Urban risks due to climate change in the Andean municipality of Pasto,Colombia: A Bayesian network approach

The current trends of climate change will increase people's exposure to urban risks related to events such as landslides, floods, forest fires, food production, health, and water availability, which are stochastic and very localized in nature. This research uses a Bayesian network (BN) approach to analyze the intensity of such urban risks for the Andean municipality of Pasto, Colombia, under climate change scenarios. The stochastic BN model is linked to correlational models and local scenarios of representative concentration trajectories (RCP) to project the possible risks to which the municipality of Pasto will be exposed in the future. The results show significant risks in crop yields, food security, water availability and disaster risks, but no significant risks on the incidence of acute diarrheal diseases (ADD) and acute respiratory infections (ARI), whereas positive outcomes are likely to occur in livestock production, influenced by population growth. The advantage of the BN approach is the possibility of updating beliefs in the probabilities of occurrence of events, especially in developing, intermediate cities with information-limited contexts.     

The Moderating Effect of Countries’ Development on the Characterization of the Social Entrepreneur: An Empirical Analysis with GEM Data

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The objective of this paper is to analyze the moderating effect that the level of development of countries exerts on the...     

Resampling schemes with low resampling intensity and their applications in testing hypotheses

The paper explores statistical features of different resampling schemes under low resampling intensity. The original sample is considered in a very general framework of triangular arrays, without independence or equally distributed assumptions, although improvements under such conditions are also provided. We show that low resampling schemes have very interesting and flexible properties, providing new insights into the performance of widely used resampling methods, including subsampling, two-sample unbalanced permutation statistics or wild bootstrap. It is shown that, under regularity assumptions, resampling tests with critical values derived by the appertaining low resampling procedures are asymptotically valid and there is no loss of power compared with the power function of an ideal (but unfeasible) parametric family of tests. Moreover we show that in several contexts, including regression models, they may act as a filter for the normal part of a limit distribution, turning down the influence of outliers.     

Space-time generation of high intensity patterns using growth-interaction processes

We describe a novel spatial-temporal algorithm for generating packing structures of disks and spheres, which not only incorporates all the attractive features of existing algorithms but is also more flexible in defining spatial interactions and other control parameters. The advantage of this approach lies in the ability of marks to exploit to best advantage the space available to them by changing their size in response to the interaction pressure of their neighbours. Allowing particles to move in response to such pressure results in high-intensity packing. Indeed, since particles may temporarily overlap, even under hard-packing scenarios, they possess a greater potential for rearranging themselves, and thereby creating even higher packing intensities than exist under other strategies. Non-overlapping pattern structures are achieved simply by allowing the process to ‘burn-out’ at the end of its development period. A variety of different growth-interaction regimes are explored, both symmetric and asymmetric, and the convergence issues that they raise are examined. We conjecture that not only may this algorithm be easily generalised to cover a large variety of situations across a wide range of disciplines, but that appropriately targeted generalisations may well include established packing algorithms as special cases.     

The Role of Co-worker and Supervisor Support in the Relationship Between Job Autonomy and Work Engagement Among Portuguese Nurses: A Multilevel Study

The objective is to analyze the relationship between job resources (i.e., job autonomy and social support) and work engagement in nurses. Hypotheses have been tested through hierarchical linear modeling using data from 313 Portuguese nurses (individual level) nested in 33 work teams (team level), after aggregating individual perceptions to the group level and testing the agreement among these perceptions using the r_wg(j) and the intraclass correlations indices. Results confirmed first, that individual job autonomy and team-level social support (from the supervisor as well as from co-workers) are positively related to individual work engagement and second, that team-level social support has a moderating effect on the relationship between individual job autonomy and individual work engagement (but not in the case of co-workers’ support). This study provides evidence that nurses’ work engagement results from individual job autonomy and collective social support. Accordingly, fostering job autonomy and social support in order to promote work engagement among nurses can be useful for both hospital managers and practitioners.     

Longitudinal Relations Among Parental Emotional Expressivity and Sympathy and Prosocial Behavior in Adolescence

Concurrent and longitudinal relations among parental emotional expressivity, children's sympathy and children's prosocial behavior were assessed with correlations and structural equation modeling when the children were 55–97 months old (N = 214; M age = 73 months, SD = 9.59) and eight years later (N = 130; ages 150–195 months old, M = 171 months, SD = 10.01). Parent emotional expressivity (positive and negative) and children's sympathy were stable across time and early parent‐reported sympathy predicted adolescents' sympathy and prosocial behavior. Parents' positive expressivity was positively related to sympathy and prosocial behavior, but in adolescence, this was likely primarily because of consistency over time. Early observed parental negative expressivity was negatively related to adolescents' prosocial behavior. Reported negative expressivity in childhood was negatively related to boys' sympathy in childhood and positively related to girls' sympathy behavior in adolescence. The later relation remained significant when controlling for the stability of parental expressivity and sympathy, suggesting an emerging positive relation between the variables for girls.     

The professionalization of Spanish social work: moving closer to Europe or away from its roots?

This article will review the processes of professionalization of social work in Spain. With the advent of democratic Spain, many professions began a process of transformation. Those rooted in the relationship between the citizens, their rights and obligations, and the state, were among the first to be challenged. Social work was one of them. Soon thereafter, the European Union (EU), which Spain joined in 1986, brought forth greater challenges and incentives to change. In 1999, Spain and 29 other countries signed the Bologna Declaration, which committed the country to the development of a shared domain (often referred to as ‘espacio común’) with European higher education. This article reviews the historical process of insertion of social work, heavily influenced by the Catholic tradition of caring, into the universities. The paper examines the model of social work education in Spain, before and during Franco's era, and the professionalization (sometimes referred to as ‘tecnificación’) of care-giving and training-paradigms that followed the advent of democracy. Current models and efforts to bring Spanish social work into EU compliance have narrowed the gap with the Anglo-Saxon world; but have they distanced social work in Spain from its roots?