Maternal Sensitivity Moderates the Relation between Negative Discipline and Aggression in Early Childhood

Three models regarding the relation between maternal (in)sensitivity, negative discipline, and child aggression were examined in a sample of 117 mother–child pairs with high scores on child externalizing behavior: (1) Sensitivity and discipline are uniquely related to child aggression (the additive model); (2) the relation between discipline and aggression is moderated by maternal sensitivity (the moderating model); (3) the relation between sensitivity and aggression is mediated by maternal discipline (the mediating model). Parenting and child aggression were observed when the children were on average 26.71 months old (range of 13.58 to 41.91 months) and again one year later. Results supported the moderating model. More negative discipline was related to more child aggression one year later, but only when mothers were insensitive. This finding supports the idea that the affective context is important for the impact of negative discipline on child development.     

Active Participation and Well-Being Among the Elderly in Belgium and the USA: A Cross-National Time-Use Perspective

Active participation of the elderly is a recognized response to address the societal and individual challenges of rising life expectancy such as releasing the pressure of age-related public spending, reducing social isolation and improving well-being. How much time older people devote to active participation and whether their time allocation is associated with well-being remains under-investigated. Using time-use data from Belgium (n?=?1384) and the USA (n?=?2133), we investigate the time older people (65–80 years) spent on active participation and examine how this relates to their life satisfaction as an indicator of well-being. The countries vary in the amount of time spent on paid employment and volunteering, but not on informal help. Belgian older people spend much less time on paid employment than their American counterparts. This implies more are available to volunteer and provide informal help. Yet participation rates in these activities are higher in the USA. Multivariate analyses show that associations between active participation and life satisfaction vary between both countries and within both countries by gender and age. Overall, positive associations between paid work and volunteering and life satisfaction suggest that governments would do well to mobilize elderly into active participation, especially in Belgium. Negative associations between informal help and life satisfaction suggest governments should provide greater support for informal carers.

     

The Labor Market Orientation of Single Mothers on Welfare in The Netherlands

Since the implementation of the new General Assistance Act (1996) in The Netherlands, single parents on welfare have become obliged to seek work as soon as their youngest child has become 5 years old. This article presents a study of 1,049 Dutch single mothers on welfare. Using LISREL, a conceptual model is examined for the effects of both the past and current circumstances of the mothers on their labor orientation and on their steps toward a full‐time job. An individual mother's motivation to work is particularly related to the importance she attaches to caring (care ethos) as opposed to working (work ethos) and to the problems she anticipates in combining care and work.     

Female Asylum-Seekers in the Netherlands: An Empirical Study

This article presents the findings from a study into the chances for refugee status, or a temporary residence permit, for three cohorts of male and female asylum-seekers to the Netherlands. The study investigated whether men and women with similar backgrounds in terms of country of origin, social and demographic characteristics have a similar likelihood of obtaining permission to stay in the Netherlands.
The quantitative findings are corroborated with an in-depth qualitative study of refugees' files from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), as well as with an experiment in which decision-making personnel were asked to judge hypothetical case studies of refugees in which gender as well as other gender-specific properties were systematically varied.
We recommend that further in-depth studies be conducted to capture elements in the decision-making process that could not be investigated in our kind of large-scale study.     

Is Research‐Ethics Review a Moral Panic?*

Au cours des dix dernières années, nous avons été témoins de l'im‐portance croissante accordée aux principes d'éthique appliqués à la recherche mais aussi de la popularité et de la pertinence grandis‐santes de la recherche inductive, plus connue sous le nom de recherche et d'analyse qualitatives. Dans cet article, nous étudions le contexte social dans lequel se situe l'examen déontologique des travaux de recherche et son influence sur la recherche qualitative. Plus précisément, nous soutenons que, lorsque cet examen déontologique est fondé sur les principes et l'épistémologie de la recherche déductive, il a tendance à rogner et à entraver le dynamisme et l'ob‐jet de la recherche qualitative. À l'aide de documents, de rapports de recherche formelle et d'après notre expérience personnelle et celle d'autres collègues, nous démontrons l'aspect disproportioné de l'examen déontologique de la recherche, qui semble favoriser la recherche quantitative ‐ c'est‐à‐dire la recherche formelle fondée sur des hypothèses ‐, au détriment de la recherche qualitative. Nos exem‐ples proviennent surtout du Canada, des États‐Unis et d'Angleterre, en anthropologie, éducation, sciences infirmières, psychologie et so‐ciologie. Nous affirmons que les processus sociaux qui sous‐tendent l'analyse déontologique de la recherche s'apparentent à ceux que lon associe à une panique morale. The recent decade saw not only the rise of the importance of formal ethical research guidelines, but also witnessed the growing popularity and relevance of inductive research, better known as qualitative research and analysis. This paper addresses the social context of formal ethical review and its influence on qualitative research. Specifically, it suggests that when ethical review is based on the principles and epistemology of deductive research, it tends to erode or hamper the thrust and purpose of qualitative research. Using documents, formal research accounts, and the experiences of others and myself, the author indicates the lopsided nature of reviewing the ethics of research, which seems to work in favour of quantitative, formal hypotheses‐driven research, to the serious disadvantage of qualitative research. The paper draws most heavily on evidence in Canada, the United States, and England, in the fields of anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, and sociology. The social processes underpinning research‐ethics review, the author avers, are similar to those associated with a moral panic.     

Handedness as a major determinant of lateral bias in human functional cradling

Studies examining infant cradling have almost uniformly concluded with a general human left-side bias for cradling, indicating that people prefer to hold an infant to the left of their body. Explanations for the notion of the left-side cradling bias have traditionally been searched for in a variety of factors, for example, in terms of maternal heartbeat, genetic factors, in the form of an ear asymmetry where auditory information is perceived faster through the left ear, as a result of a right hemispheric functional specialization for perception of emotions and faces, and in identifying a motor bias of the infant, such as the tendency of newborn infants to lie with the face to the right when placed supine. Interestingly, handedness is generally considered an inadequate explanation for the lateralized cradling bias, despite it being an intuitively plausible one. In this brief review, I put forward the cradler's handedness as the most convincing and elegant determinant of the cradling bias. This explanation is consistent with a developmental cascades' framework where the cradling bias can be understood as the result of a multitude of factors across a range of levels and systems.     

The specific value of freedom

This article examines the question of how to assess our overall freedom in terms of its so-called specific value, i.e., the part of its value that can be reduced to the value of the various specific things we are free to do or be. It is argued that existing preference-based freedom rankings may fail to capture this value adequately and, drawing on earlier work by Puppe (J Econ Theory 68:174–199, 1996; in: Laslier et al. (eds.) Freedom in economics. New perspectives in normative analysis, 1998) and Puppe and Xu (Soc Choice Welf, this issue, 2010), an alternative, more general framework is proposed. Two rankings of freedom’s specific value are axiomatically characterized. The article concludes with a discussion of possible extensions of the framework.     

Where is the exit? Intergenerational ambivalence and relationship quality in high contact ties

We challenge the common idea that solidarity has positive, whereas conflict has negative implications, by investigating intergenerational ambivalence – defined as the co-occurrence of solidarity and conflict – and relationship quality. We use representative data on non-coresident adult children and parents with high levels of contact (weekly or more; N = 2,694 dyads). Results show that over half of high contact parent–child ties can be characterized as ambivalent and of high-quality. The likelihood of negative instead of positive ambivalent ties is greater if adult children have few exit options because they are socially isolated or have a small number of siblings. Ties between fathers and sons, and those between caring daughters and aging parents also have a high probability of belonging to the negative ambivalent type.