The Effect of Cultural Capital on High School Dropout: An Investigation in the Italian Provinces

This article studies at a detailed geographical level the relation between cultural capital and high school dropout. Bronfenbrenner’s systemic theory and Heckman’s perspective on cognitive/non-cognitive skills are considered as theoretical framework. We analyzed data from 103 Italian provinces employing Covariance Structure Analysis and spatial indices of autocorrelation. We found a consistent protective effect of cultural capital on dropout, independently of economic performance, in Central and Southern provinces, but not in Northern provinces. Spatial analyses showed very heterogeneous patterns of autocorrelation for dropout (especially across Southern provinces) even between neighboring areas, in spite of a more compact clustering when considering cultural and economic indicators. These results indicate that living in an environment with animated cultural life might enhance students’ non-cognitive skills, thus fostering their involvement in formative activities and the development of their human capital.     

A Measure of Trust: The Italian Regional Divide in a Latent Class Approach

Social differences within countries may partly explain the lack of economic convergence and the persistence of regional disparities. The case of Italy is emblematic: economic gap between North and South remains at high levels with large differences in social capital and in trust. In this paper, we use the micro data from the ISTAT “Aspects of Daily Life” Survey to build a measure of “trust in others” and a measure of “trust in institutions” through a latent class model to attribute a trust score to the Italian households and the Italian regions and, in this way, to add elements of knowledge useful to policies. Our measures confirm a persistent territorial divide although the regional mapping appears more complex than the classical North–South partition. At last, a discussion on the household typology shows that the territorial gaps of trust persist even among households with similar socio-economic characteristics.     

Data for the Sustainable Development Goals: Metrics for Evaluating Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems Data Relevance and Production Capacity,Illustrations with Nigeria

Three issues impinging on the potential use of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) data for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are analysed in the paper. These include CRVS data relevance, content and data production capacity of CRVS systems. The paper adopts a ‘data type’ approach to relevance and capacity and proposes two metrics based on a graded qualitative evaluation (GQE) methodology. One is a data-relevance metric for evaluating the relevance of CRVS data types to the SDGs. The second is a National Statistical Systems (NSS) data type production capacity metric used for evaluating the data production capacity of CRVS systems. CRVS data instrument analysis and the CRVS data production capacity are exemplified with the Nigerian CRVS system. Relevance assessment results suggest that CRVS systems can provide data relevant to 25% of the SDGs. However the SDG data contribution of CRVS depends on the ‘data type’ capacity of National CRVS systems. As the capacity assessment shows, the Nigerian CRVS system has ‘nominal’ capacity to produce all CRVS data types (fertility, mortality, migration, nuptiality and socio-economic) and ‘active’ and ‘latent’ capacities to provide data for some 21 SDG targets. However, it currently lacks ‘effective’ capacity to produce any of the data types for the SDGs. The paper has implications for goal setting and prioritization in evolving strategies to enhance the development of CRVS/NSS systems’ data capacities, especially in developing countries.     

Urban and peri-urban agriculture and its implication on food and nutrition insecurity in northern Ghana: a socio-spatial analysis along the urban–rural continuum

Food and nutrition insecurity remains a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. Several studies have examined food and nutrition insecurity in urban or rural areas but have not captured the whole continuum. Between November and December 2013, 240 households were surveyed along the urban–rural continuum in Northern Ghana. The study objective was to understand the socio-spatial dynamics of household food and nutrition insecurity and to investigate the role played by urban, peri-urban and rural agriculture. The study found that there was more involvement in agriculture in rural areas compared to peri-urban areas and urban areas. Households from urban areas were more food insecure (HFIAS >?11) compared to their counterparts in peri-urban and the rural areas. Stunting increased by 3.4 times (p?=?0.048) among households located in the peri-urban area. Wasting was reduced by 0.16 times among household that produced staple food or vegetables (p?=?0.011). Overweight was reduced by 0.04 times among households that produced livestock (p?=?0.031). The results reveal a socio-spatial dimension of food and nutrition insecurity that is related to agricultural activities.     

