Internet literacy and digital natives’ civic engagement: Internet skill literacy or Internet information literacy?

This study aims to show the role of Internet literacy in empowering digital natives’ civic engagement. Using a survey of 10th graders, we analyzed the effects of digital media use and Internet literacy on adolescents’ political and social interest, participation, and efficacy, controlling for their home and school environments. In doing so, we try to highlight the following points. First, we emphasize that there are two separate dimensions of Internet literacy: Internet skill literacy and Internet information literacy. Second, we adopt a broader concept of civic engagement reflecting the changing youth practices observed in the contemporary media environment. The study empirically found that Internet information literacy, not Internet skill literacy, is intricately related to adolescents’ civic engagement. It was also shown that adolescents’ Internet use contributed only to new and alternative forms of participation. Overall, the findings show that an adolescent who can critically understand and effectively evaluate online information is more likely to become an active civic participant than one who lacks such skills. The study concludes with a few policy suggestions.     

Integrative Cycle Scheduling Approach for a Capacitated Flexible Assembly System*

This study revisits the traditional single stage, multi-item, capacitated lot-sizing problem (CLSP) with a new integrative focus on problem structuring. Unlike past research, we develop integrative cycle scheduling approaches which simultaneously address lot-sizing, capacity, and sequencing issues. Our purposes are to (1) explore the effect of sequencing on inventory levels, (2) examine the problem of infeasibility in the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP), and (3) provide a simple methodology of generating low-cost cycle schedules in an environment with discrete shipping, dynamic demands, limited capacity, zero setup cost, and sequence-independent setup times. Our procedures are compared to benchmark cycle scheduling approaches in terms of both inventory cost and computation time under different demand scenarios, using the operating data from a flexible assembly system (FAS) at the Ford Motor Company's Sandusky, Ohio plant.     

Issue Information

In 2017, the number of applications for care orders in England and Wales was the highest ever recorded at 14,207. This is a significant factor, contributing to the rise in the number of children who are looked after, which is at the highest level since 1985. The authors reflect on the recently published Care Crisis Review 2018, a sector‐led review, which examines the reasons for the rise in care proceedings and the number of children in care. The review sought to identify changes to policy and practice within local authorities and the family justice system, in an attempt to divert cases away from the family courts and to reduce the number of children in care, where it is safe to do so. Whilst the legislative framework is largely effective and the system generally works well, there is insufficient funding and resources to meet the needs of children and their families when they seek help, regardless of whether this is at an early stage or when they are in crisis and most in need of care and protection.     

We Don’t Belong Here: Adolescents of North Korean Refugee Families and Their Suicidal Behaviors

Despite the increasing number of studies that examine the link between immigration and suicide in Korean youths, most have focused on self-harming behaviours among adolescents in multicultural families, while much less attention has been directed towards those in North Korean (NK) refugee families. This paper addresses this gap by comparing three determinants of suicidal behaviours across three groups of Korean adolescents. Data are drawn from the KYRBS, a nationally representative sample of students in middle and high schools, and the results indicate that NK youths were 87.2 per cent more likely to have suicidal ideation than their South Korean peers, that they are 3.7 times more likely to experience suicidal plans and 4.1 times more likely to attempt suicide. These results clearly suggest that immigrant youths, including NK refugees, are confronting significant difficulties with assimilation, and those disadvantages lead to a higher propensity of self-threatening behaviours.     

Social investment effects of public education,health care,and welfare service expenditures on economic growth

The purpose of this study is to theoretically and empirically examine whether public spending in education, health care, and welfare service operates as a fruitful investment in welfare states, which has been implied in the literature of social investment arguments. Based on comprehensive review of existing literature, this study suggested a tripartite mechanism of social investment effect of such spending, that is “enhancement of human capital,” “support for labor force participation,” and “job creation.” To find the empirical evidence, a pooled time‐series cross‐section analysis was conducted with the data of 15 advanced welfare states from 1980 to 2015 using estimation technique of fixed‐effect model. The results confirmed that public spending in education, health care, and welfare service had a positive medium‐term as well as long‐term effect on economic performance, while cash‐type welfare spending had an obscure or no visible effect on economy. Government consumption that is a proxy and control variable of size of the welfare state showed a positive effect on real GDP in the medium term but a negative effect in the long run. In conclusion, this study suggests that reinforcing social services should be recognized and dealt with as essence of social investment strategy.     

