Your House,Your Car,Your Education: The Socioeconomic Situation of the Neighborhood and its Impact on Life Satisfaction in Germany

This study deals with the impact of socioeconomic conditions and social integration into a local neighborhood on individual life satisfaction in Germany. While the majority of ecological studies to date are based on very broad neighborhood concepts, using large research units for defining neighborhood the present study contains micro-geographic information on a representative sample of private households in Germany, including features of their respective residential environments. The data was derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and enriched with data from the Micromarketing-Systeme and Consult GmbH (microm) for the years 2000–2006. Our analyses reveal neighborhood effects on various facets of life satisfaction. Controlling for several covariates at the household and individual level, life satisfaction increases when a person lives in a neighborhood with a higher socioeconomic status. In addition, the individual gap between a person’s economic status and the status of the neighborhood also affects individual well-being. However, when comparing with other neighborhood aspects, the strongest effects on individual life satisfaction have social networks.     

Social Cohesion and the Labour Market: Societal Regimes of Civic Attitudes and Labour Market Regimes

The aim of this paper is to test the connections between the indicators used in the literature on social cohesion, which usually reflect ‘general’ values or behaviours, and indicators specific to a particular space, namely the labour market. A key question is the stability of the social cohesion’s indicators when moving from a societal level to the labour market. Based on data from the World Value Survey, and following a restrictive definition of social cohesion, a comparison is done, for European countries. Examination of the situation in the two spheres makes it possible to identify more or less homogeneous groups of countries and also to point to instabilities. ‘Regimes’ of social cohesion begin to emerge. As in most analyses, the Nordic countries (excluding Finland) have high scores in all the dimensions. Conversely, most of the new EU member states from the former Eastern bloc have low scores, particularly in the horizontal dimension of trust between individuals.     

Examining the Reliability and Validity of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale: The Persian Version

This study was an attempt to determine the factor structure, reliability, validity, and adaptation of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale (FDAS) for Iranian divorced individuals. The primary rationale for this study was the lack of such an instrument in an Iranian context to help researchers and therapists determine postdivorce adjustment and distinguish those in need of receiving psychological help. Participants of this study were 486 individuals (49.5% men, 50.5% women) who were divorced and were selected from the available population. Participants were asked to complete a sociodemographic questionnaire, the FDAS (Fisher, 1978), the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ; Ghanbarnejad & Turki, 2013). The results showed that the internal consistency of FDAS using Cronbach’s alpha was .93 and the split-half coefficient was .89, indicating fine consistency. Also, the internal consistency of FDAS subscales measuring self-worth, disentanglement from the ex-partner, anger, grief, social trust, and social self-worth was .81, .86, .89, .88, .86, and .69, respectively, using Cronbach’s alpha. Data analysis shows an adequate convergent validity with the SWLS and GHQ. It can be concluded that the FDAS has an acceptable factor structure, reliability, and validity, and can be used in Iran and other Persian-speaking countries.     

Marginalisation processes in inclusive education in Norway: a longitudinal study of classroom participation

The aim of this paper is to describe the classroom participation of primary school children with disabilities who attend regular schools in Norway; to explore how relations between children with disabilities and their environment change, and further to chart how schools act in response to such change. The analyses are based on a life course study with data gathered from interviews and questionnaires given to the parents of children with disabilities born in the period between 1993 and 1995. The results show an increasing marginalisation of children with disabilities who receive their primary school education at regular schools. Despite the fact that public policies in Norway are based on a relational understanding of disability, thus suggesting that educators would make considerable efforts to accommodate children with disabilities in regular schools, the reality is that schools take an individual approach to children with disabilities which reflects a medical understanding of disability.     

Therapeutic Responses to Communities Affected by Disasters: The Contribution of Family Therapy

This article is underpinned by the premise that for recovery, healing and post‐traumatic growth to occur after traumatic events such as technological and natural disasters, massacres and terrorist attacks, effective therapeutic services need to be offered at both the individual and community level. Frequently, responses to such traumatic instances have been conceptualised as discrete, polarised interventions offered by various groups of health and welfare professionals at various points post the traumatic event. Traditionally when therapeutic interventions are considered, many practitioners assume that the response would, and should, focus primarily and narrowly, on individuals or their families and the symptoms of post‐traumatic stress. Conversely, the perceived role of community wide interventions has been unnecessarily limited to disaster relief or organised emergency responses most usually offered at the time of the crisis. The consequence of these limited understandings is an apparent failure to explore fully the therapeutic or mediating role of social or community support in surviving trauma. Interventions encompassing the level of community might be therapeutic in two fundamental ways. First, if practitioners embraced ideas from systemic family therapy literature, ideas that acknowledge the importance of social networks, this would encourage a more holistic vision of resilience and recovery. Second, if practitioners recognised that whole communities and social networks might also be traumatised, they could provide support and interventions oriented toward healing at this broader level.     

Collingridge’s dilemma and technoscience

Collingridge’s dilemma is one of the most well-established paradigms presenting a challenge to Technology Assessment (TA). This paper aims to reconstruct the dilemma from an analytic perspective and explicates three assumptions underlying the dilemma: the temporal, knowledge and power/actor assumptions. In the light of the recent transformation of the science, technology and innovation system—in the age of “technoscience”—these underlying assumptions are called into question. The same result is obtained from a normative angle by Collingridge himself; he criticises the dilemma and advances concepts on how to keep a technology controllable. This paper stresses the relevance of the dilemma and of Collingridge’s own ideas on how to deal with the dilemma. Today, a positive interpretation of technoscience for effective TA is possible.     

Eunuchoid sexuality in four syndromes

Using HTDM and SAM Questionnaires, heterosexual development and sexual activity were investigated in the following patients: two men with a Klinefelter syndrome associated with developmental anomalies of the penis, two patients with testicular agenesis, 14 men with hypogonadism, and three “fertile eunuchs.” Through comparison with a control group of 204 adult well‐developed, fertile, and potent men it was ascertained that the heterosexual development of the patients was distinctly retarded and that their sexual activity was lower. These insufficiencies in sex life were of the same character regardless of the diversity of etiopathogenetic mechanisms which had led to the disturbance of somatosexual development.