Gender role identity in a sample of Italian male homosexuals

Gender role is a multifactorial concept, as gender-related attitudes, behaviors, and personality are partially autonomous. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prevalent gender role identity in a sample of male homosexuals. One hundred male homosexuals and 50 male heterosexuals matched for age and sex, have been assessed with the Italian version of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974). Statistically significant differences have been found between the two groups at the dimensions "Masculine" (z = 1.963; p = 0.001) and "Androgyny" (z = 2.367; p < 0.0001). The results obtained from the present study tend to confirm that homosexuals view themselves as adrogynous individuals, sharing both features of masculine and feminine gender roles.     

Ethnicity,Modern Prejudice and the Quality of Life

The aim of this investigation was to measure levels of ethnic or cultural background diversity, social cohesion and modern prejudice, and the impact of such diversity, cohesion and prejudice on the quality of life. Using a sample of 743 residents of Prince George, British Columbia, we identified diverse ethnic or cultural groups, and created several indexes of heterogeneous social networks and a measure of modern prejudice. Dividing the total sample into three roughly distinct groups containing, respectively, respondents self-reporting an ethnic or cultural background that was aboriginal, non-aboriginal visible minority or anything else, we discovered that all significant comparisons indicated that people with aboriginal backgrounds reported a generally lower quality of life than those in the other two groups. The quality of life scores of the other two groups were practically indistinguishable. Given the demographic structure of our sample, the revealed differences could not be attributed to differences in socio-economic classes. Members of the largest group of respondents tended to be most prejudiced and optimistic, people with aboriginal backgrounds tended to be least prejudiced and optimistic and people with visible minority backgrounds tended to be between the other two groups. Regressions revealed that a variety of ethnic/culture-related phenomena could only explain 8%, 9% and 10%, respectively, of the variation in scores for happiness, life satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall quality of life. When domain satisfaction scores were added to the set of predictors, we were able to explain 48%, 69% and 54%, respectively, of the variation in scores for happiness, life satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall quality of life. In the presence of the domain satisfaction scores, the scores on the ethnic/cultural related phenomena added only one percentage point of explanatory power for happiness and life satisfaction, and three percentage points for satisfaction with the overall quality of life. All things considered, then, it is fair to say that this project showed that ethnic or cultural background diversity, social cohesion and modern prejudice had relatively very little impact on the quality of life of our sample of respondents.     

COVID Health Structure Index: The Vulnerability of Brazilian Microregions

Social Indicators Research - Many developing countries have highly unequal health systems across their regions. The pandemic of COVID-19 brought an additional challenge, as hospital structures...     

Multisystemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect: Do Parents Show Improvement in Parental Mental Health Problems and Parental Stress?

Multisystemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect (MST-CAN) is an evidence-based program for families with children who experience maltreatment. This clinical trial is the first evaluation of MST-CAN in a German-speaking area. Parental psychological problems and parental stress have been shown to be risk factors for child abuse and neglect. By the end of treatment, parents reported significantly less psychological distress than before the start of MST-CAN. Six months after treatment, this reduction was still evident. However, parents did not report any significant reduction of parental stress at any of the three time points. MST-CAN is an effective intervention for child maltreatment that not only combats child abuse and neglect but also has the potential to alleviate parental psychological distress.     

Aggregating the Single Crossing Property

The single crossing property plays a crucial role in economic theory, yet there are important instances where the property cannot be directly assumed or easily derived. Difficulties often arise because the property cannot be aggregated: the sum or convex combination of two functions with the single crossing property need not have that property. We introduce a new condition characterizing when the single crossing property is stable under aggregation, and also identify sufficient conditions for the preservation of the single crossing property under multidimensional aggregation. We use our results to establish properties of objective functions (convexity, logsupermodularity), the monotonicity of optimal decisions under uncertainty, and the existence of monotone equilibria in Bayesian games.     

Probabilistic,Multivariable Flood Loss Modeling on the Mesoscale with BT‐FLEMO

Flood loss modeling is an important component for risk analyses and decision support in flood risk management. Commonly, flood loss models describe complex damaging processes by simple, deterministic approaches like depth‐damage functions and are associated with large uncertainty. To improve flood loss estimation and to provide quantitative information about the uncertainty associated with loss modeling, a probabilistic, multivariable B agging decision T ree F lood L oss E stimation MO del (BT‐FLEMO) for residential buildings was developed. The application of BT‐FLEMO provides a probability distribution of estimated losses to residential buildings per municipality. BT‐FLEMO was applied and validated at the mesoscale in 19 municipalities that were affected during the 2002 flood by the River Mulde in Saxony, Germany. Validation was undertaken on the one hand via a comparison with six deterministic loss models, including both depth‐damage functions and multivariable models. On the other hand, the results were compared with official loss data. BT‐FLEMO outperforms deterministic, univariable, and multivariable models with regard to model accuracy, although the prediction uncertainty remains high. An important advantage of BT‐FLEMO is the quantification of prediction uncertainty. The probability distribution of loss estimates by BT‐FLEMO well represents the variation range of loss estimates of the other models in the case study.     

Bayesian modeling of university first-year students' grades after placement test

University first-year students grades are naturally correlated with the scores obtained at placement tests. Often this characteristic leads the university grades in the first exams to be asymmetrically distributed. Motivated by the analysis of grades of the basic Statistics examination of first-year students, we discuss informative priors for the shape parameter of the skew-normal model, a class of distribution which account for several degree of asymmetry. Our proposed prior leads to closed-form full-conditional posterior distributions, particularly useful in Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. A Gibbs sampling algorithm is discussed for the joint vector of parameters and the method is applied to a real data set from the School of Economics, University of Padua, Italy. Our analysis reveals that the correlation between the placement test and the grades of first-year students leads to a measurable positive skewness of the distribution of the university grades.     

The Primary Importance of Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethicality in Corporate Reputation: An Empirical Study

We examine three assumptions commonly held in the corporate reputation literature: (1) reputation ratings of owners and investors are generally representative of all stakeholders; (2) stakeholders will generally provide a higher reputation rating to firms that emphasize corporate social responsibility versus firms that do not; and (3) profitability is the primary criterion of importance to all stakeholders when rating a firm's reputation. Using an exploratory in‐class exercise, our findings suggest that: (1) there are significant differences among stakeholder groups in their reputation ratings; (2) firms that emphasize corporate social responsibility are not rated more highly across all stakeholder groups; and (3) for all stakeholder groups, the ethicality criterion explained more of the variance in firms' reputation ratings than the profitability criterion.