Search

This study explores the relationship between parental educational similarity – educational concordance (homogamy) or discordance (heterogamy) – and children’s health outcomes. Its contribution is threefold. First and foremost, I use longitudinal data on children’s health outcomes tracking children from age 1 to 15, thus being able to assess whether the relationship changes at key life-course and developmental stages of children. This is an important addition to the relevant literature, where the focus is solely on outcomes at birth. Second, I look at different health outcomes, namely height-for-age (HFA) and BMI-for-age (BFA) z-scores, alongside their dichotomized counterparts, stunting and thinness. Third, I conduct the same set of analyses in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, thus providing multi-context evidence from countries at different levels of development and with different socio-economic characteristics and gender dynamics. Results reveal important heterogeneity across contexts. In Ethiopia and India, parental educational homogamy is associated with worse health outcomes in infancy and childhood, while associations are positive in Peru and, foremost, Vietnam. Complementary estimates from matching techniques show that these associations tend to fade after age 1, except in Vietnam, where the positive relationship persists through adolescence, thus supporting the homogamy-benefit hypothesis not only at birth, but also across the early life course. Insights from this study contribute to the inequality debate on the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage and shed additional light on the relationship between early-life conditions and later-life outcomes in critical periods of children’s lives.

Models of research systems increasingly emphasize collaborations between networks of heterogeneous actors, to both produce knowledge and formulate interdisciplinary responses to societal challenges and market needs. In this context, researchers’ goals and practices are required to satisfy professional requirements for new scientific findings and societal demand for relevant knowledge. Researchers may need also to find ways to reconcile tensions between these two missions. This article proposes an analytical and operational framework that incorporates individual, organizational and process-context factors to explain distinct configurations of scientific and societal impacts from research. The framework emphasises the role of productive interactions with different nonacademic actors as a mechanism for reconciling the scientific and societal missions of research., This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the State Plan of Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation (EXTRA project, grant CSO2013-48053-R) and by the Oslo Institute for Research on the Impact of Science (OSIRIS, grant 256240) funded by the Research Council of Norway.

This article explores the concept of care and the responsibility assumed by ‘states’ when taking children into care. It examines the limitations of the state in exercising its parental duty and it proposes a model for re-conceptualising children’s social care by drawing on the literature on autonomy, recognition theory and specific provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The model places the child’s dignity at the core of the care framework, and it argues that a children’s rights approach which is grounded in moral theories contributes to their self-esteem and autonomy, both of which are key for a person’s development and well-being. The model addresses the tension between children’s rights and child welfare and it can be applied to child protection services that aim to take a children’s rights approach.

Objectives This meta-review integrates the findings of meta-analyses and systematic reviews to explore the effect of intervention programs on recidivism for juvenile offenders. Methods The systematic literature search gathered 48 meta-analyses and systematic reviews from 53 research reports, contributing 56 independent effect sizes for analysis. These effect sizes were statistically integrated, and five moderators of theoretical and methodological importance were tested using meta-regression. Results On average, intervention programs are associated with a significant reduction in recidivism (rΦ = −0.09, p < 0.001) for juvenile offenders who participate in a program compared to those who do not. However, reductions in recidivism significantly vary between the levels of criminal justice system, characteristics of juvenile offenders, types of program modalities, and methodological quality. Conclusions Results indicate that intervention programs can be an effective approach to reducing recidivism for juvenile offenders, especially when combined with a rehabilitative program modality.

Drawing on data collected in a cross-disciplinary survey of early-career academics (ECAs) in New Zealand, this article explores the factors influencing ECA conference attendance. Our conceptual framework uses conference attendance as the dependent variable and measures gender, ethnicity, family responsibilities and workload. Three key features affect conference attendance: demographic characteristics (background features and prior experiences that affect an academic’s willingness and ability to attend), accessibility (constraints to attending, such as financing, family responsibilities, institutional support or teaching commitments) and purpose (the value placed on attending conferences by the individual, the institution, or the discipline). In particular, we identify differences for women, Indigenous people, and those born overseas with respect to their ability to navigate and their inclination to attend national and international conferences.

