Building Weighted-Domain Composite Indices of Life Satisfaction with Data Envelopment Analysis

The specialised literature has frequently addressed the relationship between life domains and people’s satisfaction with life. Some researchers have posed questions regarding the importance of domains, therefore interpreting them as weightings and creating domain satisfaction indices. This paper illustrates how Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques can be employed to compute domain-based composite indices of life satisfaction and weightings for life domains. Furthermore, an empirical application is performed on a sample of 178 people living in a rural community in Yucatan (Mexico). One of the main features of the aforementioned techniques is that weightings might differ from one individual to another. Accordingly, several weighting schemes are used to compute different life satisfaction indices, in addition to a constant equally-weighted index. Based on the goodness-of-fit criteria commonly used in this literature, our main result is that DEA-MCDM indicators of life satisfaction do not improve the relationship with self-reported life satisfaction in comparison to the equally-weighted index.     

Ethnic identity, majority norms, and the native–immigrant employment gap

Earlier studies do not agree on whether ethnic identity, i.e., immigrants’ attachment to the home country and the host country, can explain lower employment outcomes among immigrants. This study investigates the relationship between employment and ethnic identity and complements the literature by capturing a novel dimension of ethnic identity: openness to majority norms. Reproducing measures from earlier studies, I find that immigrants’ employment outcomes do not systematically associate with their ethnic identity. However, immigrants who share social norms with the majority experience significantly better employment outcomes, particularly first-generation immigrant women. Furthermore, I show that interethnic differentials in majority norms could account for up to 20 % of the explained part of the employment gap between natives and first-generation immigrants. Those results shed more light on the interethnic employment gap and aspects of immigrants’ identity relevant to economic integration.     

Validating the Portuguese Version of the Satisfaction With Life Scale in an Elderly Sample

Life satisfaction is referred to a cognitive, judgmental process (Diener et al. in J Pers Assess 49:71–75, 1985), in which person’s quality of life is globally assessed according to his/her chosen criteria (Shin and Johnson in Soc Indic res 5:475–492, 1978). Thus, life satisfaction is a conscious cognitive judgment, based on the comparison of one’s life with a self-imposed standard or set of standards, which lead to a global assessment of life (Pavot and Diener in Psychol Assess 5:164–172, 1993). Among the many scales developed to measure life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS, Diener et al. in J Pers Assess 49:71–75, 1985) is one of the global life satisfaction scales more often used in the research arena. It is composed of five items assessing global life satisfaction, using a Likert type response format. The aim of this paper is to validate the Portuguese version of the SWLS via confirmatory factor analysis, with a sample of 1,003 elderly from Angola. Reliability, factorial and criterial validity estimates are presented. Overall, the results shown that the scale had an adequate one-factor confirmatory solution, satisfying reliability indices, and adequate criterion-related validity when assessed in a sample of Angolan elderly. The discussion relates the results with existing literature and posits the contributions of the paper: firstly, it offers the researchers on life satisfaction in Portuguese-speaking contexts a brief, self-rated measure of satisfaction with life that has sound psychometric properties, validity, and reliability; secondly, it is the first confirmatory validation of the scale in Portuguese.     

The Recent Mortality Decline in Russia: Beginning of the Cardiovascular Revolution?

The health situation in Russia has often been characterized as a long‐running crisis. From the 1960s until the beginning of the 2000s, the declining life expectancy trend was substantially interrupted only twice: once in the mid‐1980s as a result of Gorbachev's anti‐alcohol campaign, and again at the end of the 1990s as a result of the “rebound” effect following the dramatic rise in mortality associated with the acute socioeconomic crisis. In both cases, the progress made proved to be short‐lived. A third mortality decline in Russia began in 2003 and is still ongoing. We investigate the components and driving forces of this new development, in particular the role played by cardiovascular diseases. Using cause‐specific mortality data, we identify the main features of the recent improvements and compare these features with those observed in selected European countries, specifically France, Poland, and Estonia. Our aim is to gauge whether the features of the improvements in these countries are similar to those of the recent advancements made in Russia. Although the recent improvements in Russia have features in common with initial stages of prior mortality declines in other countries and may support optimism about the future, a return to mortality stagnation cannot be ruled out.     

