The Impact of Flexible Working Arrangements on Work–life Conflict and Work Pressure in Ireland

Recent rapid economic growth in Ireland has been accompanied by a strong surge in the number of women in employment, and this has led to a significant increase in the proportion of dual‐earner families. These changes have brought the issue of reconciliation between work and care commitments to the fore. Flexible working arrangements in firms have been identified as one important means of balancing work and other commitments. In this article we investigate the relationship between four flexible working arrangements; flexitime, part‐time hours, working from home and job sharing, and two key employee outcomes; work pressure and work–life conflict, using data from the first national survey of employees in Ireland in 2003. Our results show that while part‐time work and flexitime tend to reduce work pressure and work–life conflict, working from home is associated with greater levels of both work pressure and work–life conflict. We conclude that it is important to distinguish between flexible working arrangements to discover their potential for reducing work pressure and work–life conflict.     

The Generalized Conditional Autoregressive Wishart Model for Multivariate Realized Volatility

It is well known that in finance variances and covariances of asset returns move together over time. Recently, much interest has been aroused by an approach involving the use of the realized covariance (RCOV) matrix constructed from high-frequency returns as the ex-post realization of the covariance matrix of low-frequency returns. For the analysis of dynamics of RCOV matrices, we propose the generalized conditional autoregressive Wishart (GCAW) model. Both the noncentrality matrix and scale matrix of the Wishart distribution are driven by the lagged values of RCOV matrices, and represent two different sources of dynamics, respectively. The GCAW is a generalization of the existing models, and accounts for symmetry and positive definiteness of RCOV matrices without imposing any parametric restriction. Some important properties such as conditional moments, unconditional moments, and stationarity are discussed. Empirical examples including sequences of daily RCOV matrices from the New York Stock Exchange illustrate that our model outperforms the existing models in terms of model fitting and forecasting.     

The complexities of cultural support planning for Indigenous children in and leaving out‐of‐home care: the views of service providers in Victoria,Australia

Indigenous children and young people are over‐represented at all stages of the Australian child protection system. Policy and legislative initiatives exist in the state of Victoria, Australia aiming to support the connection between Indigenous children and young people in state care and their culture and community. This exploratory research involved focus group consultations with seven child and family welfare agencies to investigate the impacts, barriers, benefits and limitations of cultural support planning for Indigenous young people in, and leaving care in, Victoria. Findings indicated that cultural planning was of value when it could be completed. However, various shortcomings of current systems were identified including limited resourcing of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations to generate plans and provide direct and secondary consultation services to implement plans, difficulty gathering information for plans and some Indigenous young people expressing disinterest in connecting to their culture and community. Complexities in the relationships between the Indigenous and non‐Indigenous agencies that aimed to support Indigenous young people in care were also acknowledged. Participants identified a number of strategies to improve outcomes, such as facilitating better relationships between agencies, promoting opportunities for ongoing cultural training for staff in mainstream agencies and improving the resourcing of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations to deliver planning and to support cultural connections.     

The Diffusion of Tolerance: Birth Cohort Changes in the Effects of Education and Income on Political Tolerance

Political tolerance—the willingness to extend civil liberties to traditionally stigmatized groups—is pivotal to the functioning of democracy and the well‐being of members of stigmatized groups. Although political tolerance has traditionally been more common among American elites, we argue that as tolerance has increased, it has also diffused to less educated and less affluent segments of the population. The relative stability of political attitudes over the life course and the socialization of more recent birth cohorts in contexts of increased tolerance suggest that this diffusion of tolerance occurs across birth cohorts rather than time periods. Using age‐period‐cohort models and more than three and a half decades of repeated cross‐sectional survey data, we find persistent and robust across‐cohort declines in the importance of both income and higher education in determining levels of political tolerance. Declines in the effects of socioeconomic status are evident with tolerance toward all five out‐groups in the analysis—anti‐religionists, gays and lesbians, communists, militarists, and racists—but to varying degrees. These findings fit with a model of changes in public opinion, particularly views of civil and political rights, through processes of cultural diffusion and cohort replacement.     