In contrast to works on victim advocacy in specific organizational contexts, this article introduces the term “victim work” to capture the vast array of victim-related roles and tasks that have proliferated in recent decades. Data are derived from in-depth interviews with 30 “victim workers” in public and private agencies in two Midwestern states. The interviews revealed diverse work experiences that spanned hotlines, crisis response, legal proceedings, and postconviction support. Three themes emerged that characterize “victim work”: flexibility, emotions, and the challenge of “fit”—the multifaceted difficulties of interacting with victims and agents of the justice system. Based on the findings, we offer a revised model of criminal justice vis-à-vis victims and implications for practice and future research.

Building on historical and discursive institutionalism, this article examines the agent-based dynamics of gradual institutional change. Specifically, using marriage equality in the United States as a case study, we examine how actors’ ideational work enabled them to make use of the political and discursive opportunities afforded by multiple venues to legitimize the process of institutional change to take off sequentially through layering, displacement, and conversion. We also pay special attention to how the discursive strategies deployed by LGBT advocates, religious-conservative organizations and other private actors created new opportunities to influence policy debates and tip the scales to their preferred policy outcome. The sequential perspective adopted in this study allows problematizing traditional conceptualizations of which actors support or contest the status quo, as enduring oppositional dynamics lead them to perform both roles in subsequent phases of the institutional change process.

Some real life processes, including molecular ones, are context-sensitive, in the sense that their outcome depends on side conditions that are most of the times difficult, or impossible, to express fully in advance. In this paper, we survey and discuss a logical account of context-sensitiveness in molecular processes, based on a kind of non-classical logic. This account also allows us to revisit the relationship between logic and philosophy of science (and philosophy of biology, in particular).

Our review essay contributes to the long-standing and vibrant discussion in science and technology studies (STS) on methods, methodologies, and theory–method relationships. We aim to improve the reflexivity of research by unpacking the often implicit assumptions that imbue research conduct and by offering practical tools through which STS researchers can recognize their research designs and think through them in a new way. To achieve these aims, we analyze different compositions of theories, methods, and empirics in three different STS approaches—actor–network theory, the biography of artifacts and practices, and ethnomethodology—by employing the concept of a theory–methods package (TMP). A selection of theoretical cornerstone texts and case studies in infrastructure research from each tradition serves as our material. Our findings point, first, to differences between the TMPs of the reviewed approaches and to the internal diversity of theory–method relationships in each approach. Second, we found some intriguing similarities between the approaches and discuss potential complementarities of their theory–method fits.

This article presents the findings of 51 interviews with foreign national prisoners in Flanders (Belgium). Following an appreciative inquiry stance, the aim is to understand how foreign nationals experience (accessibility to) prison activities (for example, education, work, sports activities and worship) and to investigate if and how this differs between foreign-speaking and Dutch-speaking foreign nationals. A thematic analysis of the interviews revealed several components of the activities offered that were perceived by the foreign nationals to be ‘working well’ and revealed several dreams concerning the activities for foreign nationals. Within each theme considered, similarities and dissimilarities among foreign-speaking and Dutch-speaking foreign nationals are described. This article argues that foreign nationals are confronted with a new pain of imprisonment, namely ‘the pain of (non-)participation’. The findings could enable a shift from supply-driven to tailor-made activities for foreign national prisoners.

Strong and viable modern states have limited the use of private force to narrowly-defined situations of self-defense. Yet, evidence from crime surveys shows that a significant proportion of violent and property crimes is not reported to police. Instead of calling the police, people either take no action or employ a variety of mechanisms, including retaliation, to settle disputes. Drawing on data from a survey of 2,921 young people in two German cities, we investigate the propensity of adolescents to resort to self-justice retaliation. The results show widespread propensity to engage in retaliatory actions, particularly among adolescent males of low socio-economic status. Further, attitudes to the police, unsupervised routine activities, and delinquency-related variables were the most influential correlates of propensity to engage in retaliatory actions.

In this article, I reflect on the process of understanding and my strategies of reporting in the context of a three-year ethnographic study on non-monogamous sex and relationships in Belgium, which included interviews and participant observation in various dating sites and in support groups for people in consensual non-monogamous relationships. I draw the contours of what a research ethics that creates space for the researcher's embodied learning, and learning through sexual-intimate relationships in particular, might look like, centralizing the concept of vulnerability. An ethics of intersubjective vulnerability not only has the potential to constitute an epistemological position from which to conduct critical analyses that aims at producing multidimensional and embodied understanding of power relations, it also constitutes a space of political contestation and a position from which to start to envision alternative possibilities to the neoliberal values that have pervaded society.

