Relations Between Media,Perceived Social Support and Personal Well-Being in Adolescence

This paper’s main objective is to show relations between interest in media, perceived social support and adolescents’ personal well-being. For this purpose, 1,589 Brazilian adolescents answered a questionnaire containing Cummins’ Personal Well-Being, Vaux’s Social Support Appraisals and Casas’ interest in media scales. The media in study are: The Internet, computer games, video games, computer, cell phone and television. For the data analysis this research used Structural Equation Modeling, a statistical methodology based on the confirmation of hypotheses previously established by theoretical frameworks on data. A final model of relations between media, support and well-being was obtained with a fit considered satisfactory by the literature. Implications of media on adolescents’ well-being based on this model are considered.     

Happiness and Childbearing Across Europe

Using happiness as a well-being measure and comparative data from the European social survey we focus in this paper on the link between happiness and childbearing across European countries. The analysis motivates from the recent lows in fertility in many European countries and that economic wellbeing measures are problematic when considering childbearing. We find significant country differences, though the direct association between happiness and childbearing is modest. However, partnership status plays an important role for both men and women. Working fathers are always happier, whereas working mothers are not, though mothers?? happiness tends to increase with household income.     

Likelihood-based risk estimation for variance-gamma models

Although the variance-gamma distribution is a flexible model for log-returns of financial assets, so far it has found rather limited applications in finance and risk management. One of the reasons is that maximum likelihood estimation of its parameters is not straightforward. We develop an EM-type algorithm based on Nitithumbundit and Chan (An ECM algorithm for skewed multivariate variance gamma distribution in normal mean–variance representation, arXiv:1504.01239, 2015) that bypasses the evaluation of the full likelihood, which may be difficult because the density is not in closed form and is unbounded for small values of the shape parameter. Moreover, we study the relative efficiency of our approach with respect to the maximum likelihood estimation procedures implemented in the VarianceGamma and ghyp R packages. Extensive simulation experiments and real-data analyses suggest that the multicycle ECM algorithm gives the best results in terms of root-mean-squared-error, for both parameter and value-at-risk estimation. The performance of the routines in the ghyp R package is similar but not as good, whereas the VarianceGamma package produces worse results, especially when the shape parameter is small.     

Some Remarks on Latent Variable Models in Categorical Data Analysis

We present an overview of some important and/or interesting contributions to the latent variable literature for the analysis of multivariate categorical responses, beginning with Lazarsfeld's introduction of latent class models. There is by now an enormous literature on latent variable models for categorical responses, especially in the context of including random effects in generalized linear mixed models, so this is necessarily a highly selective overview. Due to space considerations, we summarize the main ideas, suppressing details. As part of our presentation, we raise a couple of questions that may suggest future research work.     

La politique publique pour le développement durable: l’Amazonie,un cas illustratif

Comment utiliser l’éducation, la science et la technologie pour organiser une politique de développement durable dans l’État d’Amazonas, l’Unité fédérale la plus vaste du Brésil et d’Amazonie, qui compte 70 peuples indigènes ayant leur propre cosmogonie, 10 % de la réserve mondiale d’eau douce de surface, 25°000 kilomètres de fleuves navigables, 6,7 % de la biosphère tropicale mondiale, 72 millions d’hectares de territoires protégés, et 10 % de toutes les réserves forestières des tropiques humides de la planète, réparties sur 96% de son territoire? Cette proposition constitue le programme, ses principes structurels, ses mécanismes opérationnels et un ensemble d’actions visant à l’implantation et à l’organisation de cette politique de développement durable au cours de la période 2003-2015. Comment intégrer processus de la nature et processus culturels à un modèle de développement durable dans l’Amazonie? Telles sont les principales questions abordées par cet article, qui présente une initiative publique pionnière au Brésil pour construire des modèles de développement durable dans l’Amazonie.     

Analysis of noise on construction sites of high-rise buildings

In the civil construction industry sector, it has been observed that the increasing use of machines has made tasks noisier and consequently caused hearing loss and had other adverse effects on workers. The objective of this study was to identify and assess the physical risks of noise present in activities undertaken in a construction company in order to propose control measures which will contribute to the management of health and safety within the company's organization. The methodology applied was based on verifying the characteristics of exposure to noise on construction sites, from an observation of sources which generated noise and making measurements of sound pressure levels emitted by these sources. The data was then analyzed and compared with the recommended performance levels established in control measures. As a result, it was found that some machines and equipment used in civil construction often generate noise above the acceptable levels and as such, in these cases, various control measures have been proposed. It is believed that the use of management techniques is the most effective way to assess risk and to implement the preventive and corrective actions proposed, and allows for the analysis of sound pressure levels on an ongoing basis.     

Developing a Family Risk Assessment Tool in Adolescent Offenders: An Exploratory Study

The quality of family relations it is a relevant risk or protective factor in the adolescent criminal involvement, being the interplay between family and adolescent individual features, fundamental issues in the understanding of the adolescent risk and strengths assessment. This study aims to contribute to the validation of the Structured Interview of Family Assessment Risk (SIFAR) tool for the adolescent offenders’ family, based in nine family living items as risk factors and four protective factors. In an exploratory design, the structural consistency of SIFAR was analyzed using Cronbach’s alpha, mean inter-item correlation and exploratory factor analysis over risk items, because of the protective items dichotomous scale. The participants were a sample of 130 male adolescent delinquents detained in Portuguese facilities of the Directorate-general of Social Rehabilitation and Imprisonment, and their parents, paired analyzed. The SIFAR presents a structured professional judgment design for adolescent offender’s family protective and risk assessment. A reliability value of .75 was obtained for the risk items education, employment, housing/transport, legal problems, social dissonance, poverty, social net, social security and parenting, and an .79 was registered to the protective items family involvement, high discipline, low physical punishment and low parental stress. The risk items revealed a two-factor structure (social-economics and social conformity factors) explaining 48.15 % of the total variance. Results show the potential usefulness of SIFAR in the assessment the family protective and risk factors of adolescent offenders, presenting adequate structural reliability and construct validity. However further investigation it is necessary to the validation process of this tool.