Suspicious minds: local context and attitude variation across Swedish municipalities

Johansson Sevä I. Suspicious minds: local context and attitude variation across Swedish municipalities
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 225–235 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article investigates whether degree of suspicion of welfare abuse relates to local context in Sweden. It is suggested that certain features of Swedish municipalities can create a local information bias influencing individual suspicion of welfare abuse. Prevalence of social problems and political climate are features of the municipal context having the potential to influence opinion formation. Social problems are captured by local unemployment, social assistance and ill‐health rates. Political climate is captured by electoral support for conservatives. The results indicate that local context can influence suspicion of welfare abuse, contexts where social problems are widespread reduce such suspicion. While local political climate seems important in itself, it also interacts with social problem level, increasing suspicion if a conservative political climate and social problems coexist. While social problems seem to generate less suspicion regarding social policy abuse, they also provide ‘raw material’ for political rhetoric regarding suspicion.     

Role of Negative Emotion in Communication about CO2 Risks

This article describes how the effectiveness of risk communication is determined by the interaction between emotional and informative elements. An experiment is described that examined the role of negative emotion in communication about CO₂ risks. This experiment was based on the elaboration likelihood model and the related heuristic systematic model of attitude formation. The results indicated that inducing fear of CO₂ risks leads to systematic processing of information about energy conservation as a risk-reducing strategy. In turn, this results in more favorable attitudes toward energy conservation if strong arguments are provided. Individual differences in concern seem to have similar effects.     

Perceptions of Achievement and Achieving Peers in U.S. and Chinese Kindergartners

Two studies were conducted to examine perceptions about achievement and achiev‐ing peers in 190 U.S. and Chinese kindergartners. Children provided free‐narrative responses to story beginnings about an achieving protagonist in school settings. We found marked cultural differences. For achievement, U.S. children perceived more intellectual development, positive affects of the protagonist, and adult praise, where Chinese children perceived more social respect and their ability to help others. For lack of achievement in non‐achieving peers, U.S. children identified more negative affects, and Chinese children anticipated more negative reactions from adults. Moreover, although children in both cultures used non‐ability factors to explain achievement, Chinese children did so more consistently. Most strikingly, whereas Chinese children often expressed peer respect and desire to emulate the achieving protagonist, U.S. children frequently attributed peer negative reactions toward him or her. We interpret these differences as reflecting U.S. and Chinese cultural values regarding learning, achievement, and related self‐other perceptions.     

Ideologised values for British accents1

We report quantitative results from a large online survey of 5010 U.K. informants' reactions to 34 different accents of English, based on simple accent labels. Patterns of accent evaluation, in terms of adjudged levels of prestige, social attractiveness and some other variables, in many regards confirm broad findings from earlier research. Accent‐types associated with ‘standard’ speech are, for example, strongly favoured in the prestige and attractiveness dimensions. Several urban U.K. vernaculars, but not all, are systematically downgraded. On the other hand, robust differences emerge which have not been strongly evidenced previously – particularly differences according to informant gender (with females regularly producing more favourable evaluations) and region (with informants often favouring their own and linked varieties). There are also some important effects by informant age, for example with younger informants attributing less prestige to ‘standard’ accents. We interpret the findings as indicating rather persistent U.K. language‐ideologies around accent difference that are being reconstituted only gradually and in specific regards.     

心灵在大自然里平静——浅析华兹华斯的《丁登寺旁》

文章主要从诗歌的形式、内容、表达的感情方面,分析华兹华斯的诗歌要用"人们真正使用的语言"来描写"普通生活里的事情和情景"这一创作理念在<丁登寺旁>一诗中的体现.同时探讨华兹华斯在该诗中所反映的自然观的变化以及他的自然即上帝这一泛神论思想.     

A Further Examination of Cumulative Prospect Theory Parameterizations

Recent experimental studies have focused on fitting parameterized functional forms to cumulative prospect theory's weighting function. This paper examines the behavioral implications of the functional forms and the estimated parameters. We find that none of the parameterizations can simultaneously account for gambling on unlikely gains and the Allais paradox behavior or other strong choice patterns from experiments. Parameter estimates that lead to reasonable amounts of insurance and gambling behavior tend to also generate large risk premia. Taken as a whole, the analysis suggests that the functional forms proposed in the literature are not suitable for generalization to applied settings.     

Religious Identity and Family Ideologies in the Transition to Adulthood

This article examines how religion shapes family ideologies in young adulthood. Using the 31‐year Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (N= 909), we find relationships between mother’s religious characteristics when her child was born and the child’s own family ideologies in young adulthood. Further, multiple dimensions of young adults’ religious identities are independently related to their family ideologies, suggesting unique influences of both religious service attendance and the importance of religion. Our results vary across time and family ideologies in interesting patterns, but relationships between religion and attitudes are remarkably consistent. From early in life, mothers’ and children’s religious characteristics shape family ideologies in ways likely to help explain relationships found between religion and family behaviors.     

Examining the Relationship Between Female Inmate Homosexual Behavior and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality and Homosexuals

Most sociologists and penologists tend to shy away from studying inmate attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals. Researchers within the corrections field who focus on prison sexuality typically conduct their research on consensual samesex sexual behavior and sexual coercion. The focus of the present study, however, was to ascertain female inmates' attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals while exploring the role ofseveral predictor variables on their attitudes. Specifically, the authors examine the relationship between female inmate homosexual behavior and attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals. Because of the number of items pertaining to attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals, factor analysis was conducted to examine whether the items measured similar constructs. Results ofthe factor analysis revealed two distinct factors/issues:civil/personal rights and personal deviance models. The mostsalient, and only statistically significant, variables in the civil/personal rights model were age, homosexual activity prior to incarceration, and homosexual activity during incarceration. Homosexual behavior during incarceration was the only statistically significant predictor of the personal deviance model.     

Alienation and its correlates: A meta-analysis

We provide a meta-analysis of alienation, outlining the extent to which it is predicted by individual differences (need for achievement), role stressors (role conflict), leader dimensions (initiating structure), and aspects of the work context (formalization). We also examine its relationship with outcomes such as employee attitudes (job satisfaction), performance (task performance), withdrawal (absenteeism), and side effects (drinking). We examined these relationships based on data from 45 primary studies and 227 statistically independent relationships. Our meta-analysis provides cumulative evidence for effect sizes across multiple settings and respondents, clarifies ambiguous aspects of the construct, and presents more information on the extent to which alienation can be seen as the opposite of job involvement.     

Family roles and work values: Processes of selection and change

This study focuses on whether marriage and parenthood influence work values after taking into account the influence of work values on family formation. In a recent panel of young adults (N= 709), stronger extrinsic and weaker intrinsic work values during adolescence predicted marriage and parenthood 9 years out of high school. Controlling these relationships, wives, but not husbands, came to attach less importance to extrinsic rewards, and both husbands and wives attached less importance to intrinsic rewards, compared to single men and women. Fathers came to place greater importance on extrinsic rewards than men who had not become parents. The effect of motherhood on extrinsic values depended upon marital status, with positive effects only evident among single mothers. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of work‐family relationships and understanding the meaning of contemporary family roles, especially motherhood and fatherhood.