Unemployment and Mental Health: Some British Studies

Within the context of the British labor market, 11 investigations into the mental health impact of unemployment are described. These reveal significant decrements for people of all ages as a result of moving into unemployment, and for middle-aged men additional effects of continuing joblessness. Research into factors mediating the harmful impact of unemployment has covered time since job loss, employment commitment, social relationships, gender, ethnic group membership, social class, local unemployment rate, and personal vulnerability. Findings with respect to each are summarized, and a model of influential environmental characteristics is introduced. Additional British investigations are cited throughout the paper.     

The City Park as a Public Good Reference for Internet Policy Making

Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as a domain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet, however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights, privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions. We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internet by looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, and examining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historical and theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spaces that mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define buffer spaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As a complex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internet possesses features that can be located at different points between purely private and purely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goods theorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goods under circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urban parks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies that harmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales (economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneous re-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond a disconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on the Internet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behaviours by allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyond a mere aggregation of transactions and interests.     

Impact of Adolescents' Filial Self‐Efficacy on Quality of Family Functioning and Satisfaction

In this prospective study, we tested a structural model in which adolescents' perceived self‐efficacy to manage parental relationships affected their satisfaction with family life both directly, and indirectly, through its impact on family practices. Findings based on 380 Italian adolescents showed that perceived filial self‐efficacy was linked directly and indirectly to satisfaction with family life, and that these relations held both concurrently and longitudinally. In particular, the greater adolescents perceived their self‐efficacy, the more they reported open communication with their parents, the more accepting they were of their parents' monitoring of their own activities outside the home and the less inclined they were to get into escalative discord over disagreements. Regardless of whether perceived filial self‐efficacy was placed in the conceptual structure as a contributor to the quality of family interactions or as a partial product of family functioning, it consistently predicted satisfaction with family life.     

La Psicología del encarcelamiento: privación,poder y patología

Resumen

Este estudio analiza el síndrome de estar quemado (burnout) en el ámbito policial y su relación con variables de carácter socio-demográfico y el estilo de afrontamiento. Con una muestra de 232 policías locales, el perfil medio obtenido refleja un nivel alto de cansancio emocional, una despersonalización media-alta y una realización personal media. Respecto al estilo de afrontamiento activo, éste presenta una correlación negativa estadísticamente significativa con la despersonalización. No obstante, no se encuentran diferencias en función de las variables sexo y existencia de una relación de pareja (considerada fuente de apoyo social). En cambio, aparecen diferencias significativas respecto a la antigüedad en la organización: los policías que llevan en la profesión entre 6 y 15 años muestran niveles más elevados del síndrome. Se discuten asimismo diversas propuestas de intervención.     

Data quality: A statistical perspective

We present the old-but-new problem of data quality from a statistical perspective, in part with the goal of attracting more statisticians, especially academics, to become engaged in research on a rich set of exciting challenges. The data quality landscape is described, and its research foundations in computer science, total quality management and statistics are reviewed. Two case studies based on an EDA approach to data quality are used to motivate a set of research challenges for statistics that span theory, methodology and software tools.     

Job Satisfaction: A Study of Sydney Adults

About one quarter of the 20,434 men and about one fifth of the 17,211 women who had a Medicheck screening expressed dissatisfaction with their job. Single men and single women were the least satisfied. The most positive aspects of work for men and women were that the job was interesting and that there was independence and freedom. Boredom, as well as not using one's potential, discriminated clearly between those satisfied with their job and those not, for both men and women. Job dissatisfaction was closely associated with other psychosocial problems and in particular with life dissatisfaction.     

Older People's Family Contacts and Long-term Care Expenditure in OECD Countries: A Comparative Approach Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis

In recent decades there has been a suggestion that public and private long-term care (LTC) expenditure might be replacing traditional family care for older people. The decline of family contact is known to be more advanced in some OECD countries than others, with southern Europe identified as where family contact is still strong. This article explores at a country level whether there is an association between levels of expenditure on long-term care and the availability of family contacts. Qualitative Comparative Analysis is used as a comparative method, so as to use national quantitative indicators with a small sample of countries. An association between higher levels of family contact and lower levels of expenditure on LTC is suggested, but it is weakened by a number of untypical cases. Countries that defy this relationship have government care policies that seek to promote informal social care through the family contact that continues to be available. Austria, Canada, Great Britain and Japan are discussed in this context.     

Negotiating personal engagement and professional accountability: professional wisdom and ethics work

This article examines the relationship between personal engagement and professional accountability in social work—considering whether the increasing focus on professional accountability in the context of the new public management, public austerity and market-based systems of welfare is incompatible with the personal engagement of social workers with service users and with their work. After undertaking a conceptual analysis of the terms, it is argued that both personal engagement and professional accountability are essential features of social work. Indeed, it is this negotiation of the creative tension between them that constitutes the subject matter and work of professional ethics. This requires a capacity and disposition for good judgement based in professional wisdom and a process of practical reasoning or ‘ethics work’ to find the right balance between closeness and distance, passion and rationality, empathic relationships and measurable social outcomes. It also requires a space for the exercise of professional wisdom.     

THE IMPACT OF INCOME SHOCKS ON HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM COHORT DATA

We study the effect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime‐aged population. Using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a 25‐year period in three different cross‐sectional surveys we aggregate data by date‐of‐birth cohort to construct a “synthetic cohort” data set with details of income, expenditure, socio‐demographic factors, health outcomes, and selected risk factors. We then exploit structural and arguably exogenous changes in cohort incomes over the 1980s and 1990s to uncover causal effects of permanent income shocks on health. We find that such income innovations have little effect on a wide range of health measures, but do lead to increases in mortality and risky health behaviour. (JEL: I10, D31)