Italian Children's Understanding of War: A Domain-Specific Approach

Studies of children's conceptions of war, which have been carried out up to now mainly by asking for a definition of war and associating it with other notions, have found few age-related changes after the age of 6. Considering the complexity of the concept, and its embeddedness in the political conceptual domain, which emerges at around 11 years, we expect that greater differences should emerge if children's ideas on the causes and consequences of war, and the actors involved, are carefully assessed. Semi-structured interviews carried out with a total of 80 Italian children from 2nd to 8th grades confirmed this hypothesis. Many 2nd graders described war as a clash between collectives without structure, attributing all decisions about starting, the development of, and ending a war to the individual fighters and explaining these decisions (when they did) as due to emotions such as hatred, envy, revenge, or being tired or unwilling to fight any longer. Most 6th and 8th graders depicted war as a clash between nation-states, attributing decisions about its starting and ending to political authorities on the basis of political and economic reasons, and the actual fighting of battles to an organized army collaborating with, or subordinate to, political authorities. Many 2nd and 4th graders also showed a mixed pattern of answers, involving both political authorities and individual fighters, thus showing that the transition from the rudimentary backward conception to the more advanced one occurs through the piecemeal addition and deletion of concepts and beliefs.     

Resettlement challenges faced by refugee claimant families in Montreal: lack of access to child care

Adult refugee claimants experience several well‐documented post‐migratory challenges. Little is known about the resettlement process for refugee claimant families with children. This study reports on 75 open‐ended, in‐depth interviews with refugee claimant families in Montreal about their resettlement challenges and their proposed solutions to them. These interviews were conducted with 33 dyads and triads of children and parents attending a paediatric hospital. Experiences accessing formal and informal child care in Montreal were addressed. Subsequently, a comparative policy analysis was conducted on residency eligibility criteria for child care subsidization. Twenty‐eight out of 39 parents (73%) report a lack of informal or formal child care and 15 out of 33 families (39%) propose improving access to formal child care services. They describe a lack of informal child care as a result of reduced social networks, and affordability as a barrier to formal child care services. Refugee claimants are not eligible for subsidized child care in Quebec. A comparative policy analysis within Canada and comparable countries reveals that this situation is not unique to Quebec. However, most provinces and European countries offer child care subsidies to refugee claimants. Refugee claimants should qualify for child care subsidies. Social workers and community organizations should consider their clients' child care needs in designing programmes and services.     

Bridging the Gap: New Relationships between Primary Care Groups and Local Authorities

Current policy places great emphasis on the development of partnerships, particularly between NHS and local authority services, with the aims of increasing service coordination and delivery and improving health. To this end, primary care groups (PCGs), at the forefront of NHS organizational developments, are required to include a social services representative on their governing boards; similarly, primary care trusts (PCTs) have a social services representative on their executive committees. Drawing on a representative longitudinal national survey of English PCGs, the paper evaluates the contribution of these new governance arrangements to the development of inter-agency partnerships. Despite poor histories of collaboration and some major organizational barriers, there are some signs of progress, with social services representatives playing an active part in PCG affairs and having clear lines of communication about PCG matters with their employing authorities. Equally significantly, PCGs have also quickly established a wide range of contacts directly with other local authority services and departments. However, these early gains risk being limited by traditional professional inequalities between social work and medicine and, in particular, by the prospect of further organizational upheaval as PCGs merge with each other and/or acquire trust status.     

“In the good old days”: Insidious nostalgia and the constitution of old age identity

In this paper older people are studied through qualitative in-depth interviews regarding the constitution of identity. This is based on their participation in specific projects where they take part in schoolwork. The point of departure is that these more or less organised projects provide older people with a physical as well as a social space in which such a constitution can take place. Specific attention is not only directed toward the productive use of nostalgia, but also at the rhetorical use of already established subject positions drawn from the fields of production and reproduction, and from discourses on productive ageing and participation. The intersection of these discourses was not only found to be normative and excluding, but also liberating and a necessity.     

Performance Evaluations as Gender Barriers in Professional Organizations: A Study of Auditing Firms

Gendering processes often take the form of organizational subtexts, that is, seemingly gender‐neutral practices that have gender implications. The purpose of this article is to study performance evaluations, which, based on management by objectives systems, may appear neutral, but tend to be based on male norms of what is regarded as good performance. We analysed the careers and performance evaluations of 391 newly licenced Swedish auditors, using an open‐ended question survey. In this industry 50 per cent of new employees and 92 per cent of partners are men. Even in the early stages of their careers, there are notable differences between women and men. The women achieved less and show lower career ambitions and expectations as well as greater intentions to leave the auditing industry. Performance evaluations are also perceived differently, men focusing on what is evaluated (reflecting the perceptions of those at higher hierarchical levels) and women focusing on who does the evaluating and how.     

