More Than a Feeling? An Empirical Analysis of the Dual-Continua Model on a National Sample of Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Identified Canadians

The goal of the study is to investigate whether positive mental health complements mental illness within a theoretically informed (the dual-continua model) and psychometrically tested (the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form) framework. National-level, population-based data from the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey on Mental Health (CCHS-MH) was used, with comparisons between sexual minority and heterosexual adults. Results show that gay, lesbian, and bisexual Canadians have substantially lower rates of positive mental health and are more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental illness, with the disparities between health and illness being the most pronounced among lesbians and bisexual females. Results show considerable support for the dual-continua model, which posits that the absence of health does not automatically translate into the presence of illness, and vice versa. Suggestions are made for practitioners and researchers toward the use of the dual-continua model as a surveillance tool, especially among sexual minority individuals.     

Australian migration propensities by visa class: an analysis of linked administrative data

Journal of Population Research - Following a number of difficulties measuring net overseas migration (NOM), since 2006 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has defined a usual resident of...     

Empowering manufacturing personnel through functional understanding

A growing interest in knowledge management and standardisation, has increasingly led organisations to implement employee training programs. For the manufacturing workforce, however, these remain limited to informal ‘On-the-Job’ approaches, administered by peer colleagues – particularly in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) where economic, educational, cognitive and cultural constraints are often deeply embedded. This paper proposes a methodology for training the manufacturing workforce on the functions of products, and presents a case study conducted in a UK-based manufacturing SME – aiming to verify our two research hypotheses: a) Functional Analysis Diagrams of the company’s products and parts would assist in knowledge assimilation; and, b) knowledge assimilation has a positive effect on work quality and productivity levels. By applying statistical inference methods on long-term quantitative data and survey results, we confirmed substantial improvements in work quality (63%) and increased productivity (67%), supporting our hypotheses and suggesting that the proposed methodology can be a promising solution for the industry.     

Structural Validation and Multiple Group Assessment of the Short Internalized Homonegativity Scale in Homosexual and Bisexual Men in 38 European Countries: Results From the European MSM Internet Survey

Internalized homonegativity (IH) is the internalization of negative attitudes and assumptions about homosexual people by homosexual people themselves. To measure IH, Smolenski, Diamond, Ross, and Rosser (2010) and Ross, Rosser, and Smolenski (2010) revised the Reactions to Homosexuality Scale (RHS) to develop the Short Internalized Homonegativity Scale (SIHS) with eight items. Using the European Men Who Have Sex With Men Internet Survey (EMIS) data, with an analytic sample of 130,718 gay and bisexual men in 38 European countries, we confirmed the validity of the SIHS scale in both training and validation data, in strata of Ross, Berg, et al.’s (2013) three “homosexual discrimination” country clusters, of age, and of education level. However, the performance was less adequate in comparison of gay versus bisexually identified individuals. The latent SIHS structure contains only minor variations across these three strata. The seven-item scale performed as well as the eight-item scale. The SIHS is a promising candidate for standard IH measures, which is invariant across cultural, age, and educational strata.     

Automatic Sex-Liking and Sex-Failure Associations in Men With Sexual Dysfunction

Current models of sexual functioning imply an important role for both automatic and controlled appraisals. Accordingly, it can be hypothesized that erectile dysfunction may be due to the automatic activation of negative appraisals at the prospect of sexual intercourse. However, previous research showed that men with sexual dysfunction exhibited relatively strong automatic sex-positive instead of sex-negative associations. This study tested the robustness of this unexpected finding and, additionally, examined the hypothesis that perhaps more specific sex-failure versus sex-success associations are relevant in explaining sexual dysfunction and distress. Male urological patients (N = 70), varying in level of sexual functioning and distress, performed two Single-Target Implicit Association Tests (ST-IATs) to assess automatic associations of visual erotic stimuli with attributes representing affective valence (“liking”; positive versus negative) and sexual success versus sexual failure. Consistent with the earlier findings, the lower the scores on sexual functioning, the stronger the automatic sex-positive associations. This association was independent of explicit associations and most prominent in the younger age group. Automatic sex-positive and sex-failure associations showed independent relationships with sexual distress. The relationship between sexual distress and sex-failure associations is consistent with the view that automatic associations with failure may contribute to sexual distress.     

‘Widening cross-disciplinary research for mental health’: what is missing from the Research Councils UK mental health agenda?

This current issues article is a brief critical examination of the recent Research Councils UK agenda and call for cross-disciplinary research in mental health. Our argument is based on the fact that patient and public involvement (PPI) is the only involvement and influencing strategy for service users and survivors in the agenda. Service user and survivor research as a discipline in itself remains unacknowledged. We conclude that service user and survivor research is distinct and is different to PPI, and should be recognised in any mental health research agenda.     

Barriers to equality: why British fathers do not use parental leave

In 2011, the UK passed the Additional Paternity Leave (APL) policy, but less than 1% of eligible fathers took APL in its first year. This study investigates reasons for nonuse of APL. We find four main reasons: financial costs, gendered expectations, perceived workplace resistance, and policy restrictions. First, most fathers emphasized the role of finances in their leave decisions, sometimes taking annual leave for their second week because statutory pay was not enough. Second, both mothers and fathers largely assumed that mothers would take longer maternity leave due to gender differences in earnings and a greater emphasis on maternal over paternal bonding. Third, fathers felt that their workplaces would not be fully supportive of longer leave. Fourth, APL provides low pay and little flexibility. Gender plays a prominent role in each of the four themes. We discuss implications for Shared Parental Leave (SPL), which recently went into effect. Based on our findings, SPL is unlikely to be effective.     

Survey mode effects on measured income inequality

We study the effect of interview modes on estimates of economic inequality which are based on survey data. We exploit variation in interview modes in the Austrian EU-SILC panel, where between 2007 and 2008 the interview mode was switched from personal interviews to telephone interviews for some but not all participants. We combine methods from the program evaluation literature with methods from the distributional decomposition literature to obtain causal estimates of the effect of interview mode on estimated inequality. We find that the interview mode has a large effect on estimated inequality, where telephone interviews lead to a larger downward bias. The effect of the mode is much smaller for robust inequality measures such as interquantile ranges, as these are not sensitive to the tails of the distribution. The magnitude of effects we find are of a similar order as the differences in many international and intertemporal comparisons of inequality.