Federal Financial Aid and Family Formation: Examining the Social Security Student Benefit Program

A broad empirical literature asks if social policies designed to provide benefits to low-income families also affect family formation patterns. While most of the evidence suggests that family formation effects are small at best, and often nonexistent, recent research argues that policies that alter budget constraints considerably should have greater family formation impacts. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the Social Security Student Benefit Program (SSSBP), a program designed to provide large higher education subsidies for the children of disabled, retired, or deceased parents. Conditions for receipt of SSSBP created strong incentives to delay marriage. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and a difference-in-differences model, we found that women potentially qualifying for the SSSBP were much less likely to marry before age 22 and were older when they had children, while the program did not influence the probability of women ever marrying or having children. Impacts on men, however, were negligible.     

Strategies and cues adolescents use to assess the age of an online stranger

A common risk among adolescents is sexual solicitation, in which an adolescent is asked to provide sexual information, engage in sexual talk, or in sexual activities. Although scholars increasingly address this topic from an intrapersonal perspective, there is little attention to factors of language use and message content. In two focus group studies, we investigated whether adolescent girls consider themselves capable of assessing whether an online stranger is an adult or a peer, the extent to which adolescent girls actually succeed in making this assessment, the strategies they apply to do so, and the content- and language-related cues focused on. Our findings suggest that most of the adolescent girls are confident in their ability to assess whether the stranger is a peer or an adult with possible sexual intentions. However, we also found that only 43% were able to correctly make this assessment. Most of the adolescents seem to apply the passive strategy of uncertainty reduction: They scan the profile page of the stranger, check contact information, and the profile picture. They may choose to apply the interactive strategy to find out more about the online stranger. Important content-related cues that alarm adolescent girls are: ignoring personal questions, showing an exaggerated amount of interest, acting as a friend, and being sexually oriented. Language cues mentioned related to word usage, abbreviations, sentence length, and tone.     

Emancipated foster youth’s experiences and perceptions of the transition to adulthood

Using a grounded theory approach, this study evaluated narratives from a sample of 170 emancipated foster youth (66.5% female; 84.6% non-white) as they reflected on their experiences between the ages of 18 and 25 across three data waves. Corbin and Strauss’ (1990) three-phase coding process revealed five overarching themes: adult values and characteristics, nature of the transition process, material needs and resources, relationship concerns, and affective experiences. Although some elements of Arnett’s (2000) model of emerging adulthood were evident in this sample of emancipated foster youth, such as individualistic qualities and instability, other core features were rarely discussed, such as self-focus and optimism, or were expressed in unique ways, such as exploration and feeling in-between. There were significant age-related changes, but not gender differences, in youth’s discussion of varied themes. These findings suggest promising avenues for intervention during the sensitive period of developmental reorganization that characterizes the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.     

‘Ghost in the Shell’: Reflections on Fieldwork in Kazakhstan

After independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan proclaimed Kazakhs the title ethnic group, and the Kazakh language the national language. This deprived the Russian-speaking population of its former dominant social position. Being a Russian-speaking citizen of Kazakhstan, the daughter of a half-Korean half-Russian father and a half-Kazakh half-German mother, I did my field work as a presumed ‘native’ anthropologist at Kazakhstan State University with linguistically divided groups of students. The relations between the field and the researcher disclosed different geopolitical realities of knowledge production and challenged the legacy of relativist methodology. I reflect on this experience and examine different conceptualisations of the native positionality in the post-Soviet context. Reflections in this paper raise new questions about nation-building in post-socialist states and about ‘nativeness’ itself, and contribute to the criticism of postmodern theory.     

Precautionary saving in Spain during the great recession: evidence from a panel of uncertainty indicators

The aim of this paper is to empirically study the effect of uncertainty on private consumption using a sample of Spanish households, and therefore, to test the existence of a precautionary motive for saving. Using data provided by the Spanish Survey of Household Finances and the Labour Force Survey we construct several uncertainty measures that are commonly used in the literature and an additional indicator based on job insecurity data, and we consequently estimate different econometric models under the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis, including these measures of uncertainty. Our results are twofold: first, we find evidence in favour of the precautionary saving hypothesis. Secondly, we find that, unlike other variables related to the performance of the labour market (such as the unemployment rate) the job insecurity indicator is an appropriate variable to approximate income uncertainty in any macroeconomic context.     

Das TIMP-Inventar – Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erfassung von Kern-Faktoren salutogener Führung

Occupational health management and science increasingly focus on the issue of health-promoting leadership. Meanwhile a lot of leadership behaviors have been identified that affect the health of employees. To measure them requires high costs. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify core-factors of salutogenic leadership and to operationalize them for an efficient diagnosis. As an integrative work-related indicator of employees’ health sense of work coherence (Work-SoC) was chosen. In a deductive and inductive process the TIMP-inventory has been developed that enables the economic assessment of three leadership dimensions: Trust, Incident Management and Pressure. These factors explain with less items more variance of the Work-SoC construct than established general and health-related leadership scales of transformational leadership, consideration, social support, demanding leadership as well as positive and negative health behavior. That is why the TIMP-factors can be recognized as core-factors of health-promoting leadership.     

Karriereerfolg als Ergebnis des Personalmanagements

Strategic human resource management has avoided to evaluate its efforts in relation to employees’ careers. Recent research has investigated a selection of individual human resource management (HRM) practices (e.?g., training and development, mentoring, career development, talent management, performance appraisal) in relation to objective and subjective career success, but failed to study HRM systems or bundles. This paper argues that HRM systems and career success can be connected via human capital theory because human capital is understood as an organizational resource and as an individual antecedent to careers. Based on extant research that relates individual HRM practices to objective or subjective career success, this paper reviews and discusses the relationship between bundles of HRM practices and the individual practices contained therein and career success. The final conclusion suggests that evaluations of HRM systems should take careers into account because organizations rely on employees’ human capital. Future research should focus more intensely on the role of HRM for the development of careers also across organizations.     

BarCamps und frühere partizipatorische Konferenzformate

For the ?news‘ section of the journal ?Gruppe, Interaktion, Organisation (GIO)‘, Janine Klemmt inducts into the functioning of US conference formats, which have long-since spread to European conference landscape. Among them there are formats like BarCamp or the predecessor Open-Space-Technology. These formats increasingly rely on the active participation and involvement of their attendees. Occasionally, the conference content is completely locally determined by the attendees. These participatory conferences have a decentralized structure, which is similar to the way social media works, but cannot be explained by an imitation of contemporary social media formats. Rather by means of decentralization online and conference platforms have a common organizational component, a common denominator, which, especially with cybernetics, has moved into the field of science, has been taken up in societal areas such as technology and business, and thus increasingly found its way into the everyday world.     

Nah der Wissenschaft und fern der Führung in einer Fach‑/Expertenlaufbahn?

In order to motivate and retain technical employees, representatives of strategic career management face the challenge of establishing alternative career paths in addition to the common leadership/management career. Surveying a sample of 629 doctorate holders from the STEM fields, we differentiated between five career paths within and beyond structured career models. Structured career ladders were predominantly present in major enterprises. Female participants less frequently reported to be part of a structured career path. Entering a leadership/management career seems to occur at a later stage compared to other paths. Generally, advancement on a leadership/management path was related to stronger increases in incentives than climbing up the technical/expert or project management ladders. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find members of a technical/expert career to work closer to basic research and their initial qualification than their colleagues on other career paths. Members of leadership/management paths reported to have significantly more leadership responsibility than those working on alternative paths.