The relationship between paid work and parenthood--a comparison of structures,concepts and developments in the UK and Austria

This article investigates and compares the dominant concepts of public policy concerning the employment-parenthood interface in the UK and Austria. These two countries have been chosen because they represent very different public policy conceptions, particularly in approaching the work-family issue. In order to show the consequences of these policies the paper focuses on working time and time away from employment, when children are very young, and relates these aspects to currently introduced and changed regulatory structures, such as working time regulations and statutory parental leave. The active labour market and family policy in Austria, generally, supports the reconciliation of employment and parenthood. However, the Austrian work-family 'system' suffers from the underlying notion of the male breadwinner model in public support structures and low normative support of employed mothers. The cultural barriers for a more equal distribution of the burdens of combining employment and parenthood seem to be lower in the UK. The market as the political focus, in general, allows more equal opportunities for (qualified) women in the labour market and within families. But the highly flexible and polarised labour market, passive public policy and weak legal protection of employed parents creates a difficult relationship between paid work and family life for many parents, in particular for low-skilled, low-paid parents, above all mothers. These analyses provide the basis for conclusions for public policy aiming at the reconciliation of paid work and parenthood. Ce texte cherche à comparer les concepts dominants de la politique gouvernementale concernant l'interface travail-parent en Grande-Bretagne et en Autriche. Ces deux pays ont été choisis parce qu'ils présentent des concepts de politique gouvernementale très différents, en particulier en ce qui concerne la question de la famille et le travail. Ce texte montre les conséquences de la pratique de ces politiques sur le temps au travail rémunéréet le temps passé à l'extérieur de l'emploi ou sans emploi, et ce, dans un contexte o[ugrave] les enfants sont jeunes. Le texte fait la relation entre ces éléments et la pratique des structures de contrôle existantes et modifiées telles que les lois (ou: les règlements) sur le temps passéau travail et sur les congé parentaux. En général, le marché du travail et la politique de la famille en Autriche encourage la conciliation entre l'emploi et la responsabilité de parent. Par contre, ce système de travail- famille autrichien est un concept qui est fondé à la fois sur le modèle de l'homme comme fournisseur principal du revenu familial dans les structures de soutien public ainsi que sur normes de soutien peu élevées pour les mères employées. Les barrières culturelles face àune distribution plus égalitaire de la responsabilité travail-famille semblent être moins élevées en Grande-Bretagne. En général, le marché et la politique du marché du travail ont offerts plus d'opportunités aux femmes qualifiées. Mais la volatilité (et la polarisation) du marché du travail, la politique gouvernementale passive et la faible protection légale pour les parentstravailleurs créent tous une relation difficile pour les parents entre le travail rémunéré et la vie de famille--en particulier pour ceux qui sont moins qualifiés et mal rémunérés, dont surtout les mères de famille. Cette analyse nous guide vers la nécessité d'une politique gouvernementale qui vise la conciliation entre le travail rémunéré et la responsabilité parentale.     

In search of rigor, relevance, and legitimacy: what drives the impact of publications?

In this study, we introduce the concept of legitimacy to the rigor-relevance debate and investigate empirically how rigor, relevance, and legitimacy are related to the process of knowledge dissemination within a research field. We argue that this analysis has been a missing piece in the debate on rigor and relevance when institutional logics about what constitutes both elements lead researchers to act according to what they perceive to be appropriate behavior in the research field. We draw on insights from the micro and macro levels of institutional theory to show how researchers aiming to bestow legitimacy on their own work conform to these “rules of the game”. Using meta-analytical techniques, we focus on the field of strategic entrepreneurship and analyze how rigor- and relevance-related characteristics of studies in this field are linked to their legitimacy and therefore to the impact they have in the research community.     

Assessing the Playing Field: A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Internet Sports Gambling Behavior

Internet gambling is growing rapidly, as is concern about its possible effect on the public’s health. This paper reports the results of the first prospective longitudinal study of actual Internet sports gambling behavior during eight study months. Data include recorded fixed-odds bets on the outcome of sporting contests and live-action bets on the outcome of events within contests for 40,499 Internet sports gambling service subscribers who enrolled during February 2005. We tracked the following primary gambling behaviors: daily totals of the number of bets made, money bet, and money won. We transformed these variables into measures of gambling involvement. We analyzed behavior for both fixed-odds and live-action bets. The median betting behavior of the 39,719 fixed-odds bettors was to place 2.5 bets of €4 (approximately $5.3 US) every fourth day during the median 4 months from first to last bet. This typical pattern incurred a loss of 29% of the amount wagered. The median betting behavior of the 24,794 live-action bettors was to place 2.8 wagers of €4 every fourth day during the median duration of 6 weeks at a loss of 18% of the amount wagered. We also examined the behavior of empirically determined groups of heavily involved bettors whose activity exceeded that of 99% of the sample.     

Multiple hypothesis tests based On conditional differences in means

Many hypothesis tests are univariate tests and cannot cope with multiple hypothesis without an auxiliary procedure as e. g. the Bonferroni-Holm-procedure. At the same time, there is an urgent need for testing multiple hypothesis due to the very simple existing methods as the Bonferroni-correction or the Bonferroni-Holm-procedure, which suffers from a very small local significance level to detect statistical inferences or the drawback that logical and statistical dependencies among the test statistics are not used, whereby its detection is NP-hard. In honour of this occasion, we present a multiple hypothesis test for i.i.d. random variables based on conditional differences in means, which is capable to cope with multiple hypothesis and does not suffer on such drawbacks as the Bonferroni-correction or the Bonferroni-Holm-procedure. Thereby, the computation time can be neglected.     

