Rethinking the Significance of Attitudes in Preventing Men's Violence Against Women

The concept of attitudes has been an important component of campaigns to address men's violence against women. Attitudes have been examined in relation to men's perpetration of violence, women's experience of violence and community and institutional responses. In this article we argue that there has not been sufficient interrogation of the limitations of attitudes in understanding and addressing men's violence. We propose a social constructionist approach to attitudes and emphasise the need to locate attitudes within the context of familial, organisational, community and social norms which support violence against women. Furthermore, we argue that to prevent violence against women, we must develop interventions beyond cultural and attitudinal change to encompass changes in structural relations and social practices.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Decision to Train Apprentices

Abstract. It is a widely held belief that apprenticeship training represents a net investment for training firms, the cost of which needs to be recouped after the training period. A new firm‐level data set for Switzerland reveals large variation in net costs across firms and, remarkably, negative net costs for 60 per cent of all firms. We use these data to estimate the effect of net costs on the number of apprentices hired by a firm. The results show that the costs have a significant impact on the training decision but no significant influence on the number of apprentices, once the firm has decided to train. For policy purposes, these results indicate that subsidies for firms that already train apprentices would not boost the number of available training places.     

Turning bad into good: How resilience resources protect organizations from demanding work environments

An organization’s survival and its performance are often connected to employees’ well-being, which in intensive work conditions can be compromised by employee exhaustion. To date, the last economic crisis has forced several companies to downsize and leave the remaining employees facing higher job demands and vulnerability toward job exhaustion. The present study investigates whether resilience together with other personal resources can function as a psychological shield through a mediation and/or moderation process that mitigate the emergence of burnout. Based on a sample of employees from three different Italian companies (N?=?208), our results confirmed that “resilience resources” (i.e., resilience, self-efficacy, self-regulation) mediated the relationship between job demands, exhaustion, and task performance (i.e., energetic process). These results suggest that organizational environments characterized by challenging demands are likely to foster the development of resilience resources to cope with the emergence of potentially harming processes.     

Preregistering qualitative research

The threat to reproducibility and awareness of current rates of research misbehavior sparked initiatives to better academic science. One initiative is preregistration of quantitative research. We investigate whether the preregistration format could also be used to boost the credibility of qualitative research. A crucial distinction underlying preregistration is that between prediction and postdiction. In qualitative research, data are used to decide which way interpretation should move forward, using data to generate hypotheses and new research questions. Qualitative research is thus a real-life example of postdiction research. Some may object to the idea of preregistering qualitative studies because qualitative research generally does not test hypotheses, and because qualitative research design is typically flexible and subjective. We rebut these objections, arguing that making hypotheses explicit is just one feature of preregistration, that flexibility can be tracked using preregistration, and that preregistration would provide a check on subjectivity. We then contextualize preregistrations alongside another initiative to enhance credibility in qualitative research: the confirmability audit. Besides, preregistering qualitative studies is practically useful to combating dissemination bias and could incentivize qualitative researchers to report constantly on their study's development. We conclude with suggested modifications to the Open Science Framework preregistration form to tailor it for qualitative studies.     

Das „flexible Tandemsetting“ bei Gruppendynamik-Trainings

The new “Flexible Tandem Setting” combines both elements of the classic group dynamic design and tandem design and allows to gather valuable experiences in group building process in the context of organizational learning and to reflect them. This new setting and three practical case studies are described and the specific new learning fields in team learning and organizational learning for these settings are focused. In the end new operational areas of application and their benefits are sketched.     

Happiness and altruism within the extended family

We propose a direct measure of altruism between parents and adult children, using survey data on happiness from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000–2004. The question of altruism within families has policy relevance, for example, to understand whether public transfers crowd out private ones. Previous empirical evidence, based on observed transfer behavior, has failed to establish a clear consensus. Using various cross section, panel data, and instrumental variable estimators, we find a robust association between the happiness of parents and that of their adult children. A 1 standard deviation increase in a child’s happiness is associated with the same increase in own happiness as that of a 20–45% increase in household income, depending on specification.     

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in a model of fertility choice

We examine the relationship between assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and the microeconomics of fertility choice. Along the way, we develop a model consistent with between-country differences in overall fertility and fertility timing. Our analysis of ART centers around the distinction between biomedical and behavioral effects. While improvements in ART have the biomedical effect of raising fertility, they may cause some women who would otherwise have tried to have children earlier on in life to postpone childbirth to later in life when the conception success probability is lower. This behavioral effect of postponement may reduce the fertility rate.     

Exact percentage points for the Kolmogorov test on truncated versions of known continuous distributions with unknown truncation parameters

In this paper we deal with Kolmogorov-Smirnov testson uniformity with completely or partly unknown limits. Tables of exact percentage points are presented or referred using the wellknown determinant formula given by Steck (1971). It is shown that these tables also give the percentage points for the analogous statistics of the test on truncated versions of known continuous distributions with completely or partly unknown truncation limits. We will give some examples of these applications. Among these are the tests on exponentiality and on Pareto distribution with known shape parameter and unknown lower terminal.     

Gender Equality in Europe: The Development of the Sustainable Development Goal No. 5 Illustrated by Exemplary Cases

Social Indicators Research - The inequality between genders is a problem virtually in all countries. A comparison among 28 nations of the European Union together with a data set corresponding to a...