Household Saving Behavior and the Influence of Family-Owned Business

This study focused on the lifecycle income objective of business-owning (farm and nonfarm) households. We hypothesized that the complex relationship between household and business management decisions had the potential to challenge predictions from standard household savings theory. Specifically, we tested for differences in saving behavior of these entrepreneurial households relative to the average US household. A limited dependent variable model was performed, keying in on the saving behavior and ability of household respondents in the Survey of Consumer Finances for 2007. The estimation results indicated that, along with standard demographic influences of savings models, households owning a farm or nonfarm business had a significantly higher likelihood of maintaining private saving in a given year. Our results highlight the necessity for future research on household saving behavior to account for the differing objectives and choice sets faced by households that own businesses when conducting analyses of household saving.     

Mobility in urban social events: Towards organizational transvergence

The paper explores the emergence of territories that are constituted through spontaneous assembling of self-organized communities resulting in what we term urban social events. A concrete event is employed, namely Embros, an open occupation of an abandoned public building in the center of Athens, to highlight the dynamics that make urban social events transformative urban phenomena. By focusing upon the entangled mobilities of diverse agents, we explain how through differential, dis-continual assembling and creative collaborations, such urban social interactions institute unbounded and immanent modes of organizing. The paper contributes to organizational territoriality studies proposing that urban social events are mobile entanglements that institute practices of creative transactions with formal or informal communities. By doing that, it places the Arts, creativity and community participation at the center of transformative organizing.     

Die Eliminationsmethode – Förderung kreativer Ideen durch die Elimination bekannter Lösungen

This pilot study presents the first implementation and evaluation of a new technique to raise creative performances by eliminating common ideas and conventional solutions in a first step and subsequently generate new ideas. This technique is termed “elimination method”. The experiment of this study was conducted with individually working subjects, not involving group interaction. 30 subjects worked on a creativity task with the elimination method, 30 subjects worked on the same creativity task with brainstorming technique instructions. They produced 1919 ideas which could be summarized to 268 different cognitive elements as the baseline of the research. The theoretical focus of this study is to highlight the role of common knowledge in group discussion and the corresponding intra-individual processes and cognitive processes. Overall results of data examination were in line with expectations and support future testing of the proposed elimination method in a group context. This study was able to show that the instructions for the elimination method induced effects as intended, producing mainly common ideas in the first step and mainly new ideas in the second step, overall resembling the output of the brainstorming condition. The second step of the elimination method outperformed the brainstorming condition in producing idea output with a higher creative density and one-tailed differences were significant (p? =? 0.028). Furthermore, interactions between method and creativity measures were explored. Findings were connected to corresponding research where appropriate and implications for future research were remarked upon.     

Portuguese Scientists’ Migration: a study on the 2008 crisis aftermath

In the economic and social aftermath of the 2008 crisis there has been an important and growing new wave of highly qualified Portuguese emigration comprising scientists. No or very few public policies have been designed to reverse this phenomenon, risking the consequences of brain drain. International literature argues that professional reasons are central to scientists’ decision to migrate, even after the 2008 crisis. Spending some time in a foreign country to study, research, or teach, is perceived as a common step in an individual academic trajectory and an advantage for a successful professional career in academia. It is also encouraged by European Union policies. Twelve individual portraits of Portuguese scientists living in central Europe reveal how important other factors are to the migration decision‐making process. These factors include the economic crisis, student mobility programmes, and the current Portuguese scientific system revision.     

The Structured Interview of Family Assessment Risk: Convergent Validity,Inter-rater Reliability and Structural Relations

The quality of parenting, composition and socio-economic status are family risk or protective factors on juvenile delinquency, however, there is not an instrument to help psychologists and social workers to specifically assess the adolescent offender’s family. This study set out to accomplish an additional validation study of the structured interview of family assessment risk (SIFAR), a structured professional judgment tool for the assessment of family risk and protective factors of juvenile delinquents. The statistical analyses included inter-rater reliability, convergent validity with YLS/CMI, the Partial Least Squares approach to structural equation modeling and receiving operator characteristics (ROC) analysis. A sample of 130 male adolescent delinquents detained in Portuguese forensic facilities and their parents, were paired analyzed. The YLS/CMI was used to analyze the convergent validity with SIFAR. SIFAR shows a strong correlation with the YLS/CMI family context, moderate to high values of inter-rater reliability; SIFAR factors show that they are predictive determinants of the Moderate Four risk factors. ROC analysis shows adequate accuracy power. The findings show that SIFAR it is useful as an additional assessment tool for structured risk assessment instruments since it allows understanding the vulnerabilities and strengths of the delinquent’s family.     

Psychological Well‐Being and Career Indecision in Emerging Adulthood: The Moderating Role of Hardiness

This study investigated the moderating role of hardiness in the relationship between psychological well‐being (PWB) and career indecision in 131 never‐employed Italian emerging adults. Cluster analytic methods produced high and low hardiness profiles. A structural equation modeling analysis underscored the importance of hardiness for moderating the negative association between PWB and career indecision. Specifically, findings revealed that being hardy is a crucial relevant personal resource in the presence of lower levels of PWB. The authors discuss the importance of analyzing simultaneously the role of PWB and hardiness in promoting engagement in the career decision‐making process and provide implications for setting up appropriate career counseling interventions with emerging adults. Suggestions for future research are presented, such as the use of longitudinal designs and qualitative methods.     

Accessibility of European museums to visitors with visual impairments

People who have visual impairments exceed 250 million persons worldwide and represent an important cohort of museum visitors. However, they experience many constraints to participation in daily life. Few studies analyse the accessibility of museums to visitors with visual impairments, and many are confined to a single museum and to a small set of strategies for improving accessibility. This article aims to identify a broad set of strategies to increase the accessibility of museums to visitors with visual impairments and analyse the accessibility of museums in four European cities. Conclusions and implications for policy-makers and museum managers, designed to promote the creation of inclusive museums, are presented.     

Bivariate Birnbaum-Saunders accelerated lifetime model: estimation and diagnostic analysis

In this paper, we discuss the bivariate Birnbaum-Saunders accelerated lifetime model, in which we have modeled the dependence structure of bivariate survival data through the use of frailty models. Specifically, we propose the bivariate model Birnbaum-Saunders with the following frailty distributions: gamma, positive stable and logarithmic series. We present a study of inference and diagnostic analysis for the proposed model, more concisely, are proposed a diagnostic analysis based in local influence and residual analysis to assess the fit model, as well as, to detect influential observations. In this regard, we derived the normal curvatures of local influence under different perturbation schemes and we performed some simulation studies for assessing the potential of residuals to detect misspecification in the systematic component, the presence in the stochastic component of the model and to detect outliers. Finally, we apply the methodology studied to real data set from recurrence in times of infections of 38 kidney patients using a portable dialysis machine, we analyzed these data considering independence within the pairs and using the bivariate Birnbaum-Saunders accelerated lifetime model, so that we could make a comparison and verify the importance of modeling dependence within the times of infection associated with the same patient.