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.     

The work–family challenge and mental health

The work–family literature is dominated by studies of white middle-class workers. In this study, we sought to expand this focus by examining work–family issues from the perspective of Mexicans who have immigrated to the USA within the past five years. Using data from qualitative in-depth interviews (N?=?22) and quantitative structured interviews (N?=?150), we documented the work–family experiences associated with immigration, and we examined the extent to which these experiences differed by gender as well as their mental health effects. The in-depth interviews clearly indicated that separation from family and community was a common and poignant strain experienced by Mexican immigrants who came to the USA to find work, and that these experiences did not differ between women and men. Quantitative analyses corroborated the qualitative findings by indicating women and men had similar levels of work–family strain. Analyses also indicated that higher levels of work–family strain were associated with more perceived stress, anxiety and depression, and that these associations did not differ between women and men. Finally, modest evidence suggested that the effects of work–family strain on mental health may be lower when the realities experienced by immigrants in finding employment and sending money home matched their expectations. This study adds a new voice to the work–family literature and the context and results make clear the tension between work and family: families frequently benefit from adults’ paid work, but this paid work is not without costs.     

Socio-economic Indexes in Surveys for Comparisons between Countries

The study of socio-economic inequalities from across-national perspective has been hampered by the lack of adequate common indices of socio-economic status that can be used in a self-report survey instrument. This paper examines the construction and the properties of global social indexes in general, and of the Family Affluence Scale (henceforth FAS) in particular. The paper proposes a new strategy for making comparisons of the global index with stratified data, building a revised FAS based on Adapted Canonical Variate Analysis (henceforth ACVA). This alternative strategy for constructing a global index is available in standard software, and the new proposal for stratified data only requires a simple program, which is justified, explained and provided in the text. Data come from the 1998 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), a WHO Cross-National Study using cluster sampling of schoolchildren from five countries: Denmark, Latvia, Portugal, Scotland and the USA. The results reveal that in every country we would have had a completely different evaluation of the three indicators of Family Affluence if we had used either linear or nonlinear approaches to compute the global indexes. Moreover, Family Affluence comparisons among countries shows that the relative contribution of the three indicators to the overall FAS, changes from country to country. We conclude that separate indicators of Family Affluence are not equally relevant in each country and, as a consequence, do not contribute equally to the global index. For cross-cultural studies, the strategy for constructing an index should be country specific. The methodological developments presented in the paper open up opportunities to study socio-economic patterning of health among young people in the developed world, since self completed surveys can now employ a common measure of family material wealth. The findings show that the RFAS (Revised FAS) is a useful index of socio-economic status for use in national and cross-national surveys of adolescent health and health behaviour. The new strategy for weighting observed indicators in the index gives it enhanced power to detect in equalities.     

Is a small Monte Carlo analysis a good analysis?

In this paper we study the relationship between the number of replications and the accuracy of the estimated quantiles of a distribution obtained by simulation. A method for testing hypotheses on the quantiles of a theoretical distribution using the simulated distribution is proposed, as well as a method to check the hypothesis of consistency of a test. Received: November 15, 1999; revised version: May 29, 2001     

Objective priors for hypothesis testing in one-way random effects models

The Bayes factor is a key tool in hypothesis testing. Nevertheless, the important issue of which priors should be used to develop objective Bayes factors remains open. The authors consider this problem in the context of the one-way random effects model. They use concepts such as orthogonality, predictive matching and invariance to justify a specific form of the priors for common parameters and derive the intrinsic and divergence based prior for the new parameter. The authors show that both intrinsic priors or divergence-based priors produce consistent Bayes factors. They illustrate the methods and compare them with other proposals.     

Causes and Consequences of Block Share Purchases. Evidence from Spanish Non-Financial Firms

The structure of Spanish capital markets doesnot facilitate an efficient market forcorporate control through takeover process,which assumes that inefficient management isreplaced by competing teams. The ownershipstructure of listed companies is highlyconcentrated, with extremely low floating stockfor some companies. At the same time animportant number of companies have introducedanti-takeover provisions in their statutes.There is another way of disciplining managementthrough the exit solution: by transferring theownership of significant blocks of shares, amarket for partial corporate control, asalternative to the takeover market. Theobjective of this paper is to test empiricallythe causes and consequences of block purchasesin Spain for non-financial listed companies.The main results are: i) There is no evidencethat previous poor performance of the companiescauses block increases; ii) Block increasesoccur more frequently in companies with lowerownership concentration. After the blockincrease, on average, the ownership of thelargest shareholder increases. iii) After blockincreases there are significant board changes,for both executive board members and also fornon-executives. (iv) The transfer of blocksoccurs more frequently for smaller companies.We conclude that agency theory predictionsabout the disciplining role of partial takeoveractivity are not fully supported. They arecontingent on institutional characteristics ofthe corporate governance system.