The extent of family and school social capital promoting positive subjective well-being among primary school children in Shenzhen, China

This study aimed to examine, first, the extent to which variations in family and school social capital can be explained by child's differing socioeconomic and demographic background and school characteristics; and second, the extent to which family and school social capital in combination might be associated with variations in child subjective well-being in Shenzhen, China. This study was a cross-sectional survey design, using stratified random sampling. A total of 1306 sixth-grade primary school children and their parents were drawn from 16 schools, and a self-administered questionnaire was used. The results suggested that gender difference, the only child status at home and hukou status had impacts on family and school social capital accrued among primary school children in Shenzhen. There were also links between child's perception of connectedness to their parents, peers, and teachers, and their positive child subjective well-being.     

Play as a Resource for Children Facing Adversity: An Exploration of Indicative Case Studies

In this paper, we suggest that the ability and opportunity to play affords children a natural resource to meet intellectual and emotional challenge. Analysis of case studies focusing on interventions with children caught in the bombing of Beirut, children abandoned to the state system in Romania, and the street children in Rio de Janeiro and Cali is used to support this view. When resources are in deficit, challenge is more likely to become adversity. The impact of adversity is particular to context, but comparison across contexts also shows connections between children’s disparate experiences. Analysis confirms that given the opportunity, children interact with and influence their environment through play and that this process provides a resource to meet the challenge of adversity.     

The vexed link between social capital and social mobility for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Overcoming the socio‐economic disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non‐Indigenous Australians is a long‐standing social policy objective: one largely shared by Indigenous people. Achievement will require Indigenous individuals and households to be socially mobile, a process integrally involved with social capital, existing and requisite. The lack of research on Indigenous social mobility or its attendant social capital connections is addressed in this paper through an exploratory analysis of this interaction across three dimensions: distinctive patterns of Indigenous social capital; the transferability of Indigenous social capital; and traversing the social capital divide. The implications drawn, while tentative, indicate that for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the intersection of the processes of social mobility and social capital is vexed, and contains hazards and costs not fully shared by socially mobile non‐Indigenous households. The Indigenous‐specific factors of a gendered professional class, the identity–social capital link, and Indigenous labour market circumstances all indicate that more research and a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous social mobility is necessary. Social policy recommendations include broadening the concept of cultural leave to include bonding social capital obligations, especially for women, and re‐evaluation of how to support Indigenous career trajectories and transferable skill sets.     

Resilient product and production adaptation in a large-scale disaster: Does it pay off?

Pandemic outbreaks can disrupt firms’ normal operations, so they demand a resilient response. Firms can combine social responsibility initiatives with resilient responses by reconfiguring their production resources for pandemic relief. It remains unclear, however, whether pandemic-relieving product adaptation (in short, PRPA) improves financial performance. We draw on stakeholder theory to analyze the effect of a PRPA strategy on the stock returns of US-listed manufacturing firms during the COVID-19 pandemic—the most enduring and large-scale pandemic in recent history. The results reveal that the stock market reacts more positively to PRPA under severe pandemic circumstances and for firms with low political connectedness, low media coverage, and/or more unique production technology. The findings offer important implications for operations theory and practice.     

Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet

This study describes and analyzes outgroup linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics (‘Mock Ebonics’) that appeared on the Internet in the wake of the December 18, 1996 resolution of the Board of Education of the Oakland (California) Unified School District on improving the English-language skills of African-American students. We examined 23 World Wide Web pages containing 270,188 words, from which we chose nine pages containing 225,726 words for in-depth analysis. Drawing on a characterization of Mock Spanish, our analysis shows that Mock Ebonics is a system of graphemic-phonetic, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic strategies for representing an outgroup's belief in the imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users. We show how producers of Ebonics parody pages employ these strategies, which are common in speech stereotypes, to articulate an anti-Ebonics language ideology and shift the blame for the poor academic performance of African Americans from a racist society to learners and the community from which they come.     

Adolescents' Perceptions of Family Belonging in Stepfamilies

Prior research has established that adolescents' perceptions of family belonging are associated with a range of well‐being indicators and that adolescents in stepfamilies report lower levels of family belonging than adolescents in two‐biological‐parent families. Yet, we know little regarding what factors are associated with adolescents' perceptions of family belonging in stepfamilies. Guided by family systems theory, the authors addressed this issue by using nationally representative data (Add Health) to examine the associations between family characteristics and adolescents' perceptions of family belonging in stepfather families (N = 2,085). Results from structural equation models revealed that both the perceived quality of the stepfather–adolescent relationship and in particular the perceived quality of the mother–adolescent relationship were the factors most strongly associated with feelings of family belonging.     

Evaluation of statistical methods for safety signal detection: a simulation study

Proactive evaluation of drug safety with systematic screening and detection is critical to protect patients' safety and important in regulatory approval of new drug indications and postmarketing communications and label renewals. In recent years, quite a few statistical methodologies have been developed to better evaluate drug safety through the life cycle of the product development. The statistical methods for flagging safety signals have been developed in two major areas – one for data collected from spontaneous reporting system, mostly in the postmarketing area, and the other for data from clinical trials. To our knowledge, the methods developed for one area have not been applied to the other one so far. In this article, we propose to utilize all such methods for flagging safety signals in both areas regardless of which specific area they were originally developed for. Therefore, we selected eight typical methods, that is, proportional reporting ratios, reporting odds ratios, the maximum likelihood ratio test, Bayesian confidence propagation neural network method, chi‐square test for rates comparison, Benjamini and Hochberg procedure, new double false discovery rate control procedure, and Bayesian hierarchical mixture model for systematic comparison through simulations. The Benjamini and Hochberg procedure and new double false discovery rate control procedure perform best overall in terms of sensitivity and false discovery rate. The likelihood ratio test also performs well when the sample sizes are large. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.