Day-level fluctuations in stress and engagement in response to workplace incivility: A diary study

Previous research into workplace incivility, or rude and discourteous behaviour, has focused on between-person relationships. This study extends this research by using a diary design to examine the effect of experiences of incivility at work on two outcomes, stress and engagement, at a within-person level. Two potential moderators of the incivility-outcome association were also examined: the job resource of perceived supervisor support and the personal resource of core self-evaluation. Diary survey data were collected eight times over a four-week period from 130 security employees both in the field and at the corporate offices of a security firm in Australia. Data was analysed with multilevel modelling. Participants were found to have higher levels of stress on the days when they experienced more incivility, but high supervisor support reduced this effect. However, a negative relationship between incivility and daily engagement was only significant for those with low core self-evaluation. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of workplace incivility.     

What do we know about LGBQ+ college student academic experiences and outcomes?

In spite of recognition that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer+ (LGBQ+) young adults face challenges associated with their sexual identities, research on inequality in education has only recently begun examining their academic experiences and outcomes in college. Prior work has mainly focused on social and extracurricular experiences during college or academic outcomes among LGBQ+ students in K-12 settings. In this article, we review the growing body of social science literature on LGBQ+ college students' academic outcomes. A strength of our review is our integration of research on individual, interpersonal, and institutional characteristics and experiences that influence LGBQ+ student outcomes. In reviewing the literature, we identify a number of methodological and theoretical limitations, such as a lack of precision and consistency in defining and conceptualizing LGBQ+ identities and experiences and limited attention to intersections with race, class, and gender. We offer some solutions to these limitations and present a theoretical framework that promises to add clarity and further reliability to future research on LGBQ+ college student outcomes. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research.     

A risky strategy: Reflections on the World Bank Report Averting the old age crisis

This article is a critical assessment of a report on pensions recently published by the World Bank. It takes issue with the report's assertion that public pension systems have failed both socially and economically, demonstrating that many of the shortcomings identified by the World Bank apply with equal or greater force to private systems. It argues that the strategy outlined in the report, involving the replacement of social insurance by mandatory savings schemes, would involve an unacceptably high degree of risk for workers and pensioners, that it would make old-age protection more costly, and that the transition would impose a heavy burden on the current generation of workers. The article concludes that a more efficient and less disruptive approach to the provision of retirement pension would be to focus efforts on measures to rectify design deficiencies and inequities in existing schemes.     

Does the unemployment rate affect the divorce rate? An analysis of state data 1960-2005

We analyzed data from 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1960 to 2005 to study how the unemployment rate and the divorce rate are related. Unemployment is positively related to divorce in a bivariate analysis, but the association is not significant when state and year fixed effects are included in the statistical model. When the sample is divided into time periods, unemployment is negatively and significantly associated with divorce after 1980. These findings provide the strongest support for a “cost of divorce” perspective and suggest that a high rate of unemployment decreases the rate of divorce, net of unobserved time-invariant state characteristics and period (year) trends.     

Information Hazards in Biotechnology

With the advance of biotechnology, biological information, rather than biological materials, is increasingly the object of principal security concern. We argue that both in theory and in practice, existing security approaches in biology are poorly suited to manage hazardous biological information, and use the cases of Mousepox, H5N1 gain of function, and Botulinum toxin H to highlight these ongoing challenges. We suggest that mitigation of these hazards can be improved if one can: (1) anticipate hazard potential before scientific work is performed; (2) consider how much the new information would likely help both good and bad actors; and (3) aim to disclose information in the manner that maximally disadvantages bad actors versus good ones.     

Do Iconic Hand Gestures Really Contribute to the Communication of Semantic Information in a Face-to-Face Context?

Previous research has shown that iconic gestures are effective at communicating semantic information, particularly about the size and relative position of objects. However, the conclusions of these experiments have been somewhat limited by the fact that the methodology has typically involved presenting gesture–speech samples on video rather than in an actual face-to-face context. Because these different viewing conditions can impact on addressees’ behavior and perception, and therefore potentially impact on the amount of information they receive from gestures, the present study compares the communicative effectiveness of iconic gestures when viewed in a face-to-face context compared to when viewed on video. The results are quite striking in that gestures seemed at least as effective, and in some cases even more effective at communicating position and size information when they occurred in the face-to-face condition compared to video.