Preparing Parents for Adoption: An Agency Experience

To prepare for the complexities of family formation, 78 prospective adoptive parents participated in Pre-Adopt, a psychosocial educational orientation program offered by one private nonprofit agency. The five-session curriculum included an overview of adoption policies and procedures, discussion of the child placement process, exploration of couples' adoption concerns and expectations about child characteristics, information about adoption laws and birth-parent/child searches, and examination of anticipatory fantasies about birth parents. Program evaluation yielded statistically significant and clinically meaningful findings about changes in emotional readiness to adopt, parenting knowledge, and satisfaction with group participation, adoption policies and agency practices. Practice implications are considered.     

Does the availability of child care influence the employment of mothers? Findings from western Germany

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the effects of child care costson female employment. Day-care costs are usually treated as a reduction infemale wages and are supposed to reduce a woman's propensity to participatein the labor market. In this paper we argue that an analysis of the effects ofchild care on the employment of mothers in Germany should focus on theavailability rather than the affordability of care, due to peculiarities of theGerman day-care regime. Our empirical findings cast doubt on the effectivenessof the current German day-care regime. Specifically, we question the extent towhich it enables mothers to participate in the labor market.     

MultipLa--a tool for the combined overall estimation of various types of manual handling tasks

In the 1990ies the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (FIOSH) published "Key Indicator Methods" (KIM) for the evaluation of manual material handling tasks. These methods served as a national German implementation of the EU Manual Handling Directive (90/269/EEC). These methods allow the evaluation of individual handling tasks like lifting or pushing. KIM tools do not allow evaluating complex handling tasks like a combined lifting and pushing task. With respect to the needs at shop floor level (e.g. logistics), MultipLa tries to bridge that gap by means of an EXCEL based worksheet using the KIM philosophy. In the past several algorithms for a risk assessment had been developed. At the moment MultipLa is in a test phase at several automotive OEMs.     

A first empirical investigation into the pleasure of control as explaining factor in usage durations of information systems

To predict the technology acceptance of a system before market release is one of the big challenges of today. Many models are concerned with the question if someone is going to accept the system or not. Within this work a first empirical investigation of a personal trait called Pleasure of Control (PoC) is presented. Pleasure of Control is a construct that divides people into those people enjoy having control over a technical system and those who do not. It is predicted that a high Pleasure of Control leads to a prolonged system usage and unwillingness to accept highly automated systems. This paper presents a first empirical investigation of Pleasure of Control with 10 Persons with focus on usage durations. An experimental study revealed differences in the usage durations of a technical system (Apple iPad) between users with high and user with low Pleasure of Control measures.     

The Effect of Risk Beliefs on Property Values: A Case Study of a Hazardous Waste Site1

Health risk beliefs of homeowners near a landfill site were assessed in a survey and compared to expert judgments of the health risks of living near the site. A bimodal distribution of health risk beliefs suggested sharp disagreement between the experts and at least some of the residents. Correlates of high risk beliefs included perception of odor from the site, exposure to media coverage of the problem, having children living at home, age (younger respondents more concerned), and gender (females more concerned). An aggregated neighborhood health risk belief predicted reductions in home prices even after controlling for home physical characteristics, such as size and other disamenities such as proximity to a freeway. In the 4100 homes near the site, the estimated depression in property values was estimated to total about $40.2 million before the site was closed and to be about $19.7 million after closure. Implications of these results for community conflict and for benefit-cost analysis of hazard site remediation are discussed.     

Intimate relationships and changing patterns of money management at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Drawing on British data from two annual sweeps of the ISSP eight years apart in 1994 and 2002, for modules focusing on 'Family and Changing Gender Roles', this paper examines the extent to which changes in women's labour market participation, changing ideologies/discourses of gender and changing forms of intimate relationships are affecting the ways in which couples organize household money, and the implications of such changes for recent theories of intimate relationships. The analysis indicates that by 2002, the type of relationship respondents had established, together with their social class position, were both independently related to the ways in which they managed money, after controlling for socio-economic and cultural or discursive factors. Our findings also provide a degree of support for the thesis of a partial decline in the male breadwinner model of gender, as indicated by small declines in the use of the relatively inegalitarian female whole wage and housekeeping allowance systems which were most likely to be used by married couples and cohabiting fathers, expressing relatively traditional ideologies/discourses of breadwinning - and a slight increase in the use of the partial pool, which was most likely to be used by childless cohabiting couples in which male partners expressed less traditional ideologies of breadwinning and women were in middle-class jobs with incomes high enough to facilitate partially separate finances. We also suggest, however, that in so far as cohabiting couples earning different amounts define equality as contributing equally to household expenditure, it is possible that rather than being associated with shifts to greater equality in access to money for personal spending and saving, the partial pool may be associated with marked inequalities, because it may enable gender inequalities generated in the labour market to be more directly transposed into inequalities within households, despite the decline of traditional discourses of male breadwinning and the increasing importance of egalitarian ideologies of co-provisioning.     

Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Online Risk Taking: The Role of Gist and Verbatim Representations

Young people are exposed to and engage in online risky activities, such as disclosing personal information and making unknown friends online. Little research has examined the psychological mechanisms underlying young people's online risk taking. Drawing on fuzzy trace theory, we examined developmental differences in adolescents’ and young adults’ online risk taking and assessed whether differential reliance on gist representations (based on vague, intuitive knowledge) or verbatim representations (based on specific, factual knowledge) could explain online risk taking. One hundred and twenty two adolescents (ages 13–17) and 172 young adults (ages 18–24) were asked about their past online risk‐taking behavior, intentions to engage in future risky online behavior, and gist and verbatim representations. Adolescents had significantly higher intentions to take online risks than young adults. Past risky online behaviors were positively associated with future intentions to take online risks for adolescents and negatively for young adults. Gist representations about risk negatively correlated with intentions to take risks online in both age groups, while verbatim representations positively correlated with online risk intentions, particularly among adolescents. Our results provide novel insights about the underlying mechanisms involved in adolescent and young adults’ online risk taking, suggesting the need to tailor the representation of online risk information to different age groups.