Moral harassment of public schools teachers

Programs geared towards the occupational health of public workers, that include the prevention of moral harassment, have been created in Santa Catarina. Any institution identified for its poor records in regards to moral harassment will end up having its image tainted before society at large. This is due to its use of arbitrary and embarrassing means for accomplishing everyday tasks. This article aims to consider Workplace Psychological Harassment (WPH), its risks and implications for the health of public workers. The methodology chosen was a teacher's case study, which consisted of document research, interviews, anamnesis and observation, all in order to relate both theory and practice. The results indicate that WPH is a complex phenomenon, which can be studied in a variety of ways. WPH risks the biopsychosocial health of the worker, causing the deterioration in social-professional relations, illness, and incapacity, as well as higher costs and certain degradation in production. It is difficult to prove incidents and their impact. Nevertheless, this research concluded that WPH has harmful consequences for the physical and mental health of workers, and is in the ergonomic field, since part of this profession's role is to seek understanding of work in order to reorganize it.     

On elliptical multilevel models

Multilevel models have been widely applied to analyze data sets which present some hierarchical structure. In this paper we propose a generalization of the normal multilevel models, named elliptical multilevel models. This proposal suggests the use of distributions in the elliptical class, thus involving all symmetric continuous distributions, including the normal distribution as a particular case. Elliptical distributions may have lighter or heavier tails than the normal ones. In the case of normal error models with the presence of outlying observations, heavy-tailed error models may be applied to accommodate such observations. In particular, we discuss some aspects of the elliptical multilevel models, such as maximum likelihood estimation and residual analysis to assess features related to the fitting and the model assumptions. Finally, two motivating examples analyzed under normal multilevel models are reanalyzed under Student-t and power exponential multilevel models. Comparisons with the normal multilevel model are performed by using residual analysis.     

Promoting social Europe? The development of European youth unemployment policies

Since the beginning of the millennium, the institutions of the European Union have intensified their political efforts to combat youth employment. Youth‐specific policy initiatives were launched after the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and the overall subsequent rise of unemployment rates among young people. In this article, we analyse and assess these developments on the basis of an analysis of European policy documents and interviews. Our conclusions are twofold. One, we argue that the Europe 2020 Strategy and its flagship initiatives devoted to youth do not constitute a new policy field or approach, but are rather the outcome of an incrementalist logic of policy development. Two, the European youth strategy is clearly committed to activation, and it pushes policy developments towards a minimalist policy approach of precarious protection. Both developments are explained by the actor constellations and path dependencies of the European policy arena.     

A Dyadic Approach to Understanding the Link Between Sexual Functioning and Sexual Satisfaction in Heterosexual Couples

Researchers have demonstrated that several dimensions of sexual functioning (e.g., sexual desire, arousal, orgasm) are associated with the sexual satisfaction of individuals in a committed mixed-sex (male–female) relationship. We extended this research by comparing a dyadic model that included both own (i.e., actor effect) and partner (i.e., partner effect) domains of sexual functioning to an individual model that included only actor effects. Participants were 124 mixed-sex couples who completed online measures of sexual functioning and sexual satisfaction. Data analysis using the actor–partner interdependence model (APIM) and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that the dyadic model had a better fit than the individual model. Women’s sexual desire and orgasm and men’s erectile functioning were significant positive predictors of both own and partner’s sexual satisfaction. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of taking a dyadic approach to research and clinical work related to sexual satisfaction.     

Older Women with Cardiovascular Disease: Perceptions of Initial Experiences and Long-Term Influences on Daily Life

ABSTRACT

In 2004, we conducted qualitative interviews with 29 White women diagnosed with cardiovascular disease (CVD) living in Southwest Virginia, aged 69 to 92 years (M age = 79.2 years; SD = 6.8); time since diagnosis ranged from 1 to 50 years (M = 14.3; SD = 11.2). We explored the women's initial illness episode and the influence of CVD on their current daily functioning, family activities and relationships, and social engagement. The women were slow to seek help for CVD symptoms. Postrecovery, 62% of women perceived their heart disease as influencing change in their daily lives. The influence of CVD varied depending on how congruent behavior changes were with their sense of self.     

Predicting Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Intentions of College-Aged Males: An Examination of Parents’ and Son's Perceptions

Abstract

Objective: To examine male students’ and their parents’ human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine communication in relation to males’ willingness to discuss the vaccine with their health care provider and the likelihood of being vaccinated. Participants: Dyads (n = 111) of students and parents. Methods: Participants completed a HPV vaccine survey based on the risk perception attitude framework in 2009. Results: Male students’ perceived susceptibility for HPV and self-efficacy to talk to their provider were directly related to their intention to discuss the HPV vaccine, and their intention was directly related to their likelihood of being vaccinated. Parents’ perceived self-efficacy to talk to their son and response efficacy of the vaccine were directly related to their intention to talk to their son; however, parents’ intention was not related to the likelihood of their son being vaccinated. Conclusions: College males may benefit from HPV vaccine educational programs that include communication skills training to discuss the HPV vaccine with their parents.     

Current trends in medicalisation: Universalising ADHD diagnosis and treatments

There is a wide sociological debate that documents how inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsive behaviours from a certain point forward cease to be disturbing behaviours and become childhood psychiatric disorders—named attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD)—to be responded to with specific treatments since these behaviours are supposed to have a negative or pervasive impact on social and personal functioning and quality of life. Looking back over the stages of this debate, the article will focus on what, in recent years, are the two main directions of the expansion of the domain of medicalisation: on the one hand, discussing how the ADHD category has changed by moving from being typically a childhood problem to a disorder that can affect adults and, on the other, how it tends to globalise conquering new markets outside the United States, Canada, and Australia. The article concludes commenting on how the processes of lifelong expansion and worldwide diffusion is universalising the medical category, overcoming the disciplinary and geographical boundaries in which ADHD was created and developed.     

Theology of liberation and some problems of religious change in Brazil

It has been said that in Brazil the Catholic Church, by the adoption of the Theology of Liberation, chose the poor, but the poor chose the ever growing churches and sects of Pentecostal derivation. This paradox haunts the sociology of religion, in Brazil and elsewhere. This paper suggests to its solution a hypothesis inspired by Weber's ‘Religious Directions of the World and their Directions’ (the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’).The social, political and economic efficacy of a given religious movement is essentially linked to its theodicy. In other words, the passage of religion to politics, if understood as the exit from religion as allegedly motivated by religion itself, involves a contradiction as it implies the elimination of its basic religious motivation. The inner-worldly success of a religious tendency depends, therefore, on the persistence of a properly religious ‘rejection of the world’. In fact the whole of the Theology of Liberation movement falls under a certain cognitive penumbra, a kind of theological and philosophical syncretism, which constitutes both its main strength and its main weakness.