What is Integration? A Comparative View from Immigrants and Municipal Policy

The ongoing project of citizenship construction in societies receiving international immigration demands a perspective that takes into account the interests, views and needs of all socio-demographic groups, including those of newcomers as potential new citizens. We interviewed representatives of 16 immigrant associations operating in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, reviewed immigration policy in 13 Spanish (Galician) municipalities, and interviewed 20 municipal government staff members who put these into practice. With this research, we aim to explore the perspectives of immigrants with respect to their own integration and to examine how these compare with local policies designed to facilitate these processes. By comparing the immigrant representatives' perceptions with local policy discourses and practice, our study reveals how local integration practice is not only inconsistent with its own policy discourse but also fails to consider and include immigrants' own understandings of what integration means and how it can be achieved.     

Civil Society Meta-organizations and Legitimating Processes: the Case of the Addiction Field in France

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - To cope with the new challenges inherent to their political role, civil society organizations must convince their...     

Racial/Ethnic Minority Community College Students' Critical Consciousness and Social Cognitive Career Outcomes

A need exists to better understand how racial/ethnic minority students' critical consciousness development in response to marginalization may be involved in their educational and career development. We therefore examined the link between critical consciousness development and career decision self-efficacy and career outcome expectations among racial/ethnic minority community college students. Following social cognitive career theory's conceptual pillars, we developed a testable model integrating critical consciousness and social cognitive variables. This model was tested with 135 racially and ethnically diverse community college students. Data analysis included path analyses and tests of model fit using structural equation modeling. Results suggested that (a) higher critical agency is linked to higher career decision self-efficacy and outcome expectations and (b) critical action and reflection have a bidirectional link and predict higher critical agency. Implications for research and practice aiming to close educational and career gaps among racial/ethnic minorities are discussed.     

The Eurovision Song Contest – A Continent (still) Divided?

Credited as one of the most successful major televised music events held annually in Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) still serves as a battlefield between Eastern and Western European aesthetic paradigms. Although the Western paradigm has long been regarded as an almost universal criterion of success, the contemporary ESC presents a unique opportunity for post-communist acts to contest that hegemony while playing with its conventions. This article examines how, in the post-1989 situation, the most successful Eastern European acts purposely exploited, juxtaposed and subverted several aesthetic categories, demonstrating their understanding of the conventions promoted at the ESC on the one hand, while undermining and contesting them on the other. The article argues for greater attention to such strategies as over-exploitation of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes, as well as mocking the prevailing aesthetics by playing with such notions as authenticity, folklore, nationalism, essentialism, camp, kitsch or hyper-reality and challenging the contest's utopian and nostalgic ideals.     

TO LEAN OR NOT TO LEAN AGAINST AN ASSET PRICE BUBBLE? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, economists are reconsidering the appropriate role of monetary policy towards equity bubbles. This paper contributes to these deliberations by estimating the response of the stock market to monetary policy tightening by using a Bayesian time-varying VAR model. By introducing the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, we propose a method that estimates its fundamental and bubble components. We find that asset prices will initially fall and eventually rise again but without the risk of feeding the bubble. Counterfactual policy experiments provide additional evidence that monetary policy can lean against equity and housing prices. (JEL E50, E52, E58)     

Urban vegetation cover correlates with environmental variables in a desert city: insights of mitigation measures to climate change

Urban Ecosystems - Green cover and air quality are important components of life quality and human ecology in arid lands. In the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, Hermosillo is the largest city with a...     

Comparative Perspectives on Social Indicators

Social Indicators Research -     

The exponentiated power exponential regression model with different regression structures: application in nursing data

We define the exponentiated power exponential distribution and propose a regression model with different systematic structures based on the new distribution. We show that the new regression model can be applied to dispersion data since it represents a parametric family of models that includes as sub-models some widely-known regression models. It then can be used more effectively in the analysis of real data. We use maximum likelihood estimation and derive the appropriate matrices for assessing local influence on the parameter estimates under different perturbation schemes. Some global-influence measurements are also investigated and simulation studies are performed to evaluate the accuracy of the estimates. We provide an application of the regression model with four systematic structures to nursing activities score data in the Unit of the Medical Clinic of University of São Paulo (USP) Hospital.     

Hard thresholding regression

In this paper, we propose the hard thresholding regression (HTR) for estimating high‐dimensional sparse linear regression models. HTR uses a two‐stage convex algorithm to approximate the ?₀‐penalized regression: The first stage calculates a coarse initial estimator, and the second stage identifies the oracle estimator by borrowing information from the first one. Theoretically, the HTR estimator achieves the strong oracle property over a wide range of regularization parameters. Numerical examples and a real data example lend further support to our proposed methodology.