Correlates of sport participation among community-dwelling elderly people in Germany: a cross-sectional study

The aims of this study were (1) to analyze the sport participation in a cohort of community-dwelling elderly people in Germany and (2) to evaluate associations between sport participation, sociodemographic factors, cardiovascular risk factors, and health status. In a monitored prospective cohort study (getABI), 6,880 unselected patients ≥65 years have been followed up by 344 general practitioners beginning in 2001. As part of the 5-year follow-up telephone interview, a sample of 1,376 participants was interviewed on sport participation. The association between participation in at least one sporting activity (“sporty” yes/no) during the past week (cycling) or month (other sports) and the following parameters was analyzed by logistic regression: age, sex, immigration background, education, waist circumference, smoking, self-reported health, history of vascular events, diabetes mellitus, lipometabolic disorder, and arterial hypertension. Analysis of activities (n = 1,304; median age 76 (70–94) years; 55.1% women) showed that 27.6% of participants rode a bicycle during the previous week. During the previous month, 24.9% of participants did gymnastics or strength training, and 16.5% swam. Of all participants, 53.8% were sporty. Multivariate analysis revealed several independent factors to be associated with being sporty (p < 0.05): younger age, male sex, higher education, nonsmoking, better self-reported health, and not being diagnosed with diabetes. Immigration background, waist circumference, history of vascular events, lipometabolic disorder, and hypertension did not show a statistically significant association (p ≥ 0.05) with sport participation. Summing up, the most frequently performed sporting activities were cycling, gymnastics or strength training, and swimming. Sport participation was associated with, for example, age and sex.     

Altruism and efficient allocations in three-generation households

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - In this paper we test the efficiency of family resource allocation in three-generation households. Understanding how the so-called “squeezed middle”...     

Demand for contract enforcement in a barter environment

Do greater potential gains from trade enhance or erode contracting institutions? In an anonymous exchange environment traders can sign a contract, hence agreeing to interact with the assigned partner, or wait till the next match. Any contract can be endorsed (for a payment) by the enforcement agency, which then observes the interaction with a positive probability known to the traders and punishes any detected infractors. Demand for contract enforcement is the highest amount a proposer of a contract is ready to pay to the agency, in a stationary subgame perfect equilibrium. It may be strictly positive, as we show, even when contracts are broken. Surprisingly, larger potential gains from exchange may dampen the demand, but not always: the demand is boosted under agencies that oversee the interactions frequently.     

Promoting Ethnic Entrepreneurship in European Cities: Sometimes Ambitious,Mostly Absent,Rarely Addressing Structural Features

An increasing number of immigrants have become entrepreneurial and many governments expect or hope that the ongoing rise of ethnic entrepreneurship will contribute significantly to the integration of immigrants, to their upward mobility, and to the economic development of the city of residence. In this article we explore the rules, regulations and policy interventions that shape self‐employment trajectories in general and those of immigrant ethnic minorities in particular. The article is based on a general inventory of measures to promote ethnic entrepreneurship in 32 European countries, and a somewhat deeper inventory of policies and interventions in 28 European cities. We came across all kinds of measures and interventions and identified certain patterns, but the most striking finding was that such explicit measures and interventions were actually thin on the ground. We conclude this article with a discussion of the structural determinants of this outcome.     

The Causal Effects of the Number of Children on Female Employment - Do European Institutional and Gender Conditions Matter?

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of the number of children on female employment in Europe. Most previous research has either (1) compared these effects across countries, assuming an exogeneity of family size; or (2) used methods that dealt with endogeneity of family size, but that focused on single countries. We combine these two approaches by taking a cross-country comparative perspective and applying quasi-experimental methods. We use instrumental variable models, with multiple births as instruments, and the harmonized data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We examine the cross-country variation in the effects of family size on maternal employment across groups of European countries with different welfare state regimes. This step gives us an opportunity to investigate whether the revealed cross-country differences in the magnitude of the effect of the family size on maternal employment can be attributed to the diversity of European institutional arrangements, as well as the cultural and the structural conditions for combining work and family duties.