Aging and sexual health: getting to the problem

Erectile dysfunction (ED) is one of the most common disorders in male and is often associated with other age-related comorbidities. The aging process affects the structural organization and function of penile erectile components such as smooth muscle cell and vascular architecture. These modifications affect penile hemodynamics by impairing cavernosal smooth muscle cell relaxation, reducing penile elasticity, compliance and promoting fibrosis. This review aims to identify the mechanisms of ED in the penile aging process in experimental and clinical data. It also highlights areas that are in need of more research. The search strategies yielded total records screened from PubMed. Clarification of the molecular mechanisms that accompanies corpus cavernosum aging and aging-associated ED will aid new perspectives in the development of novel mechanism-based therapeutic approaches. Age is not a limiting factor for ED medical management, and it is never too late to treat. Hypogonadism should be managed regardless of age, and synergistic effects have been found during testosterone (T) replacement therapy when used along with oral phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitors. Therefore, the clinical management of ED related to aging can be done by therapeutic interventions that include PDE-5 inhibitors, and other pharmacological treatments.     

A Comparison of Correlation Structure Selection Penalties for Generalized Estimating Equations

Correlated data are commonly analyzed using models constructed using population-averaged generalized estimating equations (GEEs). The specification of a population-averaged GEE model includes selection of a structure describing the correlation of repeated measures. Accurate specification of this structure can improve efficiency, whereas the finite-sample estimation of nuisance correlation parameters can inflate the variances of regression parameter estimates. Therefore, correlation structure selection criteria should penalize, or account for, correlation parameter estimation. In this article, we compare recently proposed penalties in terms of their impacts on correlation structure selection and regression parameter estimation, and give practical considerations for data analysts. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Trajectories of Unintended Fertility

Having an unintended birth is strongly associated with the likelihood of having later unintended births. We use detailed longitudinal data from the Add Health Study (N = 8300) to investigate whether a host of measured sociodemographic, personality, and psychosocial characteristics select women into this “trajectory” of unintended childbearing. While some measured characteristics and aspects of the unfolding life course are related to unintended childbearing, explicitly modeling these effects does not greatly attenuate the association of an unintended birth with a subsequent one. Next, we statistically control for unmeasured time-invariant covariates that affect all birth intervals, and again find that the association of an unintended birth with subsequent ones remains strong. This persistent, strong association may be the direct result of experiencing an earlier unintended birth. We propose several mechanisms that might explain this strong association.     

Cultural Competence and Social Work Education: Moving Toward Assessment of Practice Behaviors

Social work educators are responsible for ensuring that future practitioners are culturally competent and have the ability to work effectively with people from different backgrounds. The purpose of this article is to address the current limitations in measuring cultural competence and to report the results of a qualitative study examining stakeholders’ conceptualizations of the definition, educational process, and evaluation of cultural competence in social work education. Findings support long-standing assumptions in the literature regarding the need for social workers to develop certain knowledge and attitudes as prerequisites of becoming culturally competent, and emphasize the need for further exploration of the way social workers define cultural competence, translate it into discrete practice behaviors, and assess how students demonstrate these behaviors.     

Living with the parents: the purpose of young graduates’ return to the parental home in England

Young graduates in England often return to the parental home after a period of living away during their university studies. Little is known, however, about why they return and how coresidence with parents fits within a life trajectory. This paper reports upon an in-depth cross-sectional qualitative study of young graduates’ coresidence with their parents. It identifies a five-part typology of the purpose of coresidence as perceived by the graduates: a base camp for exploration before settling into adulthood; a launch pad for careers; a savings bank, in particular for future property purchases; a refuge for respite and reflection; and a preferred residence, whether on account of comfort, cultural practice or to support parents. The paper further explores how far these purposes were associated in young adults’ accounts with social structures, individual agency or some combination of these. It concludes that the default understanding of graduates’ return and coresidence as a residual function when other options fail is insufficient. Such a generalisation obscures the different purposes which the return can enable; it overplays some notion of a broken biography rather than the positive contribution of coresidence to graduates’ trajectories towards adulthood and to their life experiences.