‘Refugees welcome?’ The interplay between perceived threats and general concerns on the acceptance of refugees – a factorial survey approach in Germany

The on-going migration of refugees to Europe has fuelled debates about the indigence of refugees and the perceived legitimacy of individual claims for asylum in different receptive countries. With a substantial body of research that has investigated the antecedents of attitudes towards immigrants, evidence on whether those underlying assumptions hold true for refugees as well remains scarce. The paper applies the framework of Intergroup Threat Theory to arrive at competing hypotheses with regard to the acceptance levels of refugees. We use pooled data from two probabilistic samples drawn in the German city of Dresden and apply a confounded factorial survey design to extend previous research on attitudes towards refugees. We find that natives perceive political persecution and war as justified reasons for seeking asylum in Germany, while socio-demographic characteristics of respondents and refugees are of minor importance. Foremost, the individual level of respondent’s fear of crime represents a crucial moderator of the perception of refugees as threatening.     

‘Let's Talk About Children’: Investigating the Use of a Family‐focused Intervention in the Gambling Support Services Sector

The family‐focused mental health intervention, ‘Let's Talk About Children,’ has positively influenced the lives of families affected by parental mental illness. This paper outlines the use of this brief, strengths‐based intervention for parents with gambling and other co‐occurring issues from the gamblers’ support services sector. Over a six‐month period, a training manual and accompanying resources were adapted for the gamblers’ support services sector and a targeted training session developed. Nine problem gambling counsellors from three Victorian gambling support services trialled the Let's Talk About Children intervention over a four‐month period. Qualitative data were gathered through focus groups, interviews, and practice enquiry groups to determine the impact of the Let's Talk About Children model for gambling support services. The results are presented as ‘practice wisdoms and recommendations’ reporting on the impact of the trial and to provide some guidance to support others in the implementation of a specific family‐focused intervention. This paper reports on the first exploratory trial of Let's Talk About Children for the gambler's support services sector in Australia.     

Ungleiche Chancen im Wissenschaftssystem: Artefakt oder Realität?

The article “Emergence of an academic elite? The impact of universities’ size and reputation on research funding” by Katrin Auspurg, Thomas Hinz and Jürgen Güdler (volume 4/2008 of this Journal) discusses critically Richard Münch’s thesis of monopolistic tendencies in the German science system. Unfortunately the authors focus in their analysis on an improper object, the “Individual grants programme” (Normalverfahren) of the German Research Foundation (DFG). However, problematic developments for the German science system will rather result from the “Coordinated grants programmes” (koordinierte Programme), in particular the excellence initiative. Furthermore the authors fail to connect their analysis to the broader context of the functions and implications of the increasing role of third party funding in the German science system.     

Lag Length Selection for Unit Root Tests in the Presence of Nonstationary Volatility

A number of recent papers have focused on the problem of testing for a unit root in the case where the driving shocks may be unconditionally heteroskedastic. These papers have, however, taken the lag length in the unit root test regression to be a deterministic function of the sample size, rather than data-determined, the latter being standard empirical practice. We investigate the finite sample impact of unconditional heteroskedasticity on conventional data-dependent lag selection methods in augmented Dickey–Fuller type regressions and propose new lag selection criteria which allow for unconditional heteroskedasticity. Standard lag selection methods are shown to have a tendency to over-fit the lag order under heteroskedasticity, resulting in significant power losses in the (wild bootstrap implementation of the) augmented Dickey–Fuller tests under the alternative. The proposed new lag selection criteria are shown to avoid this problem yet deliver unit root tests with almost identical finite sample properties as the corresponding tests based on conventional lag selection when the shocks are homoskedastic.     

A counterexample to a conjecture of Schwartz

In 1990, motivated by applications in the social sciences, Thomas Schwartz made a conjecture about tournaments which would have had numerous attractive consequences. In particular, it implied that there is no tournament with a partition A, B of its vertex set, such that every transitive subset of A is in the out-neighbour set of some vertex in B, and vice versa. But in fact there is such a tournament, as we show in this article, and so Schwartz’ conjecture is false. Our proof is non-constructive and uses the probabilistic method.     

The Emergency of Climate Change: Why Are We Failing to Take Action?

Latane and Darley developed a five-stage model to understand why people do and do not help other people in emergency situations. We extend their five-stage model to explore why people do and do not take action against climate change. We identify the factors that make climate change difficult to notice and ambiguous as an emergency; we explore barriers to taking responsibility for action; and we discuss the issues of efficacy and costs versus benefits that make action unlikely. The resulting analysis is useful on two levels. For educators and policy makers, the model suggests the most efficacious approaches to galvanizing action among U.S. citizens. For social scientists, the model provides a valuable framework for integrating research from diverse areas of psychology and suggests fruitful avenues for future empirical research.     

The value of a name: Estimating the economic impact of public land designation

Public land designations have been shown to have significant impact on their contextual regional economies. This paper reviews the existing literature on how public lands impact the proximate regional economies in which they are situated. Based on this collected wisdom the paper synthesizes past lessons into a comprehensive impact methodology. This methodology distinguishes quality effects in terms of visitors’ willingness to pay for sites of higher quality and quantity effects in terms of additional visitation to such sites to give a more comprehensive methodology for characterizing visitation and economic impact of protected area designation. We focus on National Monuments and National Parks, given that these two types of public lands have the broadest popular exposure and feature the most reliable data. A case study is then presented for a hypothetical protected area in Ferry County, Washington, USA, applying this new methodology to assess the likely economic effects of different types of protected areas.     

INTERVENTION STRATEGIES: PREDICTING FAMILY THERAPY OUTCOME*

A pre-defined list of family therapy intervention strategies was used to predict post-therapy perceived life happiness and marital happiness among husbands and wives. Clients presented with both child and marriage-focused problems. The data were analyzed separately for husbands and wives. In general, favorable outcome for husbands was associated with active restructuring operations on the part of the therapist. Prediction of outcome for wives was less clear. However, wives did appear to respond favorably to less active interventions such as actualizing transactional patterns and reframing.