Public Awareness and Practice of Responsible Gambling in Macao

Responsible gambling (RG) is a relatively new concept to the Macao gambling industry. Although recent studies reported a heightened public awareness of RG, the prevalence of disordered gambling is still high. This discrepancy may suggest an existing gap between RG awareness and gambling practices, pinpointing aspects that need to be improved by different RG stakeholders. The gap may be attributable to people’s limited knowledge toward practices favoring RG. To explore means for enhancing the RG campaign, we studied Macao residents’ interpretation and adoption of RG practices. In Study 1, a random community sample was collected to assess the extent to which common RG practices were adopted. Results suggested that there was a fair proportion of gamblers not adhering to them and gambling disorder tendency was related to the adoption of RG practices. It implied a successful promotion of RG practices may reduce gambling problems. In Study 2, focus group discussions were conducted to explore how RG was conceptualized. Twenty-five participants (including 11 casino employees) took part in four focus group interviews. All participants were aware of RG but their knowledge of RG practices was limited. Very few of them were able to identify major practices such as putting constraints on gambling amount and time and the application for self-exclusion. We argue that future RG promotion needs to be more specific and behavior-oriented and it should also address various procedural concerns on how RG practices can be implemented.     

Maternal Antecedents to Adolescent Girls’ Neural Regulation of Emotion

The purpose of this study was to investigate contributions of maternal emotional resources to individual differences in adolescents’ functional connectivity during emotion regulation. Participants included 35 adolescent girls who completed an implicit emotion regulation task during fMRI. Mothers reported on the quality of their adult attachment and emotional awareness when youth were in elementary school. Higher anxious attachment and lower emotional awareness were significantly correlated with more positive amygdala–right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex connectivity, a pattern linked in prior research with ineffective emotion regulation and emotional difficulties. Further, there was an indirect effect of anxious attachment on adolescent connectivity through emotional awareness. These results suggest that compromised maternal emotional resources in childhood may be linked to atypical neural processing of emotions.     

Comparing Precarious Employment Across Countries: Measurement Invariance of the Employment Precariousness Scale for Europe (EPRES-E)

Social Indicators Research - Comparing precarious employment (PE) across countries is essential to deepen the understanding of the phenomenon and to learn from country-specific experiences....     

The Impact of Technological and Organizational Changes on Labor Flows. Evidence on French Establishments

Abstract. This paper investigates the effects of organizational and technological changes on job stability of different occupational categories in France. We conduct an empirical analysis in which we make extensive use of a unique data set on a representative sample of French establishments. Working with various indicators of labor flows (gross labor flows, hiring rate, firing rate, net labor flows, and churning flows), we find that the use of new technology seems to have a positive effect on aggregate job turnover and, more specifically, turnover among manual workers. In contrast, innovative workplace organizational practices are related to lower turnover among clerical workers and intermediate professionals and have a positive effect on churning among managers.     

Reorganization of Firms and Job Stability: A Theoretical Approach

Abstract. This paper seeks to provide a theoretical explanation to the contradictory results found by the empirical literature concerning the effects of recent workplace organizational changes on job stability. We develop an endogenous job destruction model à la Mortensen‐Pissarides (1994) where a modernizing firm may offer to the worker a tayloristic job (traditional organization) or a holistic job (modern organization). We then study the evolution of job stability during the transition from a tayloristic to a holistic organization. Our results point towards the importance of the restructuring costs supported by firms during the modernizing trajectory as the main factor responsible for the variations in job stability.     

Intervening in youth problem behavior in Sweden: a pragmatic cost analysis of MST from a randomized trial with conduct disordered youth

Olsson TM. Intervening in youth problem behavior in Sweden: a pragmatic cost analysis of MST from a randomized trial with conduct disordered youth Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 194–205 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Within the context of a randomized trial, this study assessed the costs of treating conduct disorder with multisystemic therapy (MST) or treatment as usual (TAU) for 156 youth in Sweden. From the perspective of the municipal Social Welfare Administration, all intervention costs were collected for the 6‐month period starting at randomization. MST was found to cost, on average, US$8,847 per youth. A course of intervention including MST was found to cost significantly more (US$5,038 per youth) than TAU. Although MST was found to reduce the use of and costs associated with non‐placement interventions, MST was not found to reduce the use of or costs associated with placement interventions. This is contrary to findings reported from studies undertaken in the USA. Intent‐to‐treat (ITT) and treatment‐of‐treated (TOT) analyses are presented.     

Immigration-related political culture and support for radical right parties

Radical right parties are not equally successful across or within all countries. Most studies have up to now relied on socio-economic, socio-structural and political factors to explain these differences. We examine whether the immigration-related political culture – consisting of integration policies and shared conservative values – in which voters are embedded influences radical right voting. We argue that more exclusive immigration-culture is related to more support for radical right parties. Furthermore, the relationship between immigration attitudes and radical right support is expected to be moderated by immigration-culture. With multilevel regression models using data from the 2011 Swiss Electoral Studies (SELECTS) we compare the effect of immigration-culture in 26 Swiss cantons. We find that cantonal immigration-culture (assessed with integration regimes and shared conservative beliefs) increases radical right support and the effect of individuals' immigration attitude on radical right support is stronger when immigration-culture is exclusive.