Linking Migration Intentions with Flows: Evidence and Potential Use

In the absence of reliable, internationally available migration flow data necessary for statistical forecasting, policymakers increasingly turn to survey data on emigration intentions to evaluate future migration trends. The important assumption – i.e. that there is a measurable and systematic relationship between the intention to migrate and actual migration – has not been firmly established at the international level. We examine the association between estimated population averages of emigration intentions and official migration flow data based on data for more than 160 countries. The results show a strong association between emigration intentions and recorded bilateral flows to industrialized countries, as well as between intentions and aggregated out‐migration. The results provide policymakers with a reliability assessment of survey data on emigration intentions and encourage future attempts to incorporate survey data in formal statistical migration forecasting models.     

Kontexteffekte in Familien – Angleichung von Paaren und intergenerationale Transmission am Beispiel Religiosität

The present contribution shows conceptual and methodological approaches for the study of social context effects within families. Family members mutually constitute the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. Social influence in families becomes evident empirically in family members’ significant similarity concerning a wide variety of characteristics. The present study focuses on intrafamily convergence with regard to religiousness. In an empirical illustration, both (a) horizontal intracouple alignment and (b) vertical intergenerational transmission processes are examined. Besides the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, our analyses show that social context effects are more pronounced the stronger the cohesion of the respective interaction dyad is (e.g., according to measures of relationship quality).     

School-based prevention of bullying and relational aggression in adolescence: the fairplayer.manual

The fairplayer.manual is a school-based program to prevent bullying. The program consists of fifteen to seventeen consecutive ninety-minute lessons using cognitive-behavioral methods, methods targeting group norms and group dynamics, and discussions on moral dilemmas. Following a two-day training session, teachers, together with skilled fairplayer.teamers, implement fairplayer.manual in the classroom during regular school lessons. This chapter offers a summary of the program's conception and underlying prevention theory and summarizes the results from two evaluation studies. Standardized questionnaires showed a positive impact of the intervention program on several outcome variables.     

An integrative model of leadership behavior

Decades of questionnaire and interview studies have revealed various leadership behaviors observed in successful leaders. However, little is known about the actual behaviors that cause those observations. Given that lay observers are prone to cognitive biases, such as the halo effect, the validity of theories that are exclusively based on observed behaviors is questionable. We thus follow the call of leading scientists in the field and derive a parsimonious model of leadership behavior that is informed by established psychological theories. Building on the taxonomy of Yukl (2012), we propose three task-oriented behavior categories (enhancing understanding, strengthening motivation and facilitating implementation) and three relation-oriented behavior categories (fostering coordination, promoting cooperation and activating resources), each of which is further specified by a number of distinct behaviors. While the task-oriented behaviors are directed towards the accomplishment of shared objectives, the relation-oriented behaviors support this process by increasing the coordinated engagement of the team members. Our model contributes to the advancement of leadership behavior theory by (1) consolidating current taxonomies, (2) sharpening behavioral concepts of leadership behavior, (3) specifying precise relationships between those categories and (4) spurring new hypotheses that can be derived from existing findings in the field of psychology. To test our model as well as the hypotheses derived from this model, we advocate the development of new measurements that overcome the limitations associated with questionnaire and interview studies.     

Self-Reported Losses Versus Actual Losses in Online Gambling: An Empirical Study

Many research findings in the gambling studies field rely on self-report data. A very small body of empirical research also suggests that when using self-report, players report their gambling losses inaccurately. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the differences between objective and subjective gambling spent data by comparing gambler’s actual behavioral tracking data with their self-report data over a 1-month period. A total of 17,742 Norwegian online gamblers were asked to participate in an online survey. Of those surveyed, 1335 gamblers answered questions relating to gambling expenditure that could be compared with their actual gambling behavior. The study found that the estimated loss self-reported by gamblers was correlated with the actual objective loss and that players with higher losses tended to have more difficulty estimating their gambling expenditure (i.e., players who spent more money gambling also appeared to have more trouble estimating their expenses accurately). Overall, the findings demonstrate that caution is warranted when using self-report data relating to amount of money spent gambling in any studies that are totally reliant on self-report data.     

Language roulette – the effect of random placement on refugees’ labour market integration

Placement of refugees and subsequent labour market integration within a host country represents a key challenge for policymakers and has emerged as one of the most divisive topics in the public debate. Immigration policy in Switzerland adopts random placement of asylum seekers across its different language regions. Hence, this policy allows to estimate the causal effect of language skills on employment chances, as refugees are exogenously placed across regions where the spoken language could either match or deviate from individual language skills. The results of this ‘natural experiment’ indicate substantially higher probabilities of finding employment when asylum seekers are placed in regions with a lingua franca that matches their individual language skills. Additionally, the findings suggest that language course participation can offset the reduced likelihood of employment in cases of a language mismatch. While random placement of refugees may be desirable for political reasons, it is detrimental to the economic integration process. Thereby, the study draws relevant conclusions for a larger European immigration policy.