Disasters,local organizations,and poverty in the USA, 1998 to 2015

Disaster research has drawn attention to how natural hazards transform local organizational dynamics and social inequalities. It has yet to examine how these processes unfold together over time. We begin to fill this gap with a county-level, longitudinal analysis that examines how property damages from natural hazards correlate not only with local shifts in poverty a year later but also counts of for-profit as well as bonding and bridging social capital organizations. Results show that poverty and all organizational types tend to increase with local hazard damages. They also show that poverty tends to increase most where the number of bonding social capital organizations is also increasing. This pattern suggests a Janus-faced dynamic in which bonding, or more inwardly focused, organizations that arise after disaster may end up inadvertently marginalizing those in more dire need.     

Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?

In spite of its currency both in academic research and political rhetoric, there are numerous attempts to define and conceptualize the social cohesion concept but there has been paid little attention to provide a rigorous and empirically tested definition. There are even fewer studies that address social cohesion in a framework of cross-cultural validation of the indicators testing the equivalence of the factorial structure across countries. Finally, as far as we know there is no study that attempt to provide an empirically tested multilevel definition of social cohesion specifying a Multilevel Structural Equation Model. This study aims to cover this gap. First, we provide a theoretical construct of social cohesion taking into account not only its multidimensionality but also its multilevel structure. In the second step, to test the validity of this theoretical construct, we perform a multilevel confirmatory factor analysis in order to verify if the conceptual structure suggested in first step holds. In addition, we test the cross-level structural equivalence and the measurement invariance of the model in order to verify if the same multilevel model of social cohesion holds across the 29 countries analysed. In the final step, we specify a second-order multilevel CFA model in order to identify the existence of a general factor that can be called “social cohesion” operating in society that accounts for the surface phenomena that we observe.     

Time in the Development of Indicators on Sustainable Wellbeing: A Local Experiment in Developing Alternative Indicators

This paper is a theoretical and methodological study on the topics of distribution of and competition between time spans dedicated to social activities in the development of sustainable well-being indicators. This article seeks to answer the following question: why and how should we take into account social time in the development of alternative indicators? To bring to light the complex relationship between well-being, sustainability and people’s relationship to time, this article draws on an experiment aimed at developing Regional Sustainable Well-being Indicators (Indicateurs de Bien-être Soutenable Territorialisés—IBEST), which took place in the Grenoble urban area. This experiment was based on two methodologies; the first one being a quantitative survey, and the second one being a series of qualitative interviews coupled with a participatory approach. One of the datasheet indicators developed following this methodological crossover is the activity times balancing indicator, which allows us to take into consideration the pressure affecting time spent on social activities (work, leisure, families and civic engagement).     

Country-Level Investment in Cultural Opportunity Structures. A Potential Source of Health Differences Between 21 European Countries

Individual’s participation in cultural activities may positively affect health through a pathway mediated by social capital. We examine whether country-level investment in cultural opportunity structures was associated with between-country differences in self-rated health and, if so, whether these associations were mediated by citizens’ confidence in societal institutions, i.e., by institutional trust, regarded as a dimension of social capital. For 24,887 respondents in the European Social Survey, 2006, data on self-rated health, institutional trust (individual-level and country-level), and sociodemographic variables were linked with statistics-based country-level data on 10 indicators of cultural opportunity structures and mediator variables (gross domestic product (GDP), Gini index, and welfare state regime). Over and above the sociodemographics, six cultural indicators contributed to between-country health differences in logistic multilevel regression analysis: the percentage of arts students, the RC index, the percentage of writers and creative artists of total employment, exports of cultural goods, imports of cultural goods, and the number of feature films produced per capita. Controlling, furthermore, for trust, and country-level mediators, only imports of cultural goods contributed to between-country differences in health. No associations with other cultural indicators remained after controlling for GDP or welfare state regime. Institutional trust may partially mediate the significance of cultural investments for self-rated health. However, both cultural investment and trust may be concomitants of general prosperity and welfare policies. Future studies should investigate whether the countries’ welfare policies influence the transformation of cultural investment into institutional trust and which types of indicators best depict associations between investments and health.