Personality and psychopathological profiles in individuals exposed to mobbing

Increasingly, mental health and medical professionals have been asked to assess claims of psychological harm arising from harassment at the workplace, or "mobbing." This study assessed the personality and psychopathological profiles of 146 individuals exposed to mobbing using validity, clinical, and content scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2. Profiles and factor analyses were obtained. Two major dimensions emerged among those exposed to mobbing: (a) depressed mood, difficulty in making decisions, change-related anguish, and passive-aggressive traits (b) somatic symptoms, and need for attention and affection. This cross-sectional pilot study provides evidence that personality profiles of mobbing victims and psychological damage resulting from mobbing may be evaluated using standardized assessments, though a longitudinal study is needed to delineate cause-and-effect relationships.     

Rurality and Income Inequality in the United States, 1975–2015

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived widening of the economic divide between urban and rural areas, and on the continued rise of national income inequality. We demonstrate that, in fact, the average income gap between urban (metropolitan) and rural (nonmetropolitan) households has not risen over the past 40 years, and makes virtually no contribution to national income inequality. Rising national inequality is driven by rising inequality within both urban and rural America, not by an urban/rural divergence. As is well known, the growing dispersion of household money income is partly driven by rising wage inequality, particularly in urban areas. Less well recognized is the role played by other income sources. We show that a decline in the progressivity of the distribution of social security payments and cash transfers, and an increase in the regressivity of the distribution of retirement incomes, have jointly made a comparably large contribution to rising income inequality. At the same time, the share of income from self-employment has declined, particularly in rural America, and because self-employment income is very unequally distributed, its diminution has retarded the growth of rural inequality. In 2014–15, however, rural inequality increased, cutting the urban/rural inequality gap in half.     

Archival Work as Qualitative Sociology

Qualitative Sociology -     

Ageing Population: Identifying the Determinants of Ageing in the Least Developed Countries

Population Research and Policy Review - The issue of population ageing is no longer exclusively centred on developed countries. Empirical studies have proven that the rise in the proportion of the...     

Regression models to dependence for exceedance

Extreme Value Theory (EVT) aims to study the tails of probability distributions in order to measure and quantify extreme events of maximum and minimum. In river flow data, an extreme level of a river may be related to the level of a neighboring river that flows into it. In this type of data, it is very common for flooding of a location to have been caused by a very large flow from an affluent river that is tens or hundreds of kilometers from this location. In this sense, an interesting approach is to consider a conditional model for the estimation of a multivariate model. Inspired by this idea, we propose a Bayesian model to describe the dependence of exceedance between rivers, where we considered a conditionally independent structure. In this model, the dependence between rivers is captured by modeling the excess marginally of one river as a consequence of linear functions of the other rivers. The results showed that there is a strong and positive connection between excesses in one river caused by the excesses of the other rivers.     

Contact between birth parents and children in kinship care in a sample from Spain

Within the context of kinship care, the main objectives of this work are to study the characteristics of contact between foster children and their birth parents, and their relationship with key variables of fostering, the children and their kinship caregivers. The sample included 189 children from Spain and their kinship families. A semi‐structured placement interview and two scales relating to the child–caregiver relationship and child's psychological adjustment were used with the kinship families. The results revealed a significant percentage of foster children who had no family contact. Various visit types, frequencies and durations were described. Kinship care with contact, compared with placements without contact, was frequently characterized by the absence of professional supervision, and an affectionate child–caregiver relationship; moreover, children with contact were perceived to have fewer serious behaviour and socio‐emotional problems and a greater probability of family reunification. The regression analysis showed that the main predictors for how caregivers assessed contact were the children's emotional reaction during visits and the quality of the relationship between the kinship families and the birth parents. These results suggest the need for further research about contact, which will certainly have a major impact on professional intervention with these families.     

The Othering of Muslims: Discourses of Radicalization in the New York Times, 1969–2014

In this article, I engage with Edward Said's Orientalism and various perspectives within the othering paradigm to analyze the emergence and transformation of radicalization discourses in the news media. Employing discourse analysis of 607 New York Times articles from 1969 to 2014, this article demonstrates that radicalization discourses are not new but are the result of complex sociolinguistic and historical developments that cannot be reduced to dominant contemporary understandings of the concept or to singular events or crises. The news articles were then compared to 850 government documents, speeches, and other official communications. The analysis of the data indicates that media conceptualizations of radicalization, which once denoted political and economic differences, have now shifted to overwhelmingly focus on Islam. As such, radicalization discourse now evokes the construct radicalization as symbolic marker of conflict between the West and the East. I also advanced the established notion that the news media employ strategic discursive strategies that contribute to conceptual distinctions that are used to construct Muslims as an “alien other” to the West.     

Marginal models for the association structure of hierarchical binary responses

Clustered binary responses are often found in ecological studies. Data analysis may include modeling the marginal probability response. However, when the association is the main scientific focus, modeling the correlation structure between pairs of responses is the key part of the analysis. Second-order generalized estimating equations (GEE) are established in the literature. Some of them are more efficient in computational terms, especially facing large clusters. Alternating logistic regression (ALR) and orthogonalized residual (ORTH) GEE methods are presented and compared in this paper. Simulation results show a slightly superiority of ALR over ORTH. Marginal probabilities and odds ratios are also estimated and compared in a real ecological study involving a three-level hierarchical clustering. ALR and ORTH models are useful for modeling complex association structure with large cluster sizes.     

INDUCING OVERCONFIDENCE

In this study, I present a theory which explains how the influence of others may generate overconfidence. The argument is built on the idea that the more help an agent receives when performing a task, the less informative the score on that task will be relative to the agent's ability to perform it. If an agent is confident, he tends to benefit from more cooperation opportunities simply because he is likely to be perceived as being more skilled. As a result, he remains confident because the future signals he will observe will contain very little information regarding his ability. On the contrary, if the agent is not confident, he will receive more informative scores, which will help him learn his true ability faster. (JEL D81, D83, D84)