Will this voluntary project be successful?: Validation of an instrumental model of volunteering behavior

This study examines whether instrumental considerations influence people's decision to start volunteering. Using social dilemma theory as a basis, the authors assume that the decision to start volunteering is contingent on whether a voluntary program will be successful in achieving a collective goal. The study's findings underscore the importance of anticipated success likelihood perceptions, which appear to have a major impact on potential volunteers' decision‐making process. Furthermore, social consensus beliefs relating to proximate referents have a more distinct impact than do social consensus beliefs relating to distant referents. Finally, the study reveals interesting gender‐specific differences. On the basis of the results from the empirical analysis, the study offers implications for management and avenues for further research.     

Evidence-based practice for youth in supervised out-of-home care: a framework for development, definition, and evaluation

Adolescents comprise more than half of the children in child welfare supervised out-of-home care. This article considers the evidence-base for an array of services to adolescents in out-of-home care and evaluates the existing research base for each program. This review advances a framework for considering the critical need to develop, define, and evaluate the essential elements of out-of-home care services for older foster youth. Policy, program, and evaluation recommendations are forwarded.     

The Voluntary Facial Action Technique: A Method to Test the Facial Feedback Hypothesis

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, facial muscles do not only express emotions, they also have the ability to modulate subjective experiences of emotions and to initiate emotions. This study examined the voluntary facial action technique, where participants were instructed to react with the Zygomatic major muscle (smile) or the Corrugator supercilii muscle (frown) when exposed to different stimuli. The results demonstrate that the technique effectively induces facial feedback effects. Through use of this technique we further addressed three important areas of facial feedback and found, first, that facial feedback did not modulate the experience of positive and negative emotion evoking stimuli differently. Second, the modulating ability provided significant feedback effects, while the initiating ability did not. Third, an effect of feedback remained and could be detected even some time after the critical manipulation. It is concluded that the present technique can be used in the future study of facial feedback.     

Comparing long-term care systems: A multi-dimensional,actor-centred typology

Like other fields of social policy, the organization of long-term care (LTC) varies temporally and geographically. The present article aims to advance the comparison of LTC systems worldwide by proposing a conceptual framework to analyse variation, putting a special focus on analysing the role of public and private actor types. In a precluding literature review of existing LTC typologies, we find that there are various promising classification approaches, but with an overwhelming concentration on European countries and often constructed in-transparently and superficially. Building on the concept of the care/welfare mix, we develop a multi-dimensional, actor-centred typology of LTC systems. In doing so, we employ the methodological procedure of theoretically constructing a typological attribute space. We argue that three dimensions, that is service provision, financing and regulation, are crucial for differentiating types. Furthermore, we chose an actor-centred approach, asking who bears the main responsibility in each dimension. Five relevant types of corporate actors are distinguished: state, societal actors, private for-profit actors, private individual actors, and global actors. Finally, we present and discuss the resulting attribute space and further illustrated the typology's use by exemplarily classifying three countries.     

Well-being and ill-being: Different dimensions?

This paper presents evidence for regarding well-being and ill-being as distinct, although not orthogonal dimensions. It is suggested that well-being and ill-being may be like measures of quantitative and verbal ability in intelligence tests. For some purposes (e.g. for admitting students to particular courses of study) it may be sensible to use only one of the measures. For other purposes a combined measure-I.Q.-is appropriate. In this study we employ Indices of Well-Being and Ill-Being and a combined measure, Balance of Well-Being and Ill-Being. Using data from the first wave (1981) of an Australian panel study (N=942), four measures of well-being and three measures of ill-being were factor analysed, confirming the existence of distinct dimensions. The value of the distinctions was underlined by findings indicating that well-being and ill-being have different correlates and causes. Wellbeing depends more than ill-being on the personality traits of extraversion and optimism, and also on the existence of supportive social networks. Ill-being is more strongly related to SES, poor health and low scoring on the trait “personal competence”,. Overall, however, it was found that more variance can be accounted for in the Balance of Well-Being and Ill-Being Index than in the separate indices of Well-Being and Ill-Being.     

Women’s experience of midwife-led counselling and its influence on childbirth fear: A qualitative study

Background

Women with childbirth fear have been offered counseling by experienced midwives in Sweden for decades without evidence for its effectiveness, in terms of decrease in childbirth fear. Women are usually satisfied with the counselling. However, there is a lack of qualitative data regarding women’s views about counselling for childbirth fear.