Parent-adolescent sexual health communication (SHC) is a protective factor that can reduce adverse adolescent sexual health outcomes, and the frequency, quality, and content of SHC predicts its effectiveness. However, research on this topic has been limited in scope, overwhelmingly focused on mothers; and often has only included the parent or adolescent perspective, not both members of the dyad. Using secondary cross-sectional data, this study used ANCOVA, logistic regression, correlational, and chi-square analyses to investigate parent-gender differences in parent-adolescent SHC. Participants included 341 parent-adolescent dyads. Compared to fathers, mothers rated parent-adolescent SHC as more important and more comfortable, and had greater self-efficacy for and fewer reservations about SHC than fathers. Mothers also reported talking more frequently and more broadly with their child about sexual health than fathers. Adolescent-reported frequency, quality, and content of parent-adolescent SHC did not differ significantly by parent gender, except for one sexual health topic. Dyadic analyses revealed that mothers and their children tended to agree more in their reports of parent-adolescent SHC than fathers and their children. These findings suggest that fathers may need additional resources to help them confidently engage in effective parent-adolescent SHC.

Drawing on a decade of research on terrorism in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we show how subjective “rational choices” motivate some women to engage in terrorist activism. Focusing on the motives of young women who engage in terrorism is consistent with feminist theory’s insistence on women’s agency—even at the extremes. In addition to the well-established motivations for terrorism reported in the literature, interviews with young women involved in terrorism reveal mixed personal motives for their gender-defying choices, including thrill-seeking and some conscious rebellion. However, we contend that women’s subjective rationale for participation in such violent behavior needs to be contextualized. A cost–benefit approach, we maintain, highlights the strategic considerations supporting the deployment of women as combatants by Palestinian terrorist organizations. We argue that the inclusion of women in terrorist activism in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict exposes a major fault line in attitudes to the role and proper place of women in what remains largely a patriarchal culture. This social ambivalence accounts for why, on all measures, women fare worse than their male counterparts. The implications of the findings for feminist research as well as policy are discussed.

There is nearly universal consensus that child labour is harmful to the development of the child, however, widespread contention exists on whether child labour is cultural or economic necessity. This paper aimed to ascertain parental perceptions of the nature of child labour in rural and urban Ghana. The sample size of this study was 60 participants, all of whom were parents. Participants included: government officials; NGO representatives; and both parents whose children were involved in child labour, and parents whose children were not. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents (10) and stakeholders (10). and Focus groups (30); and participant observations (10) were also utilised. A purposive sampling technique was employed across rural and urban areas in Ghana. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. A framework approach was utilised as the main qualitative data analysis method. Parents in the rural areas indicated that the nature of child labour is cultural because children are not working because of economic necessity but for cultural reasons. On the other hand, children engage in child labour in the urban area for economic necessity since child labour is a very important component of the local economy. Understanding the socio-cultural and economic factors that drive child labour is necessary to design and execute the most suitable mechanisms for intervention and prevention.

Despite poor treatment results, a family-oriented approach and the securing of residency have been deemed essential to recovery from resignation syndrome (RS). In a retrospective cohort study, we evaluated an alternative method involving environmental therapy, with patients separated from their parents, while actively abstaining from involving the asylum process in treatment. We examined medical records, social services acts, and residential care home acts from 13 individuals treated at Solsidan residential care home between 2005 and 2020. Severity and outcome were assessed with Clinical Global Impression, Severity and Improvement subscales. Thirteen participants were included and out of these nine (69%) recovered, i.e. they very much or much improved. Out of the eight that were separated, all recovered, also, one non-separated recovered. The difference in outcome between subjects separated and not was significant (p = 0.007). Moreover, out of the five which received a residency permit during treatment, one recovered whereas four did not. The difference in outcome between subjects granted residency and not was significant (p = 0.007). The data revealed three (23%) cases of simulation where parents were suspected to have instigated symptoms. Our evaluation suggests that separation from parents and abstaining from invoking residency permit could be essential components when treating RS. Relying on a family-oriented approach, and residency could even be detrimental to recovery. The examined intervention was successful also in cases of probable malingering by proxy.

