Changing the method of working with homeless people: a photovoice project in Italy

In Italy, many organizations are experimenting with the Housing First (HF) model to promote a change in how they work with homeless people. This change creates some difficulties, especially in promoting freedom of choice in people involved in the HF programs. This study explored the definition of “home” in homeless people’s points of view. The study participants were 5 homeless men involved in a HF program called “The Road Home” implemented in the city of Padua. Data were collected using Photovoice, a photographic method based on participatory action research. During the project, the participants took photographs to illustrate their definitions of “home” and then engaged in a critical dialogue about the images represented in the photographs. The results of the study showed that occupants identified the home as being related to family, friendship, cohabitation, and hope for the future. The Photovoice project provided an opportunity to promote discussions that revealed the true needs of the people involved, and in the meantime, it brought a change to the program and to the community, in addition to promoting the HF model in the community.     

Statistical matching and uncertainty analysis in combining household income and expenditure data

Among the goals of statistical matching, a very important one is the estimation of the joint distribution of variables not jointly observed in a sample survey but separately available from independent sample surveys. The absence of joint information on the variables of interest leads to uncertainty about the data generating model since the available sample information is unable to discriminate among a set of plausible joint distributions. In the present paper a short review of the concept of uncertainty in statistical matching under logical constraints, as well as how to measure uncertainty for continuous variables is presented. The notion of matching error is related to an appropriate measure of uncertainty and a criterion of selecting matching variables by choosing the variables minimizing such an uncertainty measure is introduced. Finally, a method to choose a plausible joint distribution for the variables of interest via iterative proportional fitting algorithm is described. The proposed methodology is then applied to household income and expenditure data when extra sample information regarding the average propensity to consume is available. This leads to a reconstructed complete dataset where each record includes measures on income and expenditure.     

A Two-Step Approach to Analyze Satisfaction Data

In this paper a two-step procedure based on Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis (NLPCA) and Multilevel models (MLM) for the analysis of satisfaction data is proposed. The basic hypothesis is that observed ordinal variables describe different aspects of a latent continuous variable, which depends on covariates connected with individual and contextual features. NLPCA is used to measure the level of a latent variable and MLM is adopted for detecting individual and environmental determinants of the level. This approach is suggested to analyze users’ satisfaction. In fact, NLPCA is used to create a synthetic continuous measure of satisfaction (first step) and MLM are used to detect the role of external (individual or environmental) variables that can affect the level itself (second step). The proposed two-step procedure is applied to the Eurobarometer survey data about opinion of European citizens on services of general interest (SGI) aiming to evaluate and compare the opinion about SGI in different countries. The focus is on overall level of satisfaction about four major public services: fixed telephone, electricity supply, postal and rail services. The item analyzed, which are named manifest variables, are: access easiness, price, quality, information clarity and contract fairness, as reported in the 2002 Eurobarometer survey. In the first step these variables are used to set up the synthetic indicator (the overall level) of satisfaction and, in the second step, a MLM is used to test the impact of some explanatory variables on this satisfaction.     

Until work do us part: Labour migration and occupational stratification in non-cohabiting marriage

While recent decades have seen considerable research on cohabitation without marriage, the study of marriage without cohabitation has not fared as well. Prior work on the latter has emphasized the importance of occupational stratification, but ignored the social context around occupation, particularly regarding labour mobility and economic development. In this paper, we outline the significance of contemporary labour mobility and concomitant occupational stratification for the risk of non-cohabiting marriage, and use data from the IPUMS–International project to provide a cross-national accounting of non-cohabiting marriage. We focus on two issues: first, how does prevalence vary across countries, across time, and with respect to economic development? Second, how do the core dynamics of labour mobility—including migration, occupational status, and economic development—influence the probability of non-cohabiting marriage? Results indicate broad cross-national differences in prevalence, increasing risk over time, and a pattern of accumulating risk associated with multifaceted social disadvantage.     

Concepts travelling across disciplinary fields: the case of the business model

Journal of Management and Governance - Since the beginning of the 2000s, the concept of Business Model has been explored by scholars from a broad range of business studies and particularly those in...     

Analysis of the ergonomic usage of the ARMflex in the odontological area

The aim of this paper is to analyze the importance and applicability of ARMflex in the odontological area and its influence in preventing or stopping the involuntary habit of improperly positioning the hand under the face or under the pillow. The ergonomic usage of ARMflex influences the design in odontological areas and innovates in the semi-immobilization of the patient to prevent future orthodontic problems.     

Ethnic Prejudice and Intergroup Contact in Prospective Adoptive Parents

While ethnic prejudice is considered a key factor in parental cultural socialization strategies, there is nonetheless a lack of research about this topic among prospective transracially adoptive parents and the extent of their contacts with members of minority ethnic groups. Participants in the current study were 175 couples: 102 prospective adoptive parents pursuing international adoption in Italy and 73 couples who at the time of the study neither had children nor were involved in the adoption process. Results showed, first, that prospective adoptive parents reported lower levels of ethnic prejudice and more positive intergroup contacts than the comparison group and, second, that adoptive status, together with a more positive intergroup contact, predicted lower levels of negative prejudice. Implications for pre- and post-adoption interventions are discussed.     

Estimating Cross Province and Municipal City Price Level Differences in China: Some Experiments and Results

The estimation of Sub-national purchasing power parities (PPPs) for countries where the regions and provinces have different level of development is fundamental for income, consumption, standard of living real term comparisons, as well as for measuring cross-region welfare inequality. This is even truer for large countries like China, where the above aggregates exhibit great variability among provinces. The aim of this paper is to compute the price level differences, measured by the PPPs, for 31 Chinese Provinces and Municipal Cities, based on a sample of 62 goods and services for the year 2014. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to do it since many years. After a short review of previous studies on China cross-province and municipal cities price level differences measurement and the illustration of methodology and data used, the results of our elaborations are presented and discussed. Taking Beijing as the base area, there is evidence that the PPP max/min ratio is 1.74, confirming the common belief that China cross-province and municipal cities price levels are significantly different.     

Estimation of General Stationary Processes by Variable Length Markov Chains

We develop new results about a sieve methodology for the estimation of minimal state spaces and probability laws in the class of stationary processes defined on finite categorical spaces. Using a sieve approximation with variable length Markov chains of increasing order, we show that an adapted version of the Context algorithm yields asymptotically correct estimates for the minimal state space and for the underlying probability distribution. As a side product, the method of sieves yields a nice graphical tree representation for the potentially infinite dimensional minimal state space of the data generating process, which is very useful for exploration of the memory.