Long-Term Earnings Differentials Between African American and White Men by Educational Level

This paper investigates long-term earnings differentials between African American and white men using data that match respondents in the Survey of Income and Program Participation to 30 years of their longitudinal earnings as recorded by the Social Security Administration. Given changing labor market conditions over three decades, we focus on how racial differentials vary by educational level because the latter has important and persistent effects on labor market outcomes over the course of an entire work career. The results show that the long-term earnings of African American men are more disadvantaged at lower levels of educational attainment. Controlling for demographic characteristics, work disability, and various indicators of educational achievement does not explain the lower long-term earnings of less-educated black men in comparison to less-educated white men. The interaction arises because black men without a high school degree have a larger number of years of zero earnings during their work careers. Other results show that this racial interaction by educational level is not apparent in cross-sectional data which do not provide information on the accumulation of zero earnings over the course of 30 years. We interpret these findings as indicating that compared to either less-educated white men or highly educated black men, the long-term earnings of less-educated African American men are likely to be more negatively affected by the consequences of residential and economic segregation, unemployment, being out of the labor force, activities in the informal economy, incarceration, and poorer health.     

Business Cycles,Medicaid Generosity,and Birth Outcomes

Birth outcomes influence many aspects of later life health and wellbeing, making healthcare access during pregnancy a policy priority. Low-income mothers often depend on Medicaid, for which eligibility is determined by their income relative to state eligibility thresholds. The prevalence of adverse birth outcomes is known to exhibit cyclical variation, due in part to changes in the composition of women giving birth in response to changing economic conditions. However, cyclical variation in adverse birth outcomes also varies with respect to Medicaid eligibility thresholds. Our analysis uses birth-records data for 2000 through 2013, aggregated into 173,936 county-by-quarter observations and linked to county-level unemployment rates and state-level parental Medicaid thresholds. Using fixed-effects negative binomial models, we examine the role of Medicaid generosity in influencing birth outcomes across business cycles. We test for interactions between Medicaid and unemployment, hypothesizing that the negative effects of recessions are worse where Medicaid thresholds are more restrictive. We find that higher Medicaid generosity dampens the negative effects of recessions on birth outcomes. The extent to which Medicaid interacts with unemployment also varies according to the age and race composition of mothers; in particular, Black mothers are both most affected by unemployment and most responsive to Medicaid generosity. Given current concerns about racial gaps in both infant and maternal mortality, our findings suggest that Medicaid may be an important feature of a strategy to close gaps in the prevalence of adverse birth outcomes across racial groups, especially during bust years.     

Grandparents providing care for grandchildren and employment status of grandparents in South Korea

This study examines the association between providing care for grandchildren and the economic status of grandparents, focusing on the employment status. This study asks two questions. First, is providing care for grandchildren related to Korean grandparents’ employment status? Second, are the intensities of providing care for grandchildren related to grandparents’ employment status? In examining these research questions, this study focuses on gender and caregiving intensity. The findings suggest that providing care for grandchildren was associated with Korean grandmothers’ employment status. In addition, there are different relationships between providing care for grandchildren and grandparents’ employment status according to the caregiving intensities.     

Marriage Migration Policy in South Korea: Social Investment beyond the Nation State

This article seeks to contribute to understandings of South Korea's approach to marriage migration. Situating our analysis of marriage migration policy specifically within the recent emergence of a social investment approach to welfare, we bring together two bodies of literature that due to the methodological nationalism of much welfare state scholarship are usually treated separately. Through an examination of the policy framework governing marriage migration ‐ so‐called ‘multicultural family policies’ ‐ we find that successive Korean governments have actively sought female marriage migrants to perform various social reproductive roles as a means to secure the reproductive capacity of the nation, just as feminist scholars have argued the care work of citizen‐mothers can be understood. Our analysis also suggests that marriage migration policy in Korea constitutes a distinctly transnational dimension to its overall social investment approach, which is strongly motivated by concerns to reproduce the next generation of human capital.