In recent years, a growing trend to consider strengths and protective factors in studies on desistance from crime has emerged. The present study explores three formerly detained adolescents’ narratives, aiming to tease out how Quality of Life (QoL) and desistance interact in pathways towards a “better life.” The narratives suggest that the journey towards a better life is highly individual, and may unfold via multiple pathways characterized by an ambivalent relationship between QoL and desistance. Alongside the importance of individual aspects and social support, societal barriers and opportunities play a significant role in creating new chances to re-build a life and prosocial identities. This reflects earlier findings that desistance is not an individual responsibility. It is essential to support young people to overcome societal barriers that impede participation in society and living a good life. This research adds to growing evidence of strengths-based approaches to rehabilitation, such as the Good Lives Model (GLM).

Visions are a major driver of the scientific and technological advance, as may be seen in the fields of spaceflight, nanotechnology, or synthetic biology. They often play a major role in the early stages of innovation. However, the spreading of scientific visions and their role in innovation processes is not well understood yet. Techno-visionary futures are created and obviously have authors whose work initiates a process of spreading by communication and dissemination. While the spreading of these visions into scientific and societal debates and their impacts upon them can considerably influence the course of research and innovation, little is known about the processes and mechanisms of spreading of techno-visionary futures. We only can diagnose desiderates for future research and propose some ideas how this gap could be closed.

Highlights Ninety percent of sexual assault kits were submitted to the crime lab for analysis. Victim, assault, and case factors played little role in predicting kit submission. Submission rates varied significantly between different cities. State and organizational culture, policy, and practice are critically important.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to propose a set of design recommendations for crowdsourcing platforms with a focus on user engagement. A sample of New Zealand (NZ) cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) crowdsourcing platforms were assessed, with the aim of offering insights into how they have been designed to encourage dialogue and engagement and to sustain participation.Design/methodology/approachThe design recommendations were derived from a review of related works. Following this, 12 crowdsourcing projects overseen by libraries, museums and an archive in NZ were assessed against the recommendations through content analysis.FindingsThe recommendations were classified into four main categories. These were promote ease of use, attract and sustain user interest, foster a community of users and show users that their work is contributing to the institution and society. The findings indicated that the sample of crowdsourcing projects assessed were generally successful at displaying the credibility and significance of their projects, and promoting their crowdsourced collections. Many of the projects could nevertheless benefit from providing further support to promoting dialogues and engagement with their users and contributors and sustaining offline community interaction.Research limitations/implicationsThe content analysis conducted was focused on the functionality of design elements of the crowdsourcing platforms. The design recommendations derived from the analysis were intended as a starting point for discussion and they would need to be validated in further studies. Other relevant project information such as funding and staffing, promotion and outreach efforts were not solicited in this study. Such information could provide important contextualisation. Future research could take the form of in-depth case studies, including surveying those involved in the projects and stakeholders to investigate such contextual aspects of crowdsourcing projects.Originality/valuePrevious research on crowdsourcing in NZ CHIs consisted of single case studies. This study provides a wider snapshot and insights into digital crowdsourcing platforms from public NZ CHIs. The study findings have practical implications for project managers and Web designers involved in crowdsourcing projects, particularly those in the cultural heritage sector.

This study examines the ecological reliability, convergent validity and ecological stability of neighbourhood (dis)organizational processes measured by means of two methods: inhabitant surveys and the so-called key informant analysis technique. Considering that ecological processes play a major role in many contemporary criminological theories and research, it is vital to take into account methodological challenges and to question the reliability, validity and stability of the measures reflecting these underlying processes. (Dis)organizational processes are predominantly measured by means of questionnaires surveying neighbourhood inhabitants. To yield ecologically reliable and valid measures this approach requires large numbers of respondents. In this study we analyse the relationships between ecological measures of neighbourhood processes based on surveys of inhabitants versus key informants. The findings suggest that key informants can provide reliable, valid and stable measures of (dis)organizational neighbourhood processes. Therefore, the key informant analysis technique is an essential complementary, or even substitutive, method in the measurement of neighbourhood processes; shared survey-method variance is eliminated and it is possible to survey fewer key informants than inhabitants to obtain reliable and valid information on social trust and disorder. Nevertheless, this method is not suitable for measuring all neighbourhood processes, such as informal social control. Therefore, outstanding challenges and avenues for future research are discussed as well.

How public library policies, practices and services support the information needs of people experiencing homelessness was investigated using a qualitative-phenomenological design. Data were collected through semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with four homeless participants and seven librarians from four public library networks from a particular New Zealand region. The findings revealed that while none of the participating libraries had policies or services that were targeted at homelessness individuals, the libraries were perceived as providing services that largely met the information needs of their homeless patrons even if there were areas for improvement. It was noted that libraries could provide services that contribute to the strengthening of cultural identity and that policies and services should take relevant socio-cultural contexts into consideration. The findings inform public library policies and practices so that services could be developed and improved in order to enable equitable and effective use by homeless individuals, without unnecessarily segregating this user group.

The digital humanities (DH) is an emerging field of teaching and research that invites modern technologies to address traditional humanities questions while simultaneously making space for humanistic critiques of those technologies. A natural relationship exists between DH and the field of information studies (the iField), particularly surrounding their common focus on the interface between humans and computers, as well as subfields such as the organization of information, libraries and archives, data preservation, and information in society. Thus, we propose that iField programs in universities should take an active role in DH education. We are particularly interested in programs that are officially Information Schools (iSchools), members of the international iSchools Organization. Our research began as part of a DH curriculum committee convened by the iSchools Organization. To support iSchool engagement in DH education, we have inventoried and analyzed the degrees and supplemental credentials offered by DH education programs throughout the world. Our study deployed multiple data collection methods, which included conducting both ad hoc and comprehensive website surveys, querying an online DH catalog, and inviting members of the iSchools Organization to participate in an online questionnaire. This work has revealed several common patterns for the current structure of DH programs, including the various types of degrees or supplemental credentials offered. We observe that iSchools have a significant opportunity to become more engaged in DH education and we suggest several possible approaches based on our research.

As part of a doctoral research, eighty-eight local truth commissions created in Brazil between 2012 and 2018 were identified. Among them, it was selected the eleven final reports that described partnerships between truth commissions and universities. The paper analyzes the phenomenon of creation of local truth commissions in Brazil and the partnerships established between them and universities, especially, with Archival Science and History programs. It was found that the partnerships were established to make the work of truth commissions feasible and consisted of archival activities such as preservation, description, and scanning as well as research. It concludes that, although the educational engagement of Brazilian truth commissions has been limited, partnerships with universities have provided students the contact with the theme of human rights, in line with the callings for the profession to address activism and human rights within the context of archival education. Finally, the paper suggests that experiences developed by these partnerships could be incorporated into Archival Science programs in Brazil.

Despite the growing interest in transparency policies and, concomitantly, the need to include a gender perspective in analysing the actions of public authorities, the intersection of both fields has attracted limited attention from the research community. The scarce contributions to this topic do not provide a framework that supports an empirical examination of institutional transparency and gender, and therefore, the implementation of these policies remains unexplored. This paper contributes to the debate on institutional transparency and gender perspective by developing an index of gender inclusion in transparency policies based on the information available on official local government websites, and by identifying and analysing factors that drive variations in the municipal councils. The research focuses on the municipalities of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (MAB) and includes other cities for comparative purposes. The findings indicate that the number of inhabitants of the municipality, the presence of women in its political bodies and institutional factors, and particularly the volume of the budget, are positively associated with the incorporation of a gender perspective on institutional websites.

Family reunification is the main reason youth independently migrate from the Global South to the Global North. Research on family reunification adheres to policy definitions of the phenomenon that portray reunification as something that happens within the destination country and within the nuclear family. Yet by following youth mobility trajectories, we show that young people experience many types of family reunification. This paper draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belgium and Ghana with young people of Ghanaian background. We find that for young people, family includes multiple caregivers who are not necessarily nuclear family members, family reunification can at the same time entail family separation, and multiple family reunifications may occur in both the origin and the destination country. Many of these reunifications and separations are significant for youth yet they remain unseen when employing a policy definition of family reunification.

In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.2 To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’3 For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);4 and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

This contribution offers a new theory of vigilante violence: vigilante rituals theory. We argue that vigilante violence originates from fear, righteous anger, and retaliatory punitive desire that stems from violations of moral imperatives, which are Durkheimian sacred values. We argue that morally outraged people transform their fear and anger into violent action through mobilization and bodily alignment in vigilante rituals. These rituals can restore the integrity of moral imperatives and generate the unity of the in-group. Further, we propose the following variable socio-legal conditions that affect the likelihood for vigilante rituals to occur: legal legitimacy, an exposure to violence, and authorities’ encouragement of (violent) self-help. We conclude by noting how the theory advances prevailing explanations and how it can be used in future empirical research.

