How Similar Are Cohabitation and Marriage? Legal Approaches to Cohabitation across Western Europe

Although cohabitation and childbearing within cohabitation have increased in Europe over recent decades, the variation across Europe remains remarkably wide. Most studies on union formation have not explicitly addressed the role of state policies in the development of cohabitation or discussed how countries have responded to changes in union formation by passing legislation. Here we discuss historical and theoretical issues relevant to the relationship between state policies and union formation and describe policies relating to cohabitation and marriage in nine Western European countries. Drawing on secondary sources and legal documents, we examine the quantity of regulations that mention cohabitation and the approach to cohabitation in 19 policy dimensions. We then place the countries along a continuum, from those that have equalized cohabitation and marriage to those that only regulate marriage. As a whole, this overview raises questions about the changing institution of marriage, as well as the increasing institutionalization of cohabitation.     

What is Sexual Satisfaction? Thematic Analysis of Lay People's Definitions

Sexual satisfaction is an important indicator of sexual health and is strongly associated with relationship satisfaction. However, research exploring lay definitions of sexual satisfaction has been scarce. We present thematic analysis of written responses of 449 women and 311 men to the question “How would you define sexual satisfaction?” The participants were heterosexual individuals with a mean age of 36.05 years (SD = 8.34) involved in a committed exclusive relationship. In this exploratory study, two main themes were identified: personal sexual well-being and dyadic processes. The first theme focuses on the positive aspects of individual sexual experience, such as pleasure, positive feelings, arousal, sexual openness, and orgasm. The second theme emphasizes relational dimensions, such as mutuality, romance, expression of feelings, creativity, acting out desires, and frequency of sexual activity. Our results highlight that mutual pleasure is a crucial component of sexual satisfaction and that sexual satisfaction derives from positive sexual experiences and not from the absence of conflict or dysfunction. The findings support definitions and models of sexual satisfaction that focus on positive sexual outcomes and the use of measures that incorporate items linked to personal and dyadic sexual rewards for both men and women.     

Impact of an Overt Response System on Staff Performance and Maintenance of Computer-Based Instruction

Interactive Computer Based Instruction (CBI) systems involve teaching strategies to facilitate greater response opportunities during training in an effort to improve learner performance. The current study investigated the effect of online staff training videos with and without overt response requirements on posttest and maintenance test scores across six block-randomized instructional modules for four employees of a university located in the southeastern region of the United States. The overt response consisted of multiple-choice questions administered throughout select teaching modules using an alternating treatment design. Findings suggest that learning occurred as a result of the CBI training; however, the effectiveness of the overt response system varied across individuals, with no discernible differentiation between learning gains associated with response requirements. Other areas of research for expanding the efficacy of CBI and overt response systems are highlighted.     

Maternal union instability and childhood mortality risk in the Global South, 2010–14

Efforts to improve child survival in lower-income countries typically focus on fundamental factors such as economic resources and infrastructure provision, even though research from post-industrial countries confirms that family instability has important health consequences. We tested the association between maternal union instability and children’s mortality risk in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia using children’s actual experience of mortality (discrete-time probit hazard models) as well as their experience of untreated morbidity (probit regression). Children of divorced/separated mothers experience compromised survival chances, but children of mothers who have never been in a union generally do not. Among children of partnered women, those whose mothers have experienced prior union transitions have a higher mortality risk. Targeting children of mothers who have experienced union instability—regardless of current union status—may augment ongoing efforts to reduce childhood mortality, especially in Africa and Latin America where union transitions are common.     

Effects of the social dominance orientation on environmental attitudes of Chilean university students / Efectos de la orientación a la dominancia social sobre las actitudes ambientales de universitarios chilenos

By adopting a multidimensional approach to environmental attitudes (apathy, anthropocentrism, connectedness and emotional affinity with nature), this study explores the relationships between these dimensions, social dominance orientation (SDO) and political orientation. Two hundred and sixty-two Chilean university students filled out an ad hoc online questionnaire. Two confirmatory factorial analyses showed the four typologies of environmental attitudes and the two factors for SDO, which are labelled group dominance and opposition to equality. Through hierarchical regressions, group dominance showed higher explanatory power of environmental attitudes than political orientation. Furthermore, using the bootstrap procedure we showed that group dominance mediated between political orientation and attitudes of apathy, anthropocentrism and connectedness, while opposition to equality mediated between apathy and emotional affinity. We conclude that SDO is an important variable for measuring political ideology while also providing new nuances when analysing the relationships with environmental attitudes.     

Estimation and diagnostic analysis in skew-generalized-normal regression models

The skew-generalized-normal distribution [Arellano-Valle, RB, Gómez, HW, Quintana, FA. A new class of skew-normal distributions. Comm Statist Theory Methods 2004;33(7):1465–1480] is a class of asymmetric normal distributions, which contains the normal and skew-normal distributions as special cases. The main virtues of this distribution is that it is easy to simulate from and it also supplies a genuine expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we extend the EM algorithm for linear regression models assuming skew-generalized-normal random errors and we develop a diagnostics analyses via local influence and generalized leverage, following Zhu and Lee's approach. This is because Cook's well-known approach would be more complicated to use to obtain measures of local influence. Finally, results obtained for a real data set are reported, illustrating the usefulness of the proposed method.     

Public intellectuals,political satire and the birth of activist public relations: The case of Attic Comedy

The purpose of this article is to explore the origins of dissent public relations and to establish its emergence in the context of the ancient Greek comedy represented by Aristophanes. Indeed, Attic Comedy (also known as Old Comedy) was the first great example of today’s mass communication, in which political satire was used to dissent and protest against political and social circumstances in fifth-century BC Athens. This situation was conditioned by the Peloponnesian War and its political, economic and social consequences. From this perspective, this article also constitutes an investigation into the intellectual history of public relations, of which Aristophanes can be considered to be one of the first practitioners.     

Job-Related Well-Being of Immigrants

Social Indicators Research - Considerable literature exists on the acculturation and adaptation of immigrants. For the most part, studies looked at their psychological and social adaptation to the...     

Activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning of dogs and medium-sized wild mammals in urban parks of Xalapa,Mexico

Urban Ecosystems - Free-ranging domestic dogs are the world most common exotic carnivore species that could negatively interact with the native wildlife as predators, competitors, and disease...     

From industrial restructuring to the financial crisis: Mainstream nationalism and minimum income in the Basque Country

The uneven development of minimum incomes in Spain is one of the factors that explain the significant differences in the poverty indicators that characterize the Spanish regions, generally in favour of the territories most committed to these policies (Basque Country, Navarra and Asturias). However, there are other aspects that deserve some consideration when interpreting the specific method of developing minimum incomes in southern Europe. One aspect has to do with the differing dynamics of countries, such as Spain and Italy, which have opted for a decentralized regional model. In this regard, the regional autonomous initiative of the Basque Country played a decisive role in promoting minimum income programs in the late 1980s. Without its leadership in the launch of the regional minimum income policy, Spanish trade unions would probably not have opted for this method as a mechanism for combating poverty in the 1990s. No Italian region went on to play this driving role at that time. This article analyses the ideological foundations of the Basque minimum income policy introduced in the late 1980s and which grew significantly before and during the crisis that started in 2007-2008. It examines the dominant political narrative on this issue by analysing the discourse of some of the key nationalist leaders involved in the birth and development of the minimum income scheme. The approach shows that the experience of social decline linked to industrial restructuring processes was instrumental in the construction of the nationalist narrative.