“Like My Status”

This paper engages with the relatively new area of research into teenage girls and online social networks, focusing on the experiences and views of Israelis. In particular, we examine how Israeli girls construct social relationships on Facebook. Adopting a feminist interpretive approach, this qualitative study is based on focus group interviews with Israeli girls aged between twelve and eighteen from diverse cultural, economic, and social backgrounds. The girls clearly distinguish between different circles of social closeness on Facebook, with each circle marked by different relationships, dynamics, and expectations. The study's findings beg the question of whether social networks allow Israeli girls to exercise control, power, choice, and agency in their social world, or whether they remain informed by existing social structures that shape and restrict their choices and actions. The significance of these findings is discussed in the contexts of feminism, girl power, and Neoliberal discourse.     

Ensuring units invariant slack selection in radial data envelopment analysis models,and incorporating slacks into an overall efficiency score

This paper introduces a new methodology ensuring units invariant slack selection in radial DEA models and incorporating the slacks into an overall efficiency score. The CCR and BCC models are units invariant in their radial component, but not in their slack component, thus changing the units of measurement of one or more variables can change the models' solution. The proposed Full Proportional Slack (FPS) methodology improves the slack selections of the CCR and BCC models by producing slack selections that (a) are units invariant, thus producing fully units invariant models, (b) maximize the relative improvements represented by the slacks, and not their values, and (c) measure the full slacks that need to be removed from their corresponding variables. The FPS methodology is a fully oriented methodology first maximizing the improvements in the variables on the side of the orientation of the model. The Proportional Slack Adjusted (PSA) methodology incorporates the FPS slacks into an overall efficiency score, making it easier to interpret and use the results. The FPS and PSA methodologies are illustrated using an input oriented VRS Loan Quality DEA model with data from the retail branch network of one of Canada's largest banks.     

Mechanisms of the Effect of Involuntary Retirement on Older Adults’ Self-Rated Health and Mental Health

This study examined mechanisms of the effect of involuntary retirement on self-rated health and mental health among adults aged 50 or older. Using two waves of the Health and Retirement Study (2006 and 2010), we selected a sample of 1,195 individuals working for pay at baseline who responded to a lifestyle questionnaire in both waves. Regression-based path analyses were conducted to test the mediating effects of financial control, positive and negative family relationships, and social integration on the relationship between involuntary retirement and self-rated health and mental health. Results of mediation analyses indicated that transition to involuntary retirement was directly negatively associated with subsequent self-rated health and indirectly negatively associated with mental health via perception of less financial control. Voluntary retirement was indirectly positively associated with both self-rated and mental health via perception of more financial control. No significant direct or indirect effects of retirement were found when retirement was measured with an aggregate measure without specifying its voluntariness. Findings emphasize the importance of specifying the voluntariness of retirement and recognizing the heterogeneity in the mechanisms of involuntary and voluntary retirement.     

Challenges in the assessment of decision-making capacity

The considerations for and challenges of developing an instrument for the assessment of oder adult descision-making capacity are discussed. A variety of conceptual and methodological issues are discussed, using experience with the development of the Hopemont Capacity Assessment Interview to illustrate the directions one might take in instrument development. Research questions are raised in the context of these conceptual and methodological issues.     

Current and Future Trends in Internet-Supported Mental Health Interventions

Despite growing research in the past two decades involving Internet-supported or online mental health interventions, there has been only a few attempts to provide a synthesis of the research findings and future trends. The Internet has grown exponentially during this time, providing greater access to a wider population than ever before. Consequently, online mental health interventions have the potential to be cost-effective, convenient, and reach a more diverse population than traditional, face-to-face interventions. This paper reviews and summarizes the current research for online mental health interventions and discusses future trends. These interventions range from psychoeducational static webpages and complex, personalized, interactive cognitive-behavioral-based self-help programs, to videoconferencing, self-help support groups, blogging, and professional-led online therapy. Future trends in online interventions include the greater prevalence of online therapy and the use of video chat and videoconferencing technologies to enhance and extend the therapeutic relationship. The use of texting or short message service (SMS), mobile communications, smart phone applications, gaming, and virtual worlds extends the intervention paradigm into new environments not always previously considered as intervention opportunities. We find that there is strong evidence to support the effective use and future development of a variety of online mental health applications.     

Moving Subjects,Stagnant Paradigms: Can the ‘Mobilities Paradigm’ Transcend Methodological Nationalism?

This article contends that an emerging ‘mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility.