The Influence of Gender Equality on Volunteering Among European Senior Citizens

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This research analyzes how gender equality influences the participation of European senior citizens in a range of...     

The Volunteer Satisfaction Index: A Validation Study in the Cultural Context of the Two European Titles—Youth 2019 and Culture 2021, Novi Sad,Serbia

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Conducting a study on a sample of 303 participants from the Novi Sad Voluntary Service we set out to validate the...     

University Students’ Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Parenting and Gay and Lesbian Rights in Portugal

The purpose of this study was to explore university students’ attitudes toward same-sex parenting and toward gay and lesbian rights. A total of 292 participants, aged between 18 and 27 (M = 21) responded to a questionnaire measuring attitudes toward parenting by gay men and lesbians, gay and lesbian rights, and beliefs about the etiology of homosexuality. Results revealed that the majority of students were against gay and lesbian parenting, gay and lesbian equal rights, and believed that homosexuality has a social/environmental basis. It was found that sexual prejudice is highly prevalent in Portuguese university students, and implications of these findings are discussed.     

Welfare State Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (1970s–2000s): Multidimensional Welfare Index,Its Methodology and Results

There is an ongoing debate between focalization and universalization on welfare policies as the best way to develop the welfare state in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, there is a need to develop a measure that exhibits the multidimensional nature of the welfare state, instead of focusing on the social spending dimension. Segura-Ubiergo (The political economy of the welfare state in Latin America: globalization, democracy and development. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007) constructed a welfare effort index (WEI) to facilitate understand the relative degrees of welfare state development among Latin American countries. The WEI focuses mainly on social spending and ignores the other dimensions of welfare. Based on a comparative analysis of 17 Latin American countries and following the methodology of Segura-Ubiergo, a new index that aims at enriching the WEI was constructed. The new index is multidimensional in that it has eight indicators relating to three dimensions of welfare: social spending, coverage of welfare programs and outcome of welfare institutions. Principal component analysis was used for reducing the indicators into three indexes that represent three proposed dimensions of welfare. The combination of these three indexes gives the multidimensional welfare index. The results of the index account for more than 75 % of the data variance.     

Interpreting the Dynamics of Social Indicators: Methodological Issues Related to Absolute,Relative, and Time Differences

In contemporary society, a growing demand for the accessibility of social indicators can be observed. This requires increased attention to their construction to avoid misleading interpretations, which can be the result of inadequate knowledge, or can even be an intentional choice to imply a specific desired outcome. This paper addresses this issue by first summarizing research regarding the perception of numbers, statistical thinking, and numerical literacy. The focus is then narrowed to the comparison of social indicators observed for two units in a time perspective. Three simple and popular measures of dynamics—most frequently used when social change is analyzed and interpreted—are addressed: absolute difference, relative difference, and time distance. In a corresponding experiment, respondents evaluated the direction of change of a certain social indicator in time (i.e., whether the differences increase, decrease, or stagnate) for a hypothetical case where the three measures implied contradictory interpretations. Each experimental group was exposed to one of these measures. The results indicate that interpretations basically followed the specific measures that respondents were exposed to. This effect was particularly strong regarding absolute difference, followed by relative difference, while the effect of exposure to time distance was somewhat weaker. When only data or graphical presentation was given, respondents tended to interpret dynamics according to absolute differences. The results indicate that extreme methodological rigor is needed when presenting social indicators in time, and some guidelines are provided for this purpose.     

Ensuring Parliamentary Gender Equality Through a New Zipper Method: An Application to Finland

Gender equality constitutes a crucial objective for a successful societal development. Although research has found that the differences are shrinking, parliamentary composition is not gender balanced in most areas of the world. Henceforth, recent literature has undertaken important efforts aimed at developing different initiatives to promote parity in democratic parliaments, especially through the use of quota systems. Prior initiatives, although leading to an improvement of gender parity, do not manage to ensure an optimal gender-egalitarian parliamentary composition. Thus, this paper presents a method to organize closed and blocked lists of candidates that guarantees the achievement of gender-balanced representation in parliamentary elections. Specifically, parity is sought globally, in each party and also in each electoral constituency. Furthermore, the method is applied to the elections held over the last two decades in Finland. Results reveal that parity in gender representation increases at global, party, and constituency levels throughout all the parliamentary elections in Finland, even approaching optimal numerical parity (i.e. 50 % for each gender) in most of the cases.     

The price of risk with incomplete knowledge on the utility function*

When a risk is exchanged, the exact value for the minimum price (positive or negative) that the purchaser (investor, or insurer) is willing to pay is given by the certainty equivalent wealth level, which in turn depends on his specific utility function. When this utility function is unknown, then only a sufficient condition on the price can ever be found. This paper provides methods for calculating such a sufficient condition, when only limited information on the utility function is known.     

On the Owen Set of Transportation Solutions

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of the Owen set of transportation games. In the characterization we use six properties including consistency (CONS2) and splitting and merging (SM) which are firstly proposed and defined for this setup in the present paper.     

Personality and Subjective Well-Being: What Hides Behind Global Analyses?

The relation between personality and subjective well-being (SWB) remains involved in a considerable ambiguity and the numerous studies conducted have neglected an approach at a more detailed level of analysis. This study explores the idea that neuroticism, extraversion and conscientiousness facets predict differentially each SWB component. A battery of self-report questionnaires was used to assess personality and SWB in 398 teachers of primary and high schools. Findings of a cross-sectional study showed that neuroticism, extraversion and conscientiousness facets contributed to significantly explain the variance in positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction. Moreover, these facets predicted differentially each of the three SWB components. At same time, this study corroborates two important premises: the specificity of facets as discrete traits and the independence of the three SWB components.     

El emplazamiento de la memoria colectiva: Crónica Psicosocial

Resumen

El presente trabajo estudia la influencia de la «discusión grupal» sobre los estados afectivos inducidos. Se esperaba que, después de inducir estados afectivos (positivo vs negativo vs neutro) mediante la visión de secuencias de películas, el contexto de discusión grupal (positivo vs negativo), acentuara o atenuara el efecto del método de inducción. Para ello, se utilizó un diseño experimental en el que participaron un total de 60 sujetos, y en el que se analizaron las respuestas de cada grupo experimental en una tarea de asociación libre de palabras. Nuestros resultados demuestran que el efecto del contexto grupal es más potente que el de la visión de películas cortas, originando un número significativamente mayor de palabras originales en el primer caso que en el segundo. Estos resultados son analizados a la luz de recientes teorías sobre cognición y afecto.