Homosexuality in Turkey: Strategies for Managing Heterosexism

The goal of this study was to identify the strategies used by young homosexuals to manage their sexual minority status in Turkey. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 self-identified homosexual university students. The data on the strategies employed by homosexuals suggested a categorization of these strategies into four interrelated areas: strategies employed in the process of self-acceptance; strategies to manage sexual stigma and prejudice; strategies specific to the coming-out process; and the strategies used while openly expressing their sexual identities.     

Remittances and Calorie Consumption Nexus in Algeria

This study investigates the cointegration and causal relationships between remittances and calorie consumption as an indicator of food security in Algeria. We estimate the calorie demand function for the period 1970‐2008, using two different cointegration tests Johansen and Juselius ( 1990 ) and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach proposed by Pesaran et al. ( 2001 ) and Granger causality test based on Vector Error Correction Model. We find that: (1) GDP per capita affects calorie consumption positively and significantly; (2) income elasticity of calorie consumption is 0.16 in the short run and 0.60 in the long run; (3) remittances positively and significantly influence calorie consumption in the long run; (4) remittance elasticity of calorie consumption is 0.05 in the long run; (5) based on the causality test remittances influence calorie consumption directly and indirectly via GDP per capita in the long run.     

Youths' Organized Activities and Adjustment in Emerging Adulthood: A Multidimensional Conception of Participation

This longitudinal study examined how participation in organized activities during adolescence (ages 14–17) is associated with adjustment in emerging adulthood (age 21). It investigated the contribution of three dimensions of participation: activity portfolios (i.e., specific combinations of activity types), intensity, and duration. The sample included 287 Canadian adolescents. First, distinct activity portfolios were identified using a person‐centered approach. Second, differences between portfolios were examined with regard to salient indicators of adjustment in emerging adulthood: depressive symptoms, problematic alcohol use, educational status, and civic engagement. Third, the contributions of participation intensity and duration were examined. Results revealed that certain portfolios were related in distinct ways to specific outcomes and that these differences depended on intensity or duration of participation.     

Eliciting and Combining Decision Criteria Using a Limited Palette of Utility Functions and Uncertainty Distributions: Illustrated by Application to Pest Risk Analysis

Utility functions in the form of tables or matrices have often been used to combine discretely rated decision‐making criteria. Matrix elements are usually specified individually, so no one rule or principle can be easily stated for the utility function as a whole. A series of five matrices are presented that aggregate criteria two at a time using simple rules that express a varying degree of constraint of the lower rating over the higher. A further nine possible matrices were obtained by using a different rule either side of the main axis of the matrix to describe situations where the criteria have a differential influence on the outcome. Uncertainties in the criteria are represented by three alternative frequency distributions from which the assessors select the most appropriate. The output of the utility function is a distribution of rating frequencies that is dependent on the distributions of the input criteria. In pest risk analysis (PRA), seven of these utility functions were required to mimic the logic by which assessors for the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization arrive at an overall rating of pest risk. The framework enables the development of PRAs that are consistent and easy to understand, criticize, compare, and change. When tested in workshops, PRA practitioners thought that the approach accorded with both the logic and the level of resolution that they used in the risk assessments.     

Employee strain and job satisfaction related to an implementation of quality in a public service organization: A longitudinal study

To date, few studies have focused on employee reactions to the quality-related aspects of the introduction of New Public Management (NPM). The aim of this study was to investigate the effects on employee strain and satisfaction of the implementation NPM in a public service organization. The study was designed as an empirical examination of the 'context-dependent approach' ( Edwards, Collinson, & Rees, 1998 ). This approach suggests that effects of an organizational change depend on the context of the implementation, i.e. organizational aspects (implementation strategies), job content and job context dimensions. They employed a single-case longitudinal design. The case was a large municipal service unit responsible for the public housing system of a city in Austria. The sample consisted of 217 employees. Measurements were taken before the organizational change, and at two different times during the change process. While the implementation of NPM can be considered to have been an organizational success (increase in customer satisfaction), it was accompanied by increases in job strain, and, at the same time, mixed results in job satisfaction. Less qualified employees mainly responsible for the customer interface experienced the organizational change most negatively. Using structural equation modelling, the context-dependent approach was empirically confirmed. Job control, role clarity and information were found to be the most important job and organizational resources.     

WebStress: A web interface to explore a multidatabase bibliographic corpus on occupational stress

A bibliographic study on a multidisciplinary subject, such as occupational stress, requires a multidatabase query facility. Given this, we searched eight databases belonging to different fields (medicine, psychology, etc.) and from different countries. Thus, more than 26000 references on occupational stress were gathered. A bibliographic corpus of this sort is unusable because of the heterogeneous format of the records and the number of duplicate entries. Considering the limitations of commercial programs, we have developed a system, called WebStress, for reformatting the data and removing duplicates. The huge number of references and the research needs of updating and searching have necessitated the addition of several other functions to WebStress. Therefore WebStress comprises a web interface that makes it possible to search the corpus with advanced features (using clustering, a specialized thesaurus on stress and Boolean queries). In addition to the usual bibliographic queries on a specific database such as Medline, WebStress provides bibliometric analysis of the corpus, which might contribute to a detailed analysis on occupational stress in order to highlight the networks of researchers and to find the main topics studied in this area. WebStress is not yet available to researchers in general. It is being further developed, and also permission needs to be obtained from the eight commercial bibliographic databases that it consults.