Adaptable Careers: Maximizing Less and Exploring More

Today, young adults are expected to decide between educational, vocational, and job options and to make the best choice possible. Career literatures emphasize the importance of young adults' career decision making but also acknowledge the problems related to making these decisions. The authors argue that career counselors could support clients' intuitive processing of career information and help their clients to develop a positive and flexible view of the self and the environment while diminishing concerns about accountability for and irreversibility of career decisions. The authors argue that career adaptability rather than decision making should become the focal concept of career theory and practice.     

Excluding Institutionalized Elderly from Surveys: Consequences for Income and Poverty Statistics

Growing life expectancy and changes in financial, marriage and labour markets have placed the income position of the elderly at the center of scientific and political discourse. As a consequence, the last decades witnessed the publication of various influential reports that contained comparative statistics on old age income inequalities on the basis of international surveys. Common to these surveys is that they exclude the elderly who live in institutions. The divergence between the target population (e.g. the population aged 65 and over) and the survey population (e.g. the noninstitutionalized population aged 65 and over) that thus arises, might lead to important bias in the survey results. However, hardly any research has been conducted quantifying the direction and strength of this bias. This article tries to fill this gap and assesses the consequences of excluding the institutionalized elderly for the validity and international comparability of a number of indicators. Analyses with the Belgian Datawarehouse Labour Market and Social Protection show that the resulting bias is negligible for average equivalent pension income, but that assistance dependency among pensioners is underestimated by 10%. Furthermore, on the basis of international statistics, it is shown that the share of elderly in institutions varies substantially across countries. It is argued how this jeopardizes the international comparability of old age statistics. Finally, the article opens up a discussion on the meaning of lack of income and wealth among institutionalized elderly. It concludes that depending on how this question is answered, poverty will be under- or overestimated in countries with a high share of institutionalized elderly.     

Interpersonal violence against people with disabilities: understanding the problem from a rural context

Interpersonal violence against people with disabilities is a significant social problem. Little attention has focused on the rural context and the relevance for understanding violence. Given the dearth of literature exploring interpersonal violence, disability, and rurality, a review of rural-focused literature on domestic violence, sexual violence, and elder abuse was conducted to identify themes that could provide insight into this problem for people with disabilities. Themes include geographic isolation, traditional cultural values and norms, lack of anonymity, lack of resources, and poor response of systems. Implications for understanding interpersonal violence against rural people with disabilities and for social work practice are discussed.     

Marital and Cohabitation Dissolution and Parental Depressive Symptoms in Fragile Families

The consequences of divorce are pronounced for parents of young children, and cohabitation dissolution is increasing in this population and has important implications. The mental health consequences of union dissolution were examined, by union type and parental gender, using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n= 1,998 for mothers and 1,764 for fathers). Overall, cohabitation and marital dissolution were both associated with increased maternal and paternal depressive symptoms, though for married mothers, depressive symptoms returned to predissolution levels with time. Difference‐in‐difference estimates indicated no differences in the magnitude of the increase in depressive symptoms by type of dissolution, though pooled difference models suggested that married fathers increased in depressive symptoms more than cohabiting fathers. Potential time‐variant mediators did not account for these associations, though greater family chaos was associated with increased maternal depressive symptoms, and decreased social support and father–child contact were associated with increased paternal depressive symptoms.     

Three experiments to support the design of lightweight comfortable vehicle seats

Seats need to be more lightweight for airplanes, cars, busses and even trains to contribute to a better environment and to reduce energy consumption. However, a reduction in comfort due to weight reduction is not preferable, which opens a new area of research: improving comfort with a minimum of material or with lightweight materials and systems. In this paper three experiments are performed to test the effects of light weight seats and parts of a seat on comfort. The first experiment shows that a new developed light weight massage system improves comfort and reduces muscle activity. The second experiment shows that the automatic seat adjustment without motors improves the comfort as well. The third experiment showed that a light weight seat following closely the human body contour is experienced on many aspects in the same way as current more heavy seats. More research and models will be needed in this ergonomic field which needs more attention.     

Gender Differences in Managerial Intention

This study focuses on existing gender differences within management and within vertical career mobility. Some theoretical explanations of these differences are discussed, with behaviour and motivation theories as the base for the present study. The influence of different variables, such as outcome expectancies, perceived self-efficacy, subjective norm, work-role salience and perceived motivating job characteristics are examined. Data were gathered in two separate organizations. It was hypothesized that the motivation for a managerial job is less for females than males, which can be explained by the variables under study. In both studies perceived self-efficacy was the most important predictor of intention to assume a managerial job. Multiple regression analysis revealed significant relationships among the different variables of the theoretical model and the strengths of these relationships. In one of the two organizations, men showed a greater disposition to a managerial job, and their perceived self-efficacy was higher. It is concluded then that managerial intention can be influenced by the organizational context.     

New Parents' Psychological Adjustment and Trajectories of Early Parental Involvement

Trajectories of parental involvement time (engagement and child care) across 3, 6, and 9 months postpartum and associations with parents' own and their partners' psychological adjustment (dysphoria, anxiety, and empathic personal distress) were examined using a sample of dual‐earner couples experiencing first‐time parenthood (N = 182 couples). Using time diary measures that captured intensive parenting moments, hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that patterns of associations between psychological adjustment and parental involvement time depended on the parenting domain, aspect of psychological adjustment, and parent gender. Psychological adjustment difficulties tended to bias the 2‐parent system toward a gendered pattern of “mother step in” and “father step out,” as father involvement tended to decrease and mother involvement either remained unchanged or increased in response to their own and their partners' psychological adjustment difficulties. In contrast, few significant effects were found in models using parental involvement to predict psychological adjustment.     

Making claims on value: The rhetoric construction of aesthetic innovation by ethnic minority creatives

Conceptualizing aesthetic innovation as the social and cultural act of claiming value, we investigate how ethnic minority creatives rhetorically construct their work as innovative, while dealing with contradictory discourses of ethnicity. From our analysis of the rhetorical schemes they deploy to construct aesthetic innovation, three types of argumentations emerged: (1) argumentations relating one's creative work to one's unique self and biography through liaisons of coexistence; (2) argumentations establishing aesthetic innovation vis-à-vis other products and traditions through comparisons and model schemes and (3) argumentations highlighting power struggles between the creative and some ‘significant others’ in the creative industries through personifications and hierarchies. This study contributes to a better understanding of rhetorical strategies to construct aesthetic innovation focusing on the role social identities play in this process. More generally, it shows the suitability of rhetoric theory and method to analyse claims on value.