Identifying students’ intercultural communicative competence at the beginning of their placement: towards the enhancement of study abroad programmes

A pre-placement questionnaire was completed by a cohort of 30 students participating in the Erasmus exchange programmes from the University of Salamanca, placed in British universities, and by a group of 25 Nottingham Trent University students hosted by diverse Spanish universities. The questionnaire was then analysed with the aim of providing a profile of their intercultural communicative competence (ICC), based on data about their self-perceived motivation and their intercultural awareness, knowledge, attitudes and skills, prior to their stay abroad. Despite the fact that their previous experience abroad, level of language proficiency and home university requirements for the placement differed, both groups shared a positive attitude towards the host country, considered themselves ready to adapt to new cultural environments, regarded misperceptions and solving conflicts as their greater challenge and expressed a willingness to grow personally and professionally. These data will inform a larger research project seeking to identify the factors that promote the acquisition of intercultural competences, as a basis for universities to equip students with tools aimed at overcoming obstacles that may pose an educational challenge for them and hinder the development of their ICC while on placement abroad.     

Migration and Citizenship Law in Spain: Path‐dependency and Policy Change in a Recent Country of Immigration

This article analyzes the links between migratory processes and the evolution of nationality legislation in Spain. We argue that this case challenges the theoretical models that link immigration to liberalizing reforms in citizenship law. Despite large‐scale immigration experienced over the last two decades, Spanish nationality law has remained strongly focused on keeping ties with Spanish communities abroad. To account for the high degree of stability of Spanish citizenship law we structure our analysis along three basic lines: the historical conceptions derived from Spain's past as a colonial power, as well as its tradition as a country of emigration; the lack of incentives for political actors to introduce the reform of citizenship law in the political agenda; and the strategies adopted by those political actors in relation to the politicization of immigration.     

The mediating role of distributive justice perceptions in the relationship between emotion regulation and emotional exhaustion in healthcare workers

This research proposes that the use of emotion regulation strategies by employees in the service professions determines their perceptions of fairness in interactions with clients, which in turn influences their emotional exhaustion. Based on social exchange theory and models of self-control, the investigation tested whether: (1) the type of emotion regulation strategy that employees use to meet the emotional demands of their job role partially influences their perceptions of distributive justice (i.e. that clients respond to their efforts), and (2) these perceptions mediate the relationship between emotion regulation and emotional exhaustion. To test this, a longitudinal field survey study of a sample of primary care workers in Spain (general practitioners and nurses; N?=?233) was conducted. Findings showed that the relationship between emotion regulation and emotional exhaustion was mediated by perceptions of distributive justice. A bootstrapping mediational analysis showed a significant indirect effect of surface acting on emotional exhaustion through distributive justice when inter-individual differences at T1 and when intra-individual changes between T1 and T2 were considered. Deep acting indirect effects were not significant for intra-individual changes. The findings indicate that employees’ perception of distributive justice has implications for understanding the impact of emotion regulation on well-being.     

Single‐ and Multiple‐Informant Research Designs to Examine the Human Resource Management−Performance Relationship

During the last decades, many empirical studies have analysed the relationship between human resource management and firm performance. Despite the call for multiple‐rater designs, a relatively large number of researchers still rely on survey responses provided by a single informant in each organization. Single‐informant designs suffer from a number of problems, especially when the responses provided by different types of raters across firms are pooled into a single dataset prior to assessing their equivalence across raters. Using an illustration of the relationship between high performance work systems and firm performance, in this paper we observe that responses provided by managers holding different positions (human resource managers and sales managers) differ significantly and therefore pooling their responses into a single dataset may result in confusing conclusions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that differences arise in the estimated parameters when a multiple‐key‐informant approach, compared to a single‐informant design, is adopted. For these reasons, data collection using multiple key informants is recommended, based on the assumption that some raters in the firm will be more knowledgeable about the variables of interest than others.     

Inequality and deprivation within and between groups: An illustration of European union countries

This paper broadens the approach of Hey and Lambert (Q. J. Econ. 95,567–573 1980) regarding relative deprivation to the case in which individuals compare themselves with individuals belonging not only to their own group, but also to other groups. In this way, we obtain the average deprivation of a population in relation to another. This allows us to establish a correspondence between the decomposition of the Gini coefficient based on a partition of the population, and the decomposition of deprivation into two components. One quantifies deprivation within the subpopulation and the other deprivation between populations. An empirical illustration is given, based on the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Government–MCYT, (SEC2001-1668) and would like to thank Jacques Silber and two anonymous referees for their suggestions.     

Urban growth,policy and planning of public space

Under the pressure of the urbanizing tsunami, town planning and urban policies in Spain have given a residual treatment to public spaces in recent urban development. This work proposes a brief but comprehensive sociological analysis about social and morphological traits of public spaces – like paradigmatic social space – in order to show the city's irreplaceable role in citizen socialization processes. The network of streets and places, the city in this sense, make up the scenes of man's sociability. In this perspective, planning ought to be geared towards and for the city and redeem a civic impetus that pursues developing the whole instead of subjecting it.     

Skill premium effects on fertility and female labor force supply

In the last twenty years the United States has seen a positive relationship between female labor supply and total fertility rates, which differs from the pattern observed over the preceding years. We construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model capable of generating this changing relationship between fertility and female labor supply. We argue that skilled biased technological change in recent decades has increased the skill premium and has therefore decreased the relative cost of (unskilled) child care services. The positive effect of the increase in female mean wages on fertility rates, and the inducement for labor force participation provided by the reduction in the relative cost of child care services, generated the positive relationship between fertility rates and female labor force participation in the last two decades.All correspondence to Amaia Iza. This paper has benefited particularly from comments by Juan Carlos Conesa, Pedro Mira and Sara de la Rica. We also acknowledge countless conversations with María Paz Espinosa and useful comments from Jaime Alonso, Jose María Da-Rocha, Tim Kehoe, José Victor Rios-Rull, when the paper was presented at the IV Workshop of Dynamic Macroeconomics held in Vigo (Spain, July 1999) and in Universidade de Vigo (October, 2000). We also thank an anonymous referee whose comments enabled us to improve the paper considerably. Financial support from Universidad del País Vasco 9UPV 00035.321-13511/2001, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia PB097-0620, MCYT BEC2000/1394 and Instituto de la mujer (Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales) MTAS 33/00 is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are the authors responsibility. Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

The Type of Support that Adult Children Solicit from Their Mothers in European Welfare Systems

The objective of this article is to examine if the kind of relationship and the support which mothers offer adult children living outside the home can be explained by different welfare systems and structural indicators. Propositions derived from intergenerational relationship theories and national welfare typologies have been analysed and indicate that there are structural variables that influence the type of relationship and support offered. The data we have used is from the survey “Social Relations and Support Systems”of the International Survey Programme. We selected those respondents whose mothers were alive and did not reside in the same dwelling, a total of 9,261 interviewees. The results of a factor analysis reduce the relationship between mother and child to two dimensions. Both dimensions are correlated with structural factors and make it possible to situate countries based on different welfare models consistent with the literature.     

$${\mathcal{L}}_p$$ loss functions: a robust bayesian approach

In bayesian inference, the Bayes estimator is the alternative with the minimum expected loss. In most cases, the loss function shows the distance between the alternative and the parameter. Therefore, any distance can lead to a loss function. Among the best known distance functions is L _p one, where the choice of value p may be difficult and arbitrary. This paper examines robust models where the loss function is modelled by family L _p . Our solution concept is the non-dominated alternative. We characterize the non-dominated set by having the posterior distribution function satisfy a particular asymmetry property. We also include an example to illustrate the methodology described.