Comparative study of attitudes to religious groups in New Zealand reveals Muslim-specific prejudice

ABSTRACT

The March 15th terrorist attack started a national dialogue about prejudice in New Zealand. Previous research has investigated attitudes towards Muslims in comparison to ethnic minorities. However, presently, there are no nationally representative studies in New Zealand systematically comparing attitudes to Muslims with attitudes to other religious groups. Here, we present evidence from the New Zealand edition of the International Social Survey Programme module on religion, a national postal survey (N?=?1335) collected between September 2018 and February 2019. We assess perceived threat and negativity towards Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Atheists. We find substantially greater perceived threat and negativity towards Muslims compared with other groups. In particular, older people, New Zealand Europeans, men, and those with more right-wing attitudes report greater threat and negativity towards Muslims. In line with previous studies, higher religious identification and higher education predict greater acceptance. Taken collectively, these results reveal that the Muslim Acceptance Gap in this country is substantial, and greater challenges for acceptance are evident among lower-educated, right-wing, older, secular, and male populations. The magnitude of this gap reveals a substantial challenge to the future of New Zealand where religious and secular people can live without evoking prejudice.     

Small Is Beautiful? Emerging Organizational Strategies among Italian Professionals

The traditional debate about professional groups has mainly focused on conflicts between professions and organizations, reinforcing dualisms and dichotomies. Few scholars have investigated the extent to which professionalism and organizations are intertwined while focusing on the case of professionals integrated into large organizations, and even less attention has been paid to emerging forms of organization among self‐employed professionals. Taking as an example organizational trends among architects (liberal professionals) and management consultants (emerging professionals) in Italy, this article investigates how small, flexible, and (often) interprofessional organizations promoted by self‐employed professionals are increasingly instrumental in overcoming market pressures and responding to emerging social needs in times of crisis and austerity.     

Identifying Students at Risk of Academic Failure Within the Educational Data Mining Framework

Social Indicators Research - Data mining is widely considered a powerful instrument for searching and acquiring essential relationships among different variables/attributes in a database. Data...     

A Ecological Model of Well-Being in Child Welfare Referred Children

Despite its social, political and economic relevance, child well-being remains a challenging construct to define and measure accurately. This holds true especially for children growing up in at-risk families, where their development is hindered by many adverse circumstances. Typically, the well-being of child welfare (CW) referred children has been conceptualized as the absence of negative outcomes, and the study of its determinants has been limited to children’s micro-systems. In this study, we aimed to obtain a suitable indicator of child well-being and to test a model of the determinants of CW referred children’s well-being including parental, family and wider contextual variables. The sample included 249 parents and 46 case managers from Portuguese and Spanish CW services. A three-domain solution from selected items of the Child Well-Being Scales (Physical, Academic and Socioemotional) was tested and confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of structural equation modeling for each domain revealed that risk factors nested in the wider context and those related to material disadvantage were the most powerful predictors of physical well-being, while parenting and family functioning variables predicted better both academic and socio-emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that different risk and protective factors matter for different outcomes and that most of these factors are associated with each other. Therefore, interventions with at-risk children must take this specificity into account when targeting each domain of well-being, and efforts could be allocated to a few modifiable dimensions, which would in turn positively affect other parental and family factors.     

Well-Being and Affective Commitment among Ambulance Volunteers: A Mediational Model of Job Burnout

ABSTRACT

Burnout represents a relevant risk for ambulance volunteers. According to the Job Demands-Resources model, role conflict and social support can be considered as antecedents of burnout which, in turn, may lower affective commitment. This study aims to investigate the relationship between social support, role conflict, and affective commitment, as mediated by job burnout. Survey data were collected from 352 Italian volunteers and analyzed using structural equation modeling methods. Social support was confirmed as a protective factor, and role conflict as an antecedent of burnout which, in turn, decreases affective commitment. The relationship between role conflict and affective commitment is mediated by burnout which, on the contrary, does not mediate the effect of social support on affective commitment. Social support may protect against burnout. Because of its positive effects on a personal and an organizational level, affective commitment may be increased raising levels of supervisor support and reshaping role expectations. It could be useful to carry out future longitudinal studies, in order to confirm the antecedents and effects of job burnout; furthermore, this research should be extended to other ambulance organizations, in order to generalize the results; finally, multi-group analyses would allow to bring out possible differences between paid-staff and volunteers.     

南渡士人的佛教因缘与文学创作

宋室南渡以后,禅悦之风较北宋更为盛行.从达官宰执到一般朝野士人,皆对佛教持支持信仰之态度.与北宋士人相比,南渡士人的礼佛参禅在内容与形式上有所变化.如同是援佛入儒,北宋士人是"尽用其学而不自知",一方面吸收佛学的精华,一方面又公开攘斥佛老;而南渡士人不仅援佛入儒,以佛学作为儒学的参照系,而且还身体力行,佛教对其浸染甚深.禅悦之风在士林的盛行,不仅对南宋政府的佛教政策有所影响,而且也因此影响了士林的文学批评与文学创作."以禅喻诗"是南渡士人对文学作出的新诠释,而"援禅入诗"、"援禅入词",则是他们在创作上呈现出的一大特色.就佛教对文学批评的影响来说,尽管参诗之说始自北宋,但真正将参禅与作诗结合起来并提出重要的诗学概念与范畴的,则是南渡诗人.并且就时间来说,禅诗相通,至南渡以后,方为诗人所共识,这是最值得注意的现象.禅悦之风在南宋初期的盛行,有历史、政治及经济等方面的原因,就士人来说,他们信奉佛教,除去学术与个人遭际等因素以外,最重要的原因是南渡政府安置南渡士人的特殊政策增加了士人与佛教接触的机会,从而进一步刺激了士人对佛教的了解.     

Prenatal child abuse risk assessment: a preliminary validation study

Workers need an efficient prenatal screener that can identify mothers at greatest risk of child abuse. Existing risk assessment methods are often invasive and difficult to administer. This study assessed child abuse risk in a sample of 49 expectant mothers using the Brigid Collins Risk Screener (BCRS). At three months postpartum, high-risk mothers scored significantly lower on the quality of infants' physical, social, and emotional environments than moderate or low-risk mothers. BCRS appears to offer a noninvasive, efficient approach to assessing risk of child abuse.