Exploring the essence of enabling child participation within child protection services

The chances that children have to participate in child protection services are largely contingent upon the attitudes and skills of case managers. They have a crucial role in ensuring that a child's voice is being listened to and acknowledged in often sensitive dialogues. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate what case managers need to facilitate child participation. By handing case managers a participation toolbox developed by children and through the use of reflexive monitoring in action, we elaborated on the barriers faced in practice. The results show that the intention to facilitate child participation is quickly overruled by often subconscious thoughts and beliefs, stemming from the complex interplay of child image, protection, and participation. Case managers need to be aware of this interplay and how this unknowingly steers their actions. Therefore, iterative reflection should be facilitated within organizations for an actual change in their daily practice and to amplify the role of children in the decision‐making processes within child protection services.     

The Salience of Perceived Societal Conflict in Europe: A 27 Country Study on the Development of a Measure for Generalized Conflict Thinking

Social Indicators Research - Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some)...     

In the flesh: a poetic inquiry into how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the question of how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma at work. We use poetic inquiry to show the reader how it feels for our participants to be stigmatized based on their size. We interviewed 22 women who self-identify as full-figured, fat, overweight, or obese. The results consist of six poems, five of which were written by us, the researchers. These ‘tri-voiced poems’ (Leavy 2010b) illustrate the spectrum of affective responses and stigma management strategies that our participants talked about, ranging from feeling anxious, super-smart, impeccable, and funny to rebellious and confident. The sixth poem was written by one of our participants and voices her first-person experiences and perspective. Our aim is to do justice in our writing to the emotions that circulated in the interviews and to make a political statement with regards to the stigmatizing practices in organizations related to size and health.     

CHANGING BUSINESS MODELS IN INTERNATIONAL BANK FUNDING

This paper investigates the foreign funding mix of globally active banks. Using BIS international banking statistics for a panel of 12 advanced economies, we detect a structural break in international bank funding at the onset of the great financial crisis. In their postbreak business model, banks rely less on cross‐border liabilities and, instead, tap funds from outside their jurisdictions by making more active use of their subsidiaries and branches, as well as interoffice accounts within the same banking group. (JEL C32, F65, G21)     

Charisma as signal: An evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership

We present an evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership, arguing that charisma has evolved as a credible signal of a person's ability to solve a coordination challenge requiring urgent collective action from group members. We suggest that a better understanding of charisma's evolutionary and biological origins and functions can provide a broader perspective in which to situate current debates surrounding the utility and validity of charismatic leadership as a construct in the social sciences. We outline several key challenges which have shaped our followership psychology, and argue that the benefits of successful coordination in ancestral environments has led to the evolution of context-dependent psychological mechanisms which are especially attuned to cues and signals of outstanding personal leadership qualities. We elaborate on several implications of this signaling hypothesis of charismatic leadership, including opportunities for deception (dishonest signaling) and for large-scale coordination.     

Dashed Hopes,Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School

The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the transition. Self‐esteem and Big Five personality traits were measured both pre‐ and posttransition. Self‐esteem changed as a function of the discrepancy between children's expected and actually perceived social acceptance. Furthermore, neuroticism magnified self‐esteem decreases when children's ‘hopes were dashed'—when they experienced disappointing levels of social acceptance. These findings provide longitudinal support for sociometer theory across the critical transition to secondary school.     

Observed and parent‐reported conscience in childhood: Relations with bullying involvement in early primary school

This exploratory study aimed to examine which components of early childhood conscience predicted bullying involvement around school entry. In the population‐based Generation R Study, teacher reports of bullying involvement and parent reports of conscience were available for 3,244 children (M age = 6.7 years). Higher levels of overall conscience predicted lower bullying perpetration scores, independently of intelligence quotient, temperamental traits and sociodemographic characteristics. Particularly, the subscales guilt, confession, and internalized conduct, and to a lesser extent empathy, predicted bullying perpetration. Conscience was not related to victimization. Similar results were found using observations during so‐called ‘cheating games’ (subsample N = 450 children). Findings suggest that improving children's understanding of moral standards and norms may be a potential target for bullying intervention programs in early primary school.     

Poverty Research in a Development Policy Context

This article provides an evaluation of the extent to which science is addressing worldwide poverty and hunger. It is based on the literature contained in the Thomson Reuters' Web of Science Citation Index (1980 to 2008) and focuses on the WOTRO Strategy Plan 2007–2010 of the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research, although similar policies from other countries might also be assessed. The data show that poverty/hunger research has grown steadily over time in many disciplines, most significantly in Environmental Sciences and Technology. Much of this research is hidden; hence the construction of an internationally recognised open‐access database is recommended so that scientists can easily identify critical gaps related to scientific capacity‐building.