A Measure of Trust: The Italian Regional Divide in a Latent Class Approach

Social differences within countries may partly explain the lack of economic convergence and the persistence of regional disparities. The case of Italy is emblematic: economic gap between North and South remains at high levels with large differences in social capital and in trust. In this paper, we use the micro data from the ISTAT “Aspects of Daily Life” Survey to build a measure of “trust in others” and a measure of “trust in institutions” through a latent class model to attribute a trust score to the Italian households and the Italian regions and, in this way, to add elements of knowledge useful to policies. Our measures confirm a persistent territorial divide although the regional mapping appears more complex than the classical North–South partition. At last, a discussion on the household typology shows that the territorial gaps of trust persist even among households with similar socio-economic characteristics.     

Teachers' Representations on Adoptive Families and Educational Practices: New Challenges in Teachers' Preparation

In Italy, as in Europe, the number of internationally adopted school-aged children is increasing. The school is the first place where they can meet their new context, enabling good achievement of the whole integration and adoption processes. The research uses a qualitative method to explore the representations and the strategies that guide the educational work of 268 teachers of eight primary schools in relation to the adoptive family. ATLAS.ti 7.0 software was used. The results show an ambivalent representation of the adoptive family, which is reflected in the contents and strategy used by teachers to address issues of adoption.