Conflict Management Styles and Cybervictimization: Extending Routine Activity Theory

Do online conflict management styles affect the likelihood of cybervictimization? To answer this question, we use an online survey of youth and young adults recruited from a demographically balanced sample of Americans. Using an extended version of routine activity theory, we examine how two conflict resolution styles—self-help and toleration—affect the target suitability of online users and, in turn, their likelihood of being the victim of cybercrime. Our findings demonstrate that individuals who adopt the confrontational conflict resolution style of self-help upon witnessing hostile behavior online are at an increased risk of being victimized. However, tolerating online conflict does not significantly influence the likelihood of victimization, net of other online behaviors and sociodemographic characteristics.     

Street‐level Perceptions of Procedural Rights for Young Unemployed People – A Comparative Study between Sweden and Australia

Two types of welfare states are compared in this article. Differences in procedural rights for young unemployed at the level of service delivery are analyzed. In Australia, rights are regulated through a rigid procedural justice system. The young unemployed within the social assistance system in Sweden encounter staff with high discretionary powers, which makes the legal status weak for the unemployed but, on the other hand, the system is more flexible. Despite the differences, there is striking convergence in how the young unemployed describe how discretionary power among street‐level staff affects their procedural rights. This result can be understood as a result of similar professional norms, work customs and occupational cultures of street‐level staff, and that there is a basic logic of conditionality in all developed welfare states where procedural rights are tightly coupled with responsibilities.     

Dermatoglyphic analysis of total finger ridge count in female monozygotic twins discordant for sexual orientation

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that prenatal environment contributes to the development of sexual orientation in females. The research involved a dermatoglyphic analysis of finger ridge count in two groups of female monozygotic twins: a study group which was discordant for sexual orientation, and a control group which was concordant for sexual orientation. The trait, total finger ridge count, was analyzed using the Wilcoxon matched pair statistic. In the female control group ridge counts were not significantly different. However, for the female twins discordant for sexual orientation, the null hypothesis was rejected (T = 0; p ≤ .01), with the lesbian twins showing a consistent trend for lower total finger ridge counts than their heterosexual cotwins. It is concluded that in females, prenatal environmental differences are correlated with differences in sexual orientation, and that second trimester prenatal environment is likely to be a contributing factor in the etiology of this trait.     

Biases in Attention for Social Stimuli in Children are Associated with Patterns of Infant Attachment: A Brief Report

The way an individual attends to social information has implications for his/her ability to regulate behavior in social settings. The results of the present investigation suggest that early experiences in parent–child relationships contribute to later differences in the deployment of attention to social information. The quality of the mother–child relationship was assessed at one‐year‐of‐age. At seven to eight years of age, a dot‐probe paradigm assessed immediate and delayed attention to pictures of faces vs. pictures of neutral objects. Children who were more avoidant with their mother in infancy attended to neutral objects over social stimuli at delayed but not immediate time frames. This finding suggests that individual differences in attention to social stimuli in childhood are associated with the quality of the prior attachment relationship with a primary caregiver.     

Canadian Social Enterprises: Who Gets the Non-Earned Income?

For social enterprises (SEs), non-earned income remains an attractive and important form of financing. Yet, many of these funds are donated without serious and collective deliberation about the overall impact of these transfers on the composition of the sector. Various authors suggest that the recent professionalization of the broader third sector and the use of accounting frameworks that favour short-term measurable results—a trend which SEs exemplify—are having an impact on who and what gets funded. We test this hypothesis by investigating whether the distribution of non-earned income to SEs located in three different Canadian provinces can be explained by donor preferences for the following: (i) culture and arts-related social goods; (ii) SEs that are located in wealthier neighbourhoods; and (iii) SEs that are ‘visible’ beyond their locality. The paper briefly discusses the generalizability of the results and concludes with policy recommendations that emphasize the limits of SEs in achieving a core goal of welfare provision.     

Field Placement and the Impact of Financial Stress on Social Work and Human Service Students

While significant research has been undertaken exploring the pedagogical benefits of undertaking lengthy social work and human services field placements, there has been very little consideration given to the potential financial stress involved for students. This study sought to address this knowledge gap. Research was conducted in 2014 using quantitative and qualitative methods with students and academic and professional staff from six Queensland universities. The findings show a significant relationship between unpaid placements and financial hardship, creating considerable stress for students and at times a compromised placement learning experience. The limited flexibility in requirements from professional bodies and universities for how placements are undertaken has been identified as a key contributor to financial hardship. Addressing the complexities inherent in this issue requires a collaborative effort from multiple stakeholders and should not be regarded as a problem for students to endure and manage.     

Numerical performance of block thresholded wavelet estimators

Usually, methods for thresholding wavelet estimators are implemented term by term, with empirical coefficients included or excluded depending on whether their absolute values exceed a level that reflects plausible moderate deviations of the noise. We argue that performance may be improved by pooling coefficients into groups and thresholding them together. This procedure exploits the information that coefficients convey about the sizes of their neighbours. In the present paper we show that in the context of moderate to low signal-to-noise ratios, this block thresholding approach does indeed improve performance, by allowing greater adaptivity and reducing mean squared error. Block thresholded estimators are less biased than term-by-term thresholded ones, and so react more rapidly to sudden changes in the frequency of the underlying signal. They also suffer less from spurious aberrations of Gibbs type, produced by excessive bias. On the other hand, they are more susceptible to spurious features produced by noise, and are more sensitive to selection of the truncation parameter.     

Market Good Flexibility in Capacity Auctions

We consider the allocation of limited production capacity among several competing agents through auctions. Our focus is on the contribution of flexibility in market good design to effective capacity allocation. The application studied is a capacity allocation problem involving several agents, each with a job, and a facility owner. Each agent generates revenue by purchasing capacity and scheduling its job at the facility. Ascending auctions with various market good designs are compared. We introduce a new market good that provides greater flexibility than those previously considered in the literature. We allow ask prices to depend both on agents’ utility functions and on the number of bids at the previous round of the auction, in order to model and resolve resource conflicts. We develop both optimal and heuristic solution procedures for the winner determination problem. Our computational study shows that flexibility in market good design typically increases system value within auctions. A further increase is achieved if each agent is allowed to bid for multiple market goods at each round. On average, the multiple flexible market goods auction provides over 95% of the system value found by centralized planning.