The Smooth Transition: Spain's 1978 Constitution and the Nationalities Question

Nationalist movements have played a key role in Spain's democratic transition, contributing decisively to frame the Spanish state in its present shape. This article will focus on the role of Constitution-making in providing the legitimacy needed in democratic transitions affected by the rise of sharp ethno-national conflicts. Among the contributing factors to the Transition's success the following are stressed: the Monarchy as a cohesive unitary symbol; the neutralisation of the Army's influence in political life; and a pragmatic, civic, a-nationalist leadership in Madrid.     

Measurement Invariance of Ryff’s Psychological Well-being Scales Across Italian and Belarusian Students

Cross-cultural researches on the Ryff’s Psychological Well-being (PWB) Scales are currently not available. The aim of the paper was to investigate the measurement invariance of the 18-item version of the PWB Scales across 1,114 high school and undergraduate Italian and Belarusian students. After identifying the six correlated first-order factors and one second-order factor model of the Ryff’s PWB Scales, as baseline model for each sample, multi-groups confirmatory factor analyses were subsequently performed. All analyses were performed using the Robust Diagonally Weighted Least Squares estimation procedures, entering a polychoric correlation matrix. Multi-groups analyses showed that factor structure of the preferred model did not change across the Italian and Belarusian samples. Although the obtained results provided a preliminary support for cross-cultural structural invariance of the PWB Scales, further investigations are required to ensure its generalizability and applicability. Limitations and suggestions for future researches as well as psychosocial applications for educational context were discussed.     

The Role of Ethnic Prejudice in the Modulation of Cradling Lateralization

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior - The left-cradling bias is the tendency to cradle an infant on the left side, regardless of the individuals’ handedness, culture or ethnicity. Many studies...     

Evaluation of Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Parenting in the Italian Context: Adaptation of a French Questionnaire

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the psychometric properties of the Italian version of a French scale to detect attitudes toward same-sex parenting. The Italian sample was split into two subsamples. On one, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to detect the factor structure of the Italian scale, and on the other, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to find the data’s best fit model. The scales’ internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha. The questionnaire’s convergent validity was also evaluated. EFA extracted a four-factor solution, in accordance with the original French scale’s validation study. CFA showed that the translated scale had good consistency, similar to that of the original version, showing satisfactory internal consistency for three of four subscales. There will be benefits to further validation studies of the translated scale on the Italian population and it may possibly be innovative and useful in both research and social fields.     

Clustering to reduce regional heterogeneity: A spanish case-study

Statistical methods of dimension reduction and classification are used to obtain homogeneous local-area clustering with regard to the most relevant demographic parameters. The dimension reduction is conducted in two stages using Principal Component Analysis and a modified k-mean procedure is proposed to determine the final clusters. This clustering will be useful in future demographic studies at a local level, in particular to obtain forecasts of demographic rates and population projections. The region of Castile and León in Spain is used to illustrate the method. A Poisson model is used to explore the advantages of the new clustering over the more conventional classification based on provinces.     

A quantile regression perspective on external preference mapping

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - External preference mapping is widely used in marketing and R&D divisions to understand the consumer behaviour. The most common preference map is...     

Measuring employment vulnerability in Europe

Two of the most notable trends in labour markets in Europe are the rise in the number of atypical job contracts (e.g. fixed‐term contracts and temporary work) and the increase in job turnover. The concept of “employment vulnerability” can be used to describe these trends, which weaken the employer–employee relationship. In this article, the authors measure this employment vulnerability, for individual European countries, by creating two indices – an “employer‐related vulnerability index” and a “job‐related vulnerability index” – which are then aggregated to form an overall employment vulnerability index.