The Estimation of the South Korean Government's Diplomacy for Its Opposing Public North Korea

Based on the influence of the contingency factors of inner organizational and external situational factors, contingency theory of accommodation provides a good explanation for the real public relations practices. A recent series of experimental studies supports the idea that the theory is also applicable in the public's estimation pattern regarding an organization's public relations practices. This survey study is theoretically important when examining and sorting out significant factors in the real population of a notable public diplomacy domain. That is, this research examines how the South Korean people perceive the contingency factors and how people estimate the South Korean government's stance toward its opposing public, North Korea. The regression model of perceived contingency factors and stance estimation was generalizable in the population of this study (R ² = .279). The most influential perceptual predictors in the model include: the North Korean leader's preference for the South Korean president, the relative power of South Korea, the level of commitment of North Korea, the South Korean president's preference for the North Korean leader, the US government's support for the South Korean policy toward North Korea, the South Korean government's certainty to deal with the North Korean military threat, situational difficulties, the South Korean government's knowledge and skill to deal with the threat, the situational duration of threat, and the South Korean president's relation-oriented leadership. Finally, this study discussed practical implications for the government practitioners.     

Trade union support for fathers' use of work–family benefits – lessons from Sweden

Trade unions have traditionally been male-dominated organizations serving men's interests as family breadwinners, primarily through wage-setting. This study explores whether unions will contest the gendered division of parenting to develop values and practices that support men as caregivers. It takes place in Sweden, where unions are strong and fathers have legislated rights to paid parental leave. A mail survey of local unions revealed that the vast majority of unions did not believe it was important to focus attention on men as family caregivers. Only about one-fourth reported activities to improve men's benefit knowledge; only about one-third reported that they helped to implement parental leave at the workplace and only about one-fourth had negotiated contracts that extended leave benefits for fathers. Unions were more active in supporting men as fathers when they prioritized women's equal employment opportunity and when fathers requested union help. Stronger unions were more likely than others to have won enhanced benefits; contracts tended to increase compensation rather than offer more leave time. Swedish unions are in a strong position to promote, help implement and extend work–family benefits for fathers, dissolving the boundary between work and family spheres, but this potential has not yet been realized.     

Cultural Similarities and Differences in Emblematic Gestures

Despite longstanding interest in cultural differences in emblems, there have only been a few systematic investigations of those differences, and to date there is no study that catalogues and compares emblems across different cultural groups to a standard list of verbal messages. This study does so. Encoders from six world regions produced potential emblems from a standard verbal message list. Gestures that were encoded by at least 70% of the encoders in a region were shown to observers from the same regions, and gestures that were judged correctly as the message intended by at least 70% of the decoders in that region were considered emblems. These procedures resulted in the cataloguing of cultural differences in emblems to the same verbal message list. Surprisingly, the results also indicated a small group of emblems that were similarly encoded and decoded across cultures.     

Long-Term Care

This study examines the redistributive effects of public pensions on old-age income inequality, testing whether public pensions function as the “great equalizer.” Unlike the well-known alleviating effect of public pensions on old-age poverty, the effects of public pensions on old-age income inequality more generally have been less examined, particularly outside Western countries. Using repeated cross-sectional data of elderly Koreans between 1998 and 2010, we applied Gini coefficient decomposition to measure the impact of various income sources on old-age inequality, particularly focusing on public pensions. Our findings show that, contrary to expectations, public pension benefits have inequality-intensifying effects on old-age income in Korea, even countervailing the alleviating effects of public assistance. This rather surprising result is due to the specific institutional context of the Korean public pension system and suggests that the “structuring” of welfare policies could be as important as their expansion for the elderly, particularly for developing welfare states.     

Response Agreement Rates Between Child Welfare–Involved Youth and Their Caregivers

ABSTRACT

Data were collected from 40 youth and 37 caregivers, which represented 57 distinct youth and 20 youth–caregiver dyads to measure the level of agreement between youth self-report and their caregivers on a variety of topics. Topics included: the youth's past placements, service use and needs, experiences in the child welfare system, and the youth's emotional problems and social behaviors. Results indicated high agreement between youth and caregiver proxy related to placement history, service use, the restrictiveness of the current environment, and community safety; results indicated low levels of agreement for youth emotional difficulties and prosocial behaviors. Qualitative data were used to further identify some of the differences noted. Overall, the findings support prior research that shows higher agreement within youth–caregiver dyads for objective measures as opposed to subjective and private ones. Implications for future research are discussed, and methodological challenges related to this study are identified.     

Asymptotic variance–covariance matrix of sample autocorrelations for threshold-asymmetric GARCH processes

In the field of financial time series, threshold-asymmetric conditional variance models can be used to explain asymmetric volatilities [C.W. Li and W.K. Li, On a double-threshold autoregressive heteroscedastic time series model, J. Appl. Econometrics 11 (1996), pp. 253–274]. In this paper, we consider a broad class of threshold-asymmetric GARCH processes (TAGARCH, hereafter) including standard ARCH and GARCH models as special cases. Since sample autocorrelation function provides a useful information to identify an appropriate time-series model for the data, we derive asymptotic distributions of sample autocorrelations both for original process and for squared process. It is verified that standard errors of sample autocorrelations for TAGARCH models are significantly different from unity for lower lags and they are exponentially converging to unity for higher lags. Furthermore they are shown to be asymptotically dependent while being independent of standard GARCH models. These results will be interesting in the light of the fact that TAGARCH processes are serially uncorrelated. A simulation study is reported to illustrate our results.     

Common paths,divergent patterns: The social protection by other means approach in Australia and Japan

This article reports on a study of the welfare reform trajectories of two countries that are often identified in the literature as having institutional patterns of the ‘social protection by the other means’ approach. It is questioned in the article whether these two countries have undergone a converging reform trajectory against the increasing forces of economic liberalisation and whether their distinct ways of doing social policy have now come to an end. It argues that while both Australia and Japan have followed a similar neoliberal path in their social policy reform direction, the forms and patterns they have taken to follow have been distinct, largely aligned with the existing structure of social protection in each. Distinctive strategies of welfare adopted by each country have led to a divergent pattern in their way of doing social policy.     

Households' Perceived Personal Risk and Responses in a Multihazard Environment

This study proposed and tested a multistage model of household response to three hazards—flood, hurricane, and toxic chemical release—in Harris County Texas. The model, which extends Lindell and Perry's (1992, 2004) Protective Action Decision Model, proposed a basic causal chain from hazard proximity through hazard experience and perceived personal risk to expectations of continued residence in the home and adoption of household hazard adjustments. Data from 321 households generally supported the model, but the mediating effects of hazard experience and perceived personal risk were partial rather than complete. In addition, the data suggested that four demographic variables—gender, age, income, and ethnicity—affect the basic causal chain at different points.     

Empirical bayes approach to bayes sequential estimation: the poisson and bernoulli cases

The problem considered is the Bayes sequential estimation of the mean with quadratic loss and fixed cost per observation. Assume the prior distribution is not completely known. Some empirical Bayes procedures are proposed in the Poisson and Bernoulli cases, and they are shown to be asymptotically non-deficient in the sense of Woodroofe (1981).