health problems they believe are associated with pesticides that is equivalent to an incidence rate that is higher than the reported incidence of occupational pesticide poisonings, but similar to the reported incidence of all pesticide poisonings. Farmers who report experiencing such problems have more heightened concerns about water pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, and illness and injury from mixing, loading, and applying pesticides than farmers who have not experienced such problems. Farmers who report experiencing such problems also are more likely to report using alternative pest management practices than farmers who do not report having such problems. This implies that farmers who have had such experiences do care about the effects of application and do engage in alternative means of pest management, which at least involve the reduction in pesticide use.     

Back to Work after Incapacity Benefit: Differences between Ethnic Minority and Native Dutch Workers

Contemporary pleas for an activating welfare state and social security system emphasize that getting benefit claimants back to work is more important than providing income compensation for social risks connected with unemployment or illness. The Dutch system of incapacity benefits, however, is far removed from this normative ideal of a proactive social security system. Resumption of work after a spell of incapacity benefit is the exception rather than the rule. This article examines possible ethnic differences in resumption of work following incapacity benefit. We use a unique register data file from Statistics Netherlands that contains information about all incapacity benefit claimants in the Netherlands in 1999. In the analysis we follow these benefit claimants for three years and examine what their labour market position was in 2002. We find that resumption of work after incapacity benefit is even more the exception for migrant workers with a Turkish or Moroccan ethnic background. Contrary to our assumption, this difference from native Dutch workers cannot be explained by unfavourable personal characteristics of Turkish or Moroccan benefit claimants – their personal characteristics (gender, age, low educational level) appear to be rather favourable for resumption of work. In the current literature, these differences in outcomes between ethnic groups are often attributed to certain ‘ethnic‐specific’ or cultural factors. This article argues that we should be careful of explaining different outcomes between ethnic groups by (alleged) cultural phenomena. There are other explanations possible such as differences in work motivation, lack of ‘transition facilities’ in companies and differential treatment by employers or social security officials.     

Moving Ahead in Madrid: Aspirations and Expectations in the Spanish Second Generation

This paper examines determinants of aspirations and expectations among children of immigrants based on a statistically representative sample of 3,375 second generation youths interviewed in 101 public and private secondary schools in metropolitan Madrid. We review the past literature on status attainment in general and aspirations and expectations, in particular, and draw from it a set of six hypotheses to guide the analysis. Most theoretical statements in this field have been developed on the basis of U.S. data; studies in other immigrant-receiving countries, especially outside the Anglophone world, have been scarce. The study thus provides an opportunity to test and refine existing hypotheses in a different national context. We present breakdowns of educational and occupational aspirations and expectations by gender, parental education and type of school attended. This is followed by multivariate regressions of all four dependent variables on these three plus other predictors suggested by the research literature. This analysis ends with structural equation models - recursive and non-recursive - that provide an integrated theoretical statement of the causal structure of ambition in the Spanish context. Implications of our findings for theory and policy are examined. Suggestions for future research in this field are discussed.     

Through the looking glass: A decade of Red Cross crisis response and situational crisis communication theory

Crisis communication has emerged as a hot topic in public relations literature. However, little attention has been paid to nonprofit organizations (NPOs), one of the largest sectors of public relations practice. In particular, few studies have examined that the crisis response strategy NPOs can employ to repair their reputations. For the Red Cross and other NPOs, when faced with a crisis, communicating with their publics is critical to restore a positive reputation and, ultimately, to the continued success of the organization once the crisis has passed.     

Empirical Estimates of the NAIRU

Abstract. Empirical studies have found that the non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) has been fluctuating in OECD countries around a constant mean of several percentage points over the past decades. This mean is calculated from the constant terms carried over from the wage and price growth equations. In this paper it is shown that a high proportion of the constant term is a statistical artefact and suggests a new method which yields approximately unbiased estimates of the time‐invariant NAIRU. Using data for OECD countries it is shown that the constant‐term correction lowers the unadjusted time‐invariant NAIRU by approximately half.     

Cursed Equilibrium

There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people's actions depend on these other people's information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, cursed equilibrium, which assumes that each player correctly predicts the distribution of other players' actions, but underestimates the degree to which these actions are correlated with other players' information. We apply the concept to common‐values auctions, where cursed equilibrium captures the widely observed phenomenon of the winner's curse, and to bilateral trade, where cursedness predicts trade in adverse‐selections settings for which conventional analysis predicts no trade. We also apply cursed equilibrium to voting and signalling models. We test a single‐parameter variant of our model that embeds Bayesian Nash equilibrium as a special case and find that parameter values that correspond to cursedness fit a broad range of experimental datasets better than the parameter value that corresponds to Bayesian Nash equilibrium.     

The economic recession and civic participation: the curious case of Rotterdam's civil society, 2008–2013

This paper investigates how the 2008–9 recession affected civic participation in disadvantaged and affluent neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam. We hypothesize that levels of civic participation may either diverge or converge across neighbourhoods with a different socioeconomic status. We build upon a recent wave of studies examining how civil society has been affected by the 2008–9 recession. Using five waves from the Rotterdam Neighbourhood Profile survey (N = 63,134; 71 neighbourhoods), we find converging trends in civic participation. Between 2008 and 2013, civic participation declined in affluent neighbourhoods but increased slightly in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This convergence is partly due to the level of perceived problems in the neighbourhood and differences in the types of volunteering found in disadvantaged and affluent neighbourhoods. In addition, we argue that these converging trends can be better understood by considering the neighbourhood organizational infrastructure and local policy configurations. Next to examining the impact of the 2008–9 recession on civic participation, we contribute to research on civil society by comparing the UK and Dutch context.     

“What Will My Friends Think?” Social Consequences for Danish Victims of Sexual Assaults in Peer Groups

Being exposed to sexual assaults has numerous psychological and social consequences, which may interfere with the adolescent’s still-ongoing development. This article focuses on social consequences for adolescents exposed to sexual assault by someone from their peer group.

Participants were 148 in number and 15–18 year olds (M = 16.34 years, 90.5% female) from Centre for Victims of Sexual Assault’s “Youth Programme.”

A mixed methods design combined extensive survey data collected from the 148 adolescents and five case stories. Almost half of the assaults (47.4%) were committed by someone from the victim’s social circle who was not a family member. Only 30.5% of these victims reported the assault to the police. Fear of social consequences was the main reason for not reporting. The majority of the participants described failure to thrive in school in the aftermath of the assault, for example, because the assailant attended the same school. Result furthermore showed how social relations can be complicated due to an assault and subsequent reactions, which can result in isolation for the victim and exclusion from their peer group.

Sexual assaults in peer groups have great impact on the victim’s well-being. Understanding and support from peers is of the utmost importance. Implications for practice are discussed.