The Longitudinal Relationships Between Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction at School and School-Related Subjective Well-Being in Adolescents

Situated within a positive psychology perspective, this study aimed at examining the nature and directionality of longitudinal relationships between basic psychological needs satisfaction at school and adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being. A total of 576 students (40.5 male and 36.8 % students in junior high school) completed measures of adolescent students’ basic psychological needs at school and school-related subjective well-being at two time points, 6 weeks apart. Cross-lagged structural equation modeling showed significant bidirectional longitudinal relationships between autonomy, relatedness, and competence needs satisfaction and school satisfaction. Furthermore, significant bidirectional relationships were observed between competence need satisfaction and positive affect in school. The findings provided important evidence of the roles of adolescents’ different types of needs satisfaction, experienced specifically during school, in adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being. The findings also helped extend the positive psychology perspective to the relatively neglected context of education.     

Global Health Volunteering; Understanding Organizational Goals

This paper examines the goals of organizations that sponsor short-term volunteer trips in global health, whether they be NGO’s, faith-based, educational, or corporate organizations. Results from a U.S.-based national survey of 177 such organizations and 27 interviews with trip organizers suggest that organizations often sponsor volunteer trips to achieve goals that are quite different from the improvement of health outcomes in poor countries. While providing health services is often cited as the most important goal, volunteer activity is also considered important in enhancing the organizations’ reputation, recruitment and retention, and financial well-being. The prominence of other goals has the potential for diverting resources and focus from what is presumably the primary purpose of serving host communities in the most effective manner possible.     

Beyond the urban stream syndrome: organic matter budget for diagnostics and restoration of an impaired urban river

In response to water quality standard violations linked to excessive organic matter (OM) and a lack of sampling data informing the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), an organic matter budget was created to quantify and identify sources of OM in the lower Jordan River (Salt Lake City, UT). By sampling dissolved, fine and coarse particulate OM, as well as measuring ecosystem metabolism at seven different sites, the researchers aimed to identify the origin of excess OM, and understand pathways by which different size classes of the OM pool are generated. The dissolved fraction (DOM; 94 %) was found to be the dominant form of OM transported within the river with fine particulate organic matter (FPOM; 6 %) the second most abundant, and coarse particulate organic matter (CPOM; 1 %) transport relatively insignificant in the overall OM budget. Primary production exceeded respiratory losses in the upper river, and this, along with OM inputs from two tributaries (where water reclamation facilities discharge into the river) delivered excess OM to the impaired lower reaches. Increasing stream metabolism index (SMI) with distance downstream (>1 in the lower river) further demonstrated that transport of excessive organic matter into the lower river was from upstream sources and not due to lateral inputs. This simple approach to characterizing the organic matter budget as it relates to water quality in the Jordan River was effective and could serve as a model for future studies attempting to quantify and identify sources of OM in urban ecosystems.     

Tukey’s M-estimator of the Poisson parameter with a special focus on small means

We treat robust M-estimators for independent and identically distributed Poisson data. We introduce modified Tukey M-estimators with bias correction and compare them to M-estimators based on the Huber function as well as to weighted likelihood and other estimators by simulation in case of clean data and data with outliers. In particular, we investigate the problem of combining robustness and high efficiencies at small Poisson means caused by the strong asymmetry of such Poisson distributions and propose a further estimator based on adaptive trimming. The advantages of the constructed estimators are illustrated by an application to smoothing count data with a time varying mean and level shifts.     

Adaption agiler Prinzipien für den Hochschulkontext am Beispiel des Universitätskollegs der Universität Hamburg

This report on practice discusses the pertinence of agile principles on the basis of the case “Universitätskolleg”, a central organisational unit of Universität Hamburg to promote the quality of studies and teaching. It describes previous experience with the framework scrum and the method Lean Kanban in mind. Odds and challenges of agile principles in university context are described and reflected and next steps are named.     

Action,Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.     

The German East-West Mortality Difference: Two Crossovers Driven by Smoking

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, mortality was considerably higher in the former East Germany than in West Germany. The gap narrowed rapidly after German reunification. The convergence was particularly strong for women, to the point that Eastern women aged 50–69 now have lower mortality despite lower incomes and worse overall living conditions. Prior research has shown that lower smoking rates among East German female cohorts born in the 1940s and 1950s were a major contributor to this crossover. However, after 1990, smoking behavior changed dramatically, with higher smoking intensity observed among women in the eastern part of Germany. We forecast the impact of this changing smoking behavior on East-West mortality differences and find that the higher smoking rates among younger East German cohorts will reverse their contemporary mortality advantage. Mortality forecasting methods that do not account for smoking would, perhaps misleadingly, forecast a growing mortality advantage for East German women. Experience from other countries shows that smoking can be effectively reduced by strict anti-smoking policies. Instead, East Germany is becoming an example warning of the consequences of weakening anti-smoking policies and changing behavioral norms.     

Non-Heterosexuality,Relationships, and Young Women’s Contraceptive Behavior

Non-heterosexual young women have a higher rate of unintended pregnancy than their heterosexual peers, but their fertility behaviors are understudied. We use longitudinal data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life study to investigate mechanisms contributing to non-heterosexual women’s higher pregnancy risk. These data include weekly reports of relationships, sex, and contraceptive use over 30 months. We compare the relationships and fertility behaviors of three groups: exclusively heterosexual (consistent heterosexual behavior, identity, and attraction); mostly heterosexual (heterosexual identity with same-sex behavior and/or same-sex attraction); and LGBTQ (any non-heterosexual identity). We find that mostly heterosexual and LGBTQ women behave differently from exclusively heterosexual women in ways likely to elevate their risk of unintended pregnancy: more distinct partners during the study period, more sexual intercourse with men, less frequent contraceptive use, less use of a dual method (condom plus hormonal method), and more gaps in contraceptive coverage. Mostly heterosexual women resemble LGBTQ women in their contraceptive behavior but have significantly more intercourse with men, which may increase their pregnancy risk relative to both LGBTQ and exclusively heterosexual women. We conclude by considering implications for LGBTQ health and the measurement of sexual minority populations.     

The preeminent sacred symbol: Theorizing image of God outcomes

Images of God are the most consequential religious beliefs known to social science. Although sociologists have identified a wide and diverse range of outcomes of imagining different versions of God, more work is needed to show how these outcomes fit together within a multistep theoretical framework. To lay groundwork for such a theory, the present paper (a) briefly summarizes major theoretical perspectives on sources and outcomes of images of God, from psychology, social psychology, and sociology; (b) reviews a wide range of studies that identify specific outcomes of different images of God; and (c) recommends a new theoretical direction based on (a) and (b). Although this new direction will need to be developed in substantially greater detail in another context, the starting point for such work, suggested here, is that images of God function as humans' preeminent sacred symbols. This insight helps bridge an unnecessary chasm between Durkheim's theory of ritual and Stark's theory of gods.