The Middle‐class in the German Welfare State: Beneficial Involvement at Stake?

The working‐class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle‐classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle‐class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle‐class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life‐course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle‐class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long‐term unemployed) the ‘inducement’ of – or assistance for – individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of ‘individual responsibility’ seems to find some resonance among the middle‐class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility.     

Social energy and racial segregation in the university context

Objectives: Universities often promote their diversity as a selling point, but are students of different races at these universities integrated socially? Using theories on social energy, I examine racial segregation among university students. Methods: Quantitative data were collected on student residence patterns and social groupings formed at lunch tables at a case study university. In addition, interviews were conducted with 25 students. Results: Students are substantially more segregated than chance predicts. Blacks and Hispanics are particularly segregated. Interviews reveal that these students spend large amounts of social energy coping with prejudice and discrimination as well as functioning in a student culture they find unwelcoming and foreign. Conclusions: Social energy drains on minority students from discrimination and an unwelcoming campus culture reduce energy left for interracial interaction, making these racial groups more segregated. The study highlights the need for understanding segregation as a function of the interaction of out-group preferences, in-group preferences, and the larger social context.     

Researchers experience of misconduct in research in Malaysian higher education institutions

This article offers a qualitative analysis of research misconduct witnessed by researchers during their careers, either by research students or fellow researchers, when conducting or supervising research in their respective departments. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants from various research backgrounds and with a range of research experience, from selected universities in Malaysia. Our study found that misbehavior such as manipulating research data, misrepresentation of research outcomes, plagiarism, authorship disputes, breaching of research protocols, and unethical research management was witnessed by participants among junior and senior researchers, albeit for different reasons. This indicates that despite the steps taken by the institutions to monitor research misconduct, it still occurs in the research community in Malaysian institution of higher education. Therefore, it is important to admit that misconduct still occurs and to create awareness and knowledge of it, particularly among the younger generation of researchers. The study concludes that it is better for researchers to be aware of the behaviors that are considered misconduct as well as the factors that contribute to misconduct to solve this problem.     

“Build a wall”. “Tax a shed”. “Fix a debt limit”. The constructive and destructive potential of populist anti-statism and “naïve” statism

ABSTRACT

Populist surges, movements and parties often centre around radically simplifying policy proposals, sometimes anti-statist in intent (e.g. fix a limit to state borrowing in cash terms), and at other times pushing naïve statist solutions (e.g. build a giant wall to keep out migrants; or tax companies' activities in a given shed, not their profits). Most liberal political science condemns the crudity and often unrestrained vigour of populist “solutions”. But on occasion, they can have value in counteracting the increasing complexities that elites often build into public policies. Two case studies show populist pressure for simplification working effectively in one instance – the “tax shaming” campaign against multinationals avoiding corporation taxes; and engendering only disorder in another instance – the effort to enforce national debt limits in nominal terms in the USA.     

Determining Sample Size Using Fast and Slow Thinking

ABSTRACT

Using SPSS's bootstrapping procedures, this article demonstrates an approach to determining sample size that combines fast (heuristics or rules-of-thumb) and slow (statistical power analysis) thinking to balance statistical power, precision, and practicality. Sample size is determined for six commonly used statistical procedures: independent groups t-test, one-way ANOVA, one-way MANOVA, Pearson's r correlation, linear regression, and logistic regression. Overall, findings suggest that both approaches may under or over-estimate sample size. Both approaches yielded similar parameter and confidence interval estimates, but varied, sometimes by a factor of two, in their sample size requirements. It is hoped that this study's procedure and results will provide beginning reference points for sample size determination, and encourage researchers continue to search for resolutions for often difficult sample-size decisions.     

Sex after divorce: older adult women’s reflections

People who divorce experience a number of negative impacts, and yet divorce also offers opportunities for growth and transformation. This qualitative study of older adult women offers the possibility that divorce may be sexually empowering, especially for women, based on in-depth interviewing of women who had gone through one or more divorces. Detailed examples of the experiences of fourteen women with divorce and sexual expression are offered, focusing on in which situations divorce might be empowering and how it could contribute to sexual exploration and satisfaction. Overall, for the fourteen women in the study who had experienced divorce, the quality of sex in the marriage impacted the quality of sexual expression after the divorce. Also, these findings supported the idea of transformational learning through divorce, and expand divorce-stress-adjustment and transformational learning perspectives to apply more specifically to sexual expression. Understanding possible impacts of divorce over the lifespan, including strengths-based aspects, is important for social workers as the population they serve ages.     

Depressive symptoms and help‐seeking behaviors among Korean Americans

Cheung M, Leung P, Cheung A. Depressive symptoms and help‐seeking behaviors among Korean Americans Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 421–429 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Korean Americans represent the fifth largest group of Asian Americans in the USA. This exploratory survey of 205 Korean Americans (92.2 percent foreign born) found that those with depressive symptoms tend to be younger, have lower incomes, and are more concerned about their basic needs, community/social needs, family relationship issues, and healthcare issues than those without depressive symptoms. Income, healthcare concerns, and anxiety were significant predictors of depression. The likelihood of having depressive symptoms among Korean Americans with anxiety was 240 times higher than among those without anxiety, but acculturation was not a significant contributing factor. Most respondents tended to seek advice about their mental health problems from physicians and non‐mental health professionals (friends and religious healers). Implications for social work education, research, practice, and policy are discussed in relation to the need to use evidence‐based practice data to plan culturally relevant services for ethnic minorities.     

The Civilizing Process of Trust: Developing Quality Mechanisms which are Local,Professional‐led and thus Legitimate

‘Quality’ and ‘performance’ have become defining concepts for policymakers and health‐care systems alike. Yet whilst these principles are of fundamental importance, their practical implementation and assurance are far from straightforward. This commentary analyses the difficulties faced in enhancing quality and performance in the English NHS. Many recent initiatives have been driven through incentives and external auditing of the professionals providing health care on the frontline. Drawing on recent literature and research findings, we argue that this checking‐based ‘audit culture’ is fundamentally flawed in driving quality and performance. Many targets and measures are too crude to reflect important aspects affecting patient outcomes and therefore these frameworks lack legitimacy amongst professionals. An alternative, trust‐based model is proposed – one more capable of acknowledging the meaning, complexity and specificities inherent to professional work. Quality mechanisms developed locally by professionals are able to produce the legitimacy crucial for their effectiveness. It is argued that the normative obligation of approaches based on conditional trust is a more compelling incentive towards good practice than targets and sanctions. This governance by ‘the social’ is able to motivate a more holistically enlightened and consistent reflexivity towards practice, though it is only able to flourish in the absence of purposive‐rational systems.     

Partitioning large signed two-mode networks: Problems and prospects

While a substantial amount of attention within social network analysis (SNA) has been given to the study of one-mode networks, there is an increasing consideration of two-mode networks. Recent research on signed networks resulted in the relaxed structural balance (RSB) approach and its subsequent extension to signed two-mode networks involving social actors and social objects. We extend this approach to large signed two-mode networks, and address the methodological issues that arise. We develop tools to partition these types of networks and compare them with other approaches using a recently collected dataset of United Nations General Assembly roll call votes. Although our primary purpose is methodological, we take the first step towards bridging Heider's structural balance theory with recent theorizing in international relations on soft balancing of power processes.