Sexual risk behaviors among youth in the child welfare system

This study uses data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) to provide estimates of sexual risk behaviors for 877 youth, age 11–14 at baseline, in the child welfare system. It examines the association between baseline psychosocial risk and protective factors on engagement in sexual risk behaviors after 36 months. It further compares rates of sexual risk behaviors between youth placed in out-of-home care and those who remained with their biological family. Key findings include a high rate of pregnancy, a high percentage of youth who initiated sexual activity at or before age 13 as well as a limited role of protective factors in moderating sexual risk behaviors. A history of placement into out-of-home care is not significantly associated with greater engagement in sexual risk behaviors. Implications for intervention development and child welfare policy for this population are discussed.     

Does gender matter? Policies,norms and the gender gap in work-to-home and home-to-work conflict across Europe

This article examines gender differences in work-to-home conflict (WHC) and home-to-work conflict (HWC) in 10 European countries and considers to what extent such differences can be linked to the institutional/societal context. This study combines the conventional demand-resource approach and an institutional framework on work–family reconciliation policies and gender norms by using data from the European Social Survey. The analyses reveal that work and home demands affect men's and women's perceived conflict somewhat differently, and that the two conflict dimensions are gender asymmetrical and linked to patterns that result from men's and women's traditional home and work spheres. This cross-country comparative analysis shows greater gender gap in perceived conflict in countries with weaker policy support for work–family reconciliation and more traditional gender norms suggesting that individuals' perceptions of WHC and HWC are institutionally embedded.     

Personal resilience and identity capital among young people leaving care: enhancing identity formation and life chances through involvement in volunteering and social action

This study explored identity capital and personal resilience among care leavers and young people in care engaging in social activities through volunteering. Care leavers and young people in care are disadvantaged developmentally by lack of identity resources and an accelerated transition to independence. This study analysed material from semi-structured interviews to explore the Identity Capital Model and theories of individualisation, agentic identity development and resilience in explaining the identity resources of young people transitioning out of care. The analysis identified links between the exploration opportunities of volunteering with the development of agentic individualisation and enhanced identity capital. The findings indicate that developmental processes may be enhanced through supported and personalised volunteering opportunities to aid vulnerable young people transitioning out of care. Young people leaving care can make substantial gains particularly in social capital, personal resilience and identity capital. This study indicates that volunteering opportunities for this group of vulnerable young people may assist in compensating for the lack of resources often experienced by care leavers when transitioning to adulthood.     

Universal Access to Affordable Housing? Interrogating an Elusive Development Goal

Abstract

Universal access to safe and secure housing has long been a central concern of the international development community. Since 2001, this aspiration has taken the form of global benchmarking embodied in the UN Millennium Development Goal 7–11 and its successor the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Despite these targets, hundreds of millions of households continue to be excluded from this basic human right. How might we understand the politics driving the disjuncture between rhetoric and reality? By historically examining the core policy documents, it is suggested that the self-actualising discourse of neoliberalism—in which the housing goals are framed—work to normalise a reality in which the commodification of basic survival needs and individualised self-help are seen as the only viable alternatives in realising decent shelter for all. Moreover, the construction and reconstruction of neoliberalism over the past 15 years has resulted in the increasingly explicit and central role of corporations in delivering housing justice.     

Was ist hier los?

In our prior article in this issue, we establish that although they are related, organizational and group dynamics are in fact very different. In this second article, we go on to discuss some of the challenges that this poses for consultants. We describe the interplay of factors affecting the development of the dynamics within an organization and explore approaches to acquiring practical knowledge about an organization’s dynamics. Finally, we ask how useful group dynamics skills are for providing consultancy services within and to organizations and consider where and how specific organizational dynamics skills can be acquired.     

Mediated business: living the organizational surroundings – introduction

ABSTRACT

This special section builds upon Deirdre Boden’s work on the constitutive nature of talk for organizations and the Culture & Organization 2004 special issue that developed her concern. Specifically, we aim to further engage with how business is managed, formed and locally accomplished by means of the organizational surroundings that the participants make themselves part of and the multimodal resources that they have at their disposal, in other words: how people live the organizational surroundings. Our hope is to shed light on future directions in the multimodal analysis of workplace interaction and studies of organization in general, and encourage a further interconnection among scholars from various disciplines.     

“Better safe than sorry”—Reasons for consulting care due to decreased fetal movements

Background

Experience of reduced fetal movements is a common reason for consulting health care in late pregnancy. There is an association between reduced fetal movements and stillbirth.

When near means related: evidence from three web survey experiments on inter-item correlations in grid questions

In this article, we present the results of three question design experiments on inter-item correlations, which tested a grid design against a single-item design. The first and second experiments examined the inter-item correlations of a set with five and seven items, respectively, and the third experiment examined the impact of the question design on inter-item correlations of follow-up questions. We found that the inter-item correlations in grid designs were higher for both the set of five and seven items than for questions in a single-item design. Additionally, the inter-item correlations of the set of follow-up questions were higher if the preceding set of questions was presented in a grid. According to the findings of the present research, respondents seem to apply the interpretative near means related heuristic when answering grid questions, and also when answering follow-up questions preceeded by grid questions.     

Discrete parallel machine makespan ScheLoc problem

Scheduling–Location (ScheLoc) problems integrate the separate fields of scheduling and location problems. In ScheLoc problems the objective is to find locations for the machines and a schedule for each machine subject to some production and location constraints such that some scheduling objective is minimized. In this paper we consider the discrete parallel machine makespan ScheLoc problem where the set of possible machine locations is discrete and a set of n jobs has to be taken to the machines and processed such that the makespan is minimized. Since the separate location and scheduling problem are both \(\mathcal {NP}\)-hard, so is the corresponding ScheLoc problem. Therefore, we propose an integer programming formulation and different versions of clustering heuristics, where jobs are split into clusters and each cluster is assigned to one of the possible machine locations. Since the IP formulation can only be solved for small scale instances we propose several lower bounds to measure the quality of the clustering heuristics. Extensive computational tests show the efficiency of the heuristics.