Negotiation and Defeasible Decision Making

In economically meaningful interactions negotiations are particularly important because they allow agents to improve their information about the environment and even to change accordingly their own characteristics. In each step of a negotiation an agent has to emit a message. This message conveys information about her preferences and endowments. Given that the information she uses to decide which message to emit comes from beliefs generated in previous stages of the negotiation, she has to cope with the uncertainty associated with them. The assessment of the states of the world also evolves during the negotiation. In this paper we analyze the intertwined dynamics of beliefs and decision, in order to determine conditions on the agents that allow them to reach agreements. The framework for decision making we consider here is based on defeasible evaluation of possibilities: an argument for a choice defeats another one if it is based on a computation that better uses all the available information.     

Mild Intellectual Disability Associated with a Progeny of Father-Daughter Incest: Genetic and Environmental Considerations

We report the case of a 34-year-old female resulting from a father-daughter sexual abuse and presenting a phenotype of mild intellectual disability with minor dysmorphic features. Karyotyping showed a normal 46, XX constitution. Array-based comparative genomic hybridization (array-CGH) revealed a heterozygote 320kb 6p22.3 microdeletion in the proband, encompassing only one known gene, and therefore unlikely to be the cause of the phenotype. However, the role of other genetic factors, such as a recessive condition, could not be ruled out as a putative cause for the phenotype. On the other hand, the role played by a heavily detrimental familial situation on the development and outcome, and possibly leading or contributing to a mild intellectual disability, should be taken into account.     

The Role of Early Maladaptive Schemas in the Appearance of Psychological Symptomatology in Adult Women Victims of Child Abuse

ABSTRACT

Child abuse affects people’s ways of thinking, feeling, and observing the world, resulting in dysfunctional beliefs and maladaptive schemas. Thus, consequences of child abuse may persist during adulthood. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the psychological consequences (anxiety, phobic anxiety, depression, and hopelessness) of different types of maltreatment (physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and physical and emotional neglect) and to study the role of early maladaptive schemas in the onset of symptomatology in adult female victims of child abuse. The sample consisted of 75 women referred by associations for treatment of abuse and maltreatment in childhood. Sexual abuse was the type of maltreatment that was most strongly related to most dysfunctional symptomatology, followed by emotional abuse and physical abuse, whereas physical neglect was the least related. Also, early maladaptive schemas were found to correlate with child abuse and dysfunctional symptomatology. Finally, early maladaptive schemas mediated the relationship between sexual abuse and dysfunctional symptomatology when the effect of other types of abuse was controlled. These results may provide important guidance for clinical intervention.     

Utilizing Social Work Skills to Enhance Entrepreneurship Training for Women: A Ghanaian Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article describes a women's entrepreneurship exchange program that was designed and facilitated with the cooperation of various governmental and nongovernmental entities in Ghana for Ghanaian women. The article briefly reviews the entrepreneurship development literature from an international perspective and discusses the Entrepreneurship Program as a targeted approach for empowering and sustaining women's economic situation in Ghana. Emphasis is placed on understanding the impact of cultural and social networks and the women's ability to succeed as entrepreneurs through the use of social work skills.     

Assessing the use of back translation: the shortcomings of back translation as a quality testing method

Abstract

Back translation – the ‘re-translation’ of a translated questionnaire back into the original language and the subsequent comparison of the original version and the back translation – is a controversial assessment method for questionnaire translations. Recently, cross-cultural survey methodologists have followed the call for more empirical research on this method. This article adds to the small body of research by drawing on the back translation documentation from the 2012 European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS). First, results from the official EQLS back translation step are contrasted with results when additional persons perform the same comparison step between back translation and original. We note inconsistency in the detection of presumed flaws. Second, the back translation outcome is contrasted with additional native speaker checks of the actual translation. While back translation can uncover problems, it causes quite a number of false alarms, and even more importantly, many problems remain hidden.