Access to Childcare in Europe: Parents' Logistical Challenges in Cross‐national Perspective

A burgeoning comparative literature has identified the centrality of childcare policy and provision in promoting parental, and specifically maternal, participation in paid employment across countries. This literature has focused on the importance of macro‐level institutional arrangements, with a special emphasis on variation in availability of, and access to, formal early childhood education and care services. However, there has been limited comparative exploration of what this means in practice at the micro‐level: the everyday challenges parents face when attempting to navigate the childcare system and the labour market simultaneously. Taking inspiration from human geography literature on the concept of ‘space–time fixity’, we present cross‐national findings on the logistical challenges of arranging childcare. Evidence is drawn from interviews with parent‐ and childcare‐related organizations in six European countries: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK. Our research provides a richer understanding of childcare availability than would a sole focus on formal childcare services, by elucidating the difficulties parents face in organizing access to these services, which can be a challenge to some extent even in contexts where childcare services are comprehensive and affordable.     

What makes a network go round? Exploring the structure of a strong component with exponential random graph models

A strong component is a subgraph in a directed network where, following the direction of ties, all nodes in the graph are reachable from one another. Mutual reachability implies that every node in the graph is theoretically able to send materials to and/or influence every other node suggesting that strong components are amongst the more egalitarian network structures. Despite this intriguing feature, they remain understudied. Using exponential random graph models (ERGM) for directed networks, we investigate the social and structural processes underlying the generation of strong components. We illustrate our argument using a network of 301 nodes and 703 personal lending ties from Renaissance Florence. ERGM shows that our strong component arises from triadic clustering alongside an absence of higher-order star structures. We contend that these processes produce a strong component with a hierarchical, rather than an egalitarian structure: while some nodes are deeply embedded in a dense network of exchange, the involvement of others is more tenuous. More generally, we argue that such tiered core-periphery strong components will predominate in networks where the social context creates conditions for an absence of preferential attachment alongside the presence of localized closure. Although disparate social processes can give rise to hierarchical strong components linked to these two structural mechanisms, in Florence they are associated with the presence of multiple dimensions of social status and the connectedness of participants across disparate network domains.     

Informational Size and Incentive Compatibility

We examine a general equilibrium model with asymmetrically informed agents. The presence of asymmetric information generally presents a conflict between incentive compatibility and Pareto efficiency. We present a notion of informational size and show that the conflict between incentive compatibility and efficiency can be made arbitrarily small if agents are of sufficiently small informational size.     

100‐Percenting It: Videogame Play Through the Eyes of Devoted Gamers1

We describe salient aspects of the idioculture of videogame play, based on interviews conducted with 20 devoted videogame players and several hours of observation of small‐group game play. We explore the meaningfulness of videogame play for participants, specifically through an examination of the social quality of play, interaction during play, the enactment of status differences in and through play, and players’ desire to play games perfectly and/or completely. We elicit players’ comments about acceptable and unacceptable forms of cheating, and we explore their management of the stigma attached to playing violent games and playing excessively. We conclude by highlighting game players’ penchant for finding moral content in their favorite games and game characters.     

Valuation of Air Quality in Chile: The Life Satisfaction Approach

Social Indicators Research - Chile is one of the worst countries in Latin America in terms of urban air pollution. This situation negatively affects the health and well-being of Chileans. This...     

Conversations of Care: A Narrative Review of Collaborative Care Systems for Foster and Kinship Care

This paper reviews the literature on human relational factors and their impact on complex care systems for a highly vulnerable population of children and young people in out‐of‐home care (OOHC). Factors contributing to the functioning of collaborative OOHC systems are reviewed from theoretical and contextual perspectives. The authors posit that secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma are central to understanding the impact of relational trauma and the experience of individuals, families, teams, and the wider ecology of collaborative care systems. Given the challenges of working collaboratively across interpersonal, family, and systems boundaries to support traumatised children in OOHC, further research is required.     

Factors influencing perceived learning transfer of an outdoor management development programme in Malaysia

This study investigated if components of outdoor management programme, participant characteristics and work environment characteristics influence perceived transferable skills. The study used 148 executive and management participants who attended a 3-day outdoor management programme using experiential learning at a secondary rainforest in Malaysia. Motivation to learn was the predictor of perceived transferable skills. Macro-dynamic activities, continuous learning culture and self-efficacy were found to significantly influence perceived transferable skills, but micro-dynamic activities, instructor's skills and perceived content validity were not. The outdoor management development programme was not effective in achieving its main objectives and return on investment to the relevant stakeholders. A well-designed instructional programme should be developed for accountability purposes.     

Barriers to collaboration on behalf of children with challenging behaviours: a large qualitative study of five constituent groups

Inter‐agency collaboration is seen as an effective way to support children and families with multiple and complex needs. Children in out‐of‐home care, especially those exhibiting challenging and disruptive behaviour, often require the services of multiple agencies. Ninety‐two South Australian stakeholders experienced in supporting children in out‐of‐home care were interviewed about their experience of collaborative practice, using the specific example of supporting children with extremely challenging behaviour. Participants were teachers, foster parents, child welfare workers, child mental health professionals and residential care workers. Thematic analysis revealed several tensions inherent in such collaboration. Results are discussed in terms of their unique implications for managing challenging behaviour, and suggestions are made for improving collaborative approaches to behaviour and multi‐agency practice.     

The Role of Domain Content in Understanding Identity Development Processes

The current studies examined the importance of domain content in the processes of identity development using two approaches—narrative and status. We examined personal narratives for identity domain content, the co‐occurrence of different contents, and the relations between content and processes, using two approaches to identity—status and narrative. Across two studies, 762 participants (average age = 19 years) and 2214 narratives, traditional ideological and interpersonal status domains were present, but so was a novel domain: existential concerns. Narrative identity processes were more frequent in narratives with multiple contents, and relations between identity statuses processes and narrative processes were modest. We discuss theoretical implications, the importance of examining content, and the utility of narrative approaches for doing so.