Women’s Advantage in Higher Education: Towards Understanding A Global Phenomenon

This article reviews prior and emerging research on the gender gap in higher education using a comparative lens. The article outlines historical trends in the gender gap in higher education, focusing on areas where women are advantaged and disadvantaged. It then reviews prior explanations for women’s increasing enrollment in college and continued sex segregation in fields of study. It suggests three fruitful areas for future research to understand the cross‐national female advantage in the completion of college and university degrees: (1) the female advantage in schooling; (2) male vulnerability to growing up in resource‐deprived homes; and (3) changing incentives for men and women to complete higher education.     

Causes and consequences of early-life health

We examine the consequences of child health for economic and health outcomes in adulthood, using height as a marker of childhood health. After reviewing previous evidence, we present a conceptual framework that highlights data limitations and methodological problems that complicate the study of this topic. We then present estimates of the associations between height and a range of outcomes—including schooling, employment, earnings, health, and cognitive ability—measured in five data sets from early to late adulthood. These results indicate that, on average, taller individuals attain higher levels of education. Height is also positively associated with better economic, health, and cognitive outcomes. These associations are only partially explained by the higher average educational attainment of taller individuals. We then use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults survey to document the associations between health, cognitive development, and growth in childhood. Even among children with the same mother, taller siblings score better on cognitive tests and progress through school more quickly. Part of the differences found between siblings arises from differences in their birth weights and lengths attributable to mother’s behaviors while pregnant. Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that childhood health influences health and economic status throughout adulthood.     

Investigating Validity Evidence of the Satisfaction with Life Scale Adapted for Children

This study introduces the Satisfaction with Life Scale adapted for Children (SWLS-C) and presents psychometric findings regarding its validation. The SWLS-C was adapted from the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al. 1985), which is one of the most commonly used measures to assess satisfaction with life in adults. Three subject matter experts adapted the SWLS by changing the wording of the item stem and response format in order to make it more understandable for children. A stratified random sample of 1,233 students (48% girls) in grades 4–7 (mean age 11 years and 7 months) provided data on the SWLS-C and measures of optimism, self-concept, self-efficacy, depression, emphatic concern, and perspective taking. The SWLS-C demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and high internal consistency. Furthermore, differential item functioning and differential scale functioning analyses indicated that the SWLS-C measures satisfaction with life in the same way for different groups of children (i.e., with regard to gender, first language learned at home—English vs. other language(s) than English—and across different grades) at the item and at the scale level. Associations between scores on the SWLS-C and demographic variables were statistically non-significant or of small effect size. In addition, the SWLS-C showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity in relation to the other measures. Our results indicate that the SWLS-C is a psychometrically sound instrument that demonstrated evidence of construct validity for this age group. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Successful Word Recognition by 10‐Month‐Olds Given Continuous Speech Both at Initial Exposure and Test

Most words that infants hear occur within fluent speech. To compile a vocabulary, infants therefore need to segment words from speech contexts. This study is the first to investigate whether infants (here: 10‐month‐olds) can recognize words when both initial exposure and test presentation are in continuous speech. Electrophysiological evidence attests that this indeed occurs: An increased extended negativity (word recognition effect) appears for familiarized target words relative to control words. This response proved constant at the individual level: Only infants who showed this negativity at test had shown such a response, within six repetitions after first occurrence, during familiarization.     

Affective practices,care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Scientific knowledge‐making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell, 2012) which can be understood together as ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organizational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives.     

An examination of student and provider perceptions of voluntary sector social work placements in Northern Ireland

Practice based learning in Northern Ireland is a core element of social work education and comprising 50% of the degree programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article presents evidence about the perceptions of practice learning from voluntary sector/non-government organisation (NGO) placement providers and final year social work students on social work degree programmes in Northern Ireland in 2011. It draws on data from 121 respondents from189 final year students and focus group interviews with voluntary sector providers offering 16% (85) of the total placements available to students. The agencies who participated in the research study provide a total of 55 PLOs to social work students, and are therefore fairly representative in terms of voluntary sector (NGO) provision. The article locates these data in the context of practice learning pedagogy and the changes introduced by the Regional Strategy for Practice Learning Provision in Northern Ireland 2010–2015. Several themes emerged including; induction, support and guidance, practice educator/student relationship, professional identity and confidence in risk assessment and decision-making. Social work educators, placement providers and employers must be cognisant of newly qualified social workers’ needs in terms of consolidating knowledge within the formative stages of their professional development.     

Processes Employed by Social Work Practitioners in Child Welfare for Exchanging and Using Knowledge

Organisations in the health and social services sector expend a considerable amount of energy promoting the implementation of better practices and research data use in their establishments. In the field of social work, several studies suggest that social work practitioners do not make great use of scientific knowledge and tend to favour knowledge acquired from their colleagues or through their own occupational experience. However, interactions between types of knowledge are rarely analyzed in explanations proposed by the scientific literature. Based on research conducted with social work practitioners in child welfare, this article discusses the different ways that they acquire knowledge.     

Business- oder Life-Coaching: Ist das die richtige Frage?

Three case studies are the basis for pointing out how a coaching may proceed to life–coaching. Some formal and methodical requirements for the consulting process are developed and possible central questions regarding the subsequent meta–level-dialogue are specified.     

Participatory Organizational Research: Examining Voice in the Co‐production of Knowledge

This paper advances participatory methods in management research. We propose the term participatory organizational research to describe this adjunct to action research. We illustrate the potential of the method to allow sometimes unheard organizational members to generate alternative perspectives that can offer the potential for the co‐production of new forms of knowledge that are locally relevant. Participatory methods originate from work with marginalized groups and have been used more commonly in community and organizational development. The aim of such research is, generally, to change the social and organizational conditions within which participants operate by using their perspectives as active participants to develop alternative possibilities. As such, this research method has significant potential for management researchers in providing the means for unheard organizational members to voice their perspectives: a central component, we argue, in knowledge co‐production. Based on a participatory study of care quality in elder care institutions, we examine in detail how participatory organizational research can enable voice and explore some of the structural limitations particularly in respect of research ethics.     

Optimal Contracts when Enforcement is a Decision Variable

This paper analyzes choice‐theoretic costly enforcement in an intertemporal contracting model with a differentially informed investor and entrepreneur. An intertemporal contract is modeled as a mechanism in which there is limited commitment to payment and enforcement decisions. The goal of the analysis is to characterize the effect of choice‐theoretic costly enforcement on the structure of optimal contracts. The paper shows that simple debt is the optimal contract when commitment is limited and costly enforcement is a decision variable (Theorem 1). In contrast, stochastic contracts are optimal when agents can commit to the ex‐ante optimal decisions (Theorem 2). The paper also shows that the costly state verification model can be viewed as a reduced form of an enforcement model in which agents choose payments and strategies as part of a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium.