Adverse psychosocial working conditions and subjective health in freelance media workers

In recent years there has been a steady growth of non-standard work contracts in advanced societies. These contracts are characterized by increased flexibility of work arrangements and increased job instability, which holds particularly true for the media industry. This pilot study analyses associations of work stress with subjective health in a group of German freelancers (N = 290) working in the media industry. The measurement of work stress is based on the effort-reward imbalance model. Results of logistic regression analyses indicate significant effects of high effort in combination with low reward (money, esteem, promotion prospects, job security) on subjective health in men and women, with the effects being higher in men. Moreover, among men a critical pattern of coping with work stress enhanced the reported effect. In conclusion, the preliminary evidence from this study indicates an elevated risk of poor subjective health among freelance workers who are exposed to adverse psychosocial work conditions.     

Migration into big cities and small towns — an uneven process with limited need for multiculturalism

The following paper is based on preliminary research on the consequences of recent migration in Germany for the different administrative levels and especially for local governments. In the same way as there is no uniform immigration process on the one side, there is no single society or a single nation state in the sense of single actors on the other side who could relate to immigration as an integrated whole. Migration itself consists of heterogeneous migration strands moving on different lines into different cities and towns. And local governments are part of an internally highly differentiated political system. Modern welfare state organizations handle migration in the logic of their own processing. In order to understand the consequences of migration and the meaning of multiculturalism on the local level further research will have to take into account the position of local governments in this differentiated system.     

Elterliche Arbeitslosigkeitsdynamiken und Bildungsverläufe vom Ende der Grundschulzeit bis zum jungen Erwachsenenalter

In the present study, we examine the influence of parental unemployment on the educational outcomes of children in Germany. We consider the educational pathways from the transition to secondary school until early adulthood at age 23. In particular, we focus on the question whether children of unemployed parents are less likely to enroll in tertiary education. In addition, we look at enrolment into educational tracks at the beginning and the end of secondary school. We use data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We address the problem of social selectivity into unemployment by means of a comprehensive control variable approach within the framework of random effects-models. In addition, we estimate fixed effects-models using siblings’ information. As a result, it is evident that a significant influence of unemployment on educational outcomes can be observed both with comprehensive control of status characteristics as well as in sibling models. However, this does not apply to all educational outcomes and not to all forms of unemployment.     

Bayes estimates in multivariate semiparametric linear models

Bayes estimates are derived in multivariate linear models with unknown distribution. The prior distribution is defined using a Dirichlet prior for the unknown error distribution and a normal-Wishart distribution for the parameters. The posterior distribution is determined and explicit expressions are given in the special cases of location-scale and two-sample models. The calculation of self-informative limits of Bayes estimates yields standard estimates.     

On spatiotemporal prediction for on-line monitoring data

Spatiotemporal prediction is of interest in many areas of applied statistics, especially in environmental monitoring with on-line data information. At first, this article reviews the approaches for spatiotemporal modeling in the context of stochastic processes and then introduces the new class of spatiotemporal dynamic linear models. Further, the methods for linear spatial data analysis, universal kriging and trend surface prediction, are related to the method of spatial linear Bayesian analysis. The Kalman filter is the preferred method for temporal linear Bayesian inferences. By combining the Kalman filter recursions with the trend surface predictor and universal kriging predictor, the prior and posterior spatiotemporal predictors for the observational process are derived, which form the main result of this article. The problem of spatiotemporal linear prediction in the case of unknown first and second order moments is treated as well.