The Status of Family Resilience: Effects of Sustainable Livelihoods in Rural China

Family resilience is the capacity of a family to mitigate adversity using its resources, structure, and internal connections. In rural China, where sustainable livelihoods are changing rapidly because of urbanization and migration, it is not clear how family resilience interacts with sustainability of livelihoods. This study of rural Chinese families classifies individual’s perceived family resilience and discusses how sustainable livelihoods influence this classification. A multilevel survey of rural families reveals three categories of perceived resilience in families: perceived optimistic families, perceived cooperative families, and perceived pessimistic families. Sustainable livelihoods, including natural, social, financial, and human capitals, have significant impacts on this classification of perceived family resilience. We conclude that rural families in China vary in their levels of family resilience, and the more physical and financial capital they have, the more internal cooperation there is within families. The more natural and traditional social capital families have, the less internal cooperation there is within families. The more human resources families have, the more resilience they have.

     

Secondary agency conflicts: A synthesis and proposed measurement model

Secondary agency conflicts typically arise when ownership and control are combined in the hands of dominant shareholders who could then seek to misappropriate returns at the expense of minority shareholders. This type of agency conflict has attracted attention from researchers for the past nearly three decades. However, efforts at measuring secondary agency conflicts have been fragmented and scattered. The absence of a coherent and valid approach to assess the scope and intensity of secondary agency conflicts has impeded progress in both empirical and conceptual development of the topic area. Based on a review of the extant body of literature, this paper develops a composite Shareholder Inequity index that measures the potential for secondary agency conflicts employing three different governance dimensions that are grounded in the agency literature: blockholder power, differential control, and the absence of board neutrality. The index is tested and validated empirically using a sample of 748 publicly listed U.S. firms. The resulting Shareholder Inequity index demonstrates high levels of validity and reliability. Future corporate governance studies can utilize this validated measure to investigate potential secondary agency conflicts more consistently and rigorously in order to strengthen organizational theory development and research.     

The practical utility of the Welch Emotional Connection Screen for rating parent–infant relational health

Emotional Connection (EC) measured by the Welch Emotional Connection Screen (WECS) was related to the Parent–Infant Interaction Rating System (PIIRS), a 5‐point adaptation of the rating system developed for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (e.g., NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1999, Developmental Psychology, 35, 1399). Parent–infant dyads (n = 49 mothers; 43 fathers) were videotaped during face‐to‐face interaction at infant age 6 months; interactions were coded with both the WECS and PIIRS. At age 3, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist. WECS ratings of EC were associated with PIIRS rating items for both mother–infant and father–infant dyads. Mother–infant EC related positively to maternal sensitivity and positive regard for child, child positive mood and sustained attention, and dyadic mutuality, and negatively with maternal intrusiveness. Father–infant EC related positively to fathers' positive regard for child, child positive mood and sustained attention, and dyadic mutuality. Mother–infant EC predicted child behavior problems at age 3 better than mother–infant PIIRS ratings of dyadic mutuality. With fathers, neither EC nor dyadic mutuality ratings predicted mother‐reported child behavior problems. Findings highlight the practical utility of the WECS for identifying potentially at‐risk dyads and supporting early relational health.     

Efficient and effective learning for safety from incidents

Learning from incidents is important for improving safety. Many companies spend a great deal of time and money on such learning procedures. The objectives of this paper are to present some early results from a project aimed at revealing weaknesses in the procedures for learning from incidents and to discuss improvements in these procedures, especially in chemical process industries. The empirical base comes from a project assessing organizational learning and the effectiveness of the different steps of the learning cycle for safety and studying relations between safety-specific transformational leadership, safety climate, trust, safety-related behavior and learning from incidents. The results point at common weaknesses in the organizational learning, both in the horizontal learning (geographical spread) and in vertical learning (double-loop learning). Furthermore, the effectiveness in the different steps of the learning cycle is low due to insufficient information in incident reports, very shallow analyses of reports, decisions that focus at solving the problem only at the place where the incident took place, late implementations and weak solutions. Strong correlations with learning from incidents were found for all safety climate variables as well as for safety-related behaviors and trust. The relationships were very strong for trust, safety knowledge, safety participation and safety compliance.     

Keeping rail on track: preliminary findings on safety culture in Australian rail

'Safety culture' is identified in the literature as a critical element of healthy and safe workplaces. How can rail organizations ensure that consistently effective work health and safety cultures are maintained across the diversity of their operations? This paper reports on research that is currently underway in the Australian rail industry aimed at producing a Model of Best Practice in Safety Culture for the industry. Located in rail organizations dedicated to the mining industry as well as urban rail and national freight operations, the research examines the constructs of organizational culture that impact on the development and maintenance of healthy and safe workplaces. The research uses a multi-method approach incorporating quantitative (survey) and qualitative (focus groups, interviews and document analysis) methods along with a participative process to identify interventions to improve the organization and develop plans for their implementation. The research uses as its analytical framework the 10 Platinum Rules, from the findings of earlier research in the New South Wales (Australia) mining industry, Digging Deeper. Data collection is underway at the time of writing and preliminary findings are presented at this stage. The research method may be adapted for use as a form of organizational review of safety and health in organizational culture.     

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.     

Spatial configurations of urban forest in different landscape and socio-political contexts: identifying patterns for green infrastructure planning

Rapid urbanisation and climate change have motivated the development of urban green infrastructure (UGI) as a planning strategy to support the wellbeing of urban people and ecosystems while parallel adapting cities to climate change. Forest (tree-covered areas >0.5 ha) is a key UGI component that afford a wider range of ecosystem services and mitigate urban heat islands more effectively than non-wooded green spaces. However, understanding of spatial configurations (variation in patch size and frequency) of forests across the gradient of urbanisation and between cities is limited to case studies. This represents a considerable knowledge gap for identification of general patterns that can inform integration of forest resources in UGI planning that have value beyond the individual city level. In this study we used Geographic Information Systems to explore the spatial configuration of forests across cities located within landscapes characterised by different levels of anthropogenic modification (degree of forest cover) and socio-political contexts, i.e. all Danish and Swedish cities >10,000 inhabitants (n = 176). We applied general linear modelling to investigate the relationship between forest cover, patch size and frequency with 1) regional landscape type, 2) demographic trends 1960–2010, and 3) the gradient of urbanisation (measured in three zones: urban core (0.2 km from city boundary), urban fringe (0.2–2 km), and urban periphery (2–5 km)). Regardless of demographic trends, forest cover was lowest in cities settled in large-scale agricultural regions, higher in regions with mosaics of forest and farming, and highest in forest-dominated regions. However, in all cities forest cover was lowest in the urban zone and peaked on the urban fringe rather than on the urban periphery. Furthermore, pocket woods (0.5–2 ha) accounted for over 50 % of patches in all three urban zones, irrespective of regional landscape type. We conclude by discussing how these general patterns could inform strategies for integration of urban forests in UGI planning.     

婚姻挤压对农村男性生命质量的影响

本研究基于中国的性别失衡背景和在陕西省安康市汉滨区农村地区的调查数据分析婚姻挤压对农村男性生命质量的影响。描述性分析结果显示,28岁以上的未婚男性,其生命质量水平较低;无论处于何种年龄阶段和婚姻状态,感受到婚姻挤压的男性生命质量显著低于未感受到婚姻挤压的男性。回归分析结果显示,婚姻挤压感受和年龄对于男性生命质量均具有显著的独立影响,其影响方向与描述性分析结果一致。这说明婚姻挤压确实会显著降低农村男性的生命质量水平。