In the philosophical literature concerning scientific experimentation, the notion of robustness has been solely discussed in relation to experimental results. In this article, I propose a novel sense of experimental robustness that applies to experimental procedures. I call the foregoing sense of robustness 'procedure robustness' (PR) and characterize it as the capacity of an experimental procedure to maintain its intended function invariant during the experimental process despite possible variations in its inputs. I argue that PR is a precondition for what I call 'result robustness' (RR), which refers to the traditional sense of experimental robustness, namely, the existence of convergent experimental results obtained through different and independent means of detection. Furthermore, I argue, PR and RR constitute useful experimental strategies in the context of high-energy physics experiments, but these strategies are not without limitations.

Candidates for fundamental physical laws rarely, if ever, employ higher than second time derivatives. Easwaran (2014) sketches an enticing story that purports to explain away this puzzling fact and thereby provides indirect evidence for a particular set of metaphysical theses used in the explanation. I object to both the scope and coherence of Easwaran's account, before going on to defend an alternative, more metaphysically deflationary explanation: in interacting Lagrangian field theories, it is either impossible or very hard to incorporate higher than second time derivatives without rendering the vacuum state unstable. The so-called Ostrogradski instability represents a powerful constraint on the construction of new field theories and supplies a novel, largely overlooked example of non-causal explanation in physics.

This article contributes to our existing knowledge through a crime script analysis of contract killings, based on six extensively analyzed police investigations in the Netherlands. Starting from a universal crime script, a more specific crime script for contract killings is elaborated. To provide a clear picture of the whole process, the description of the scenes focuses on requirements, facilitators, modi operandi, and preparatory actions. A comparison of liquidation investigations is made through a crime script analysis, which results in three types of requirements: vehicles, automatic weapons, and technical equipment, including PGP-telephones and beacons. In addition, spy shops turn out to play a major role in liquidations as facilitators. Due to a lack of licensing and regulations, the owners of spy shops can decide to a large extent on their own procedures. This leads to the possibility of buying and selling equipment anonymously and with large amounts of cash, which facilitates the preparation of liquidations and crime in general. Hitmen are the second type of important facilitators. The analysis reveals that all liquidation investigations contain indications of a principal to whom account has to be held. Two investigations clearly demonstrate financial rewards for contract killings.

Can the second law of thermodynamics explain our mental experience of the direction of time? According to an influential approach, the past hypothesis of universal low entropy (required to ...

Gender inequality of childcare provision is regarded as one of the main barriers to women’s labour-market careers. However, there is a scarcity of quantitative studies that examine fathers’ and mothers’ combined childcare. This research focuses on father’s and mother’s timing and type of childcare for co-resident couples with a young child. Using the two most recent UK Time-Use Surveys, the study derives typologies of couples’ childcare patterns with a particular focus on gender differences. The five patterns on weekdays and three patterns on weekend days highlight gender inequalities not just in the duration of parents’ time with their children but also in its timing. Mothers are more often than fathers involved during standard working hours. The childcare patterns vary only modestly by occupational class. This might be related to the fluidity of couples’ daily childcare patterns, which change with children’s ages and across days of the working week.

The article analyses depictions of disability embodiment in a range of contemporary North American speculative fiction that depicts post-crisis worlds of social and environmental breakdown. It argues that in each novel bodies are threatened and placed under pressure, particularly in terms of capacity and function. While some resolve this through recourse to humanist narratives of restitution, others imagine futures in which both bodies and societies become reformatted. Bodies remain material, but they also become metamorphized and messy; they hold charged manifestations of personhood, but also leak these conceptions of “person;” they are recognizably human, but also patterned as posthuman. The results are depictions of disability-led embodiment that, precisely because they are formed in imagined possibilities of the future, offer productive possibilities for re-visioning the present.

In this paper, we argue that the new demarcation problem does not need to be framed as the problem of defining a set of necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable roles that non-epistemic values can play in science. We introduce an alternative way of framing the problem and defend an open-ended list of criteria that can be used in demarcation. Applying such criteria requires context-specific work that clarifies which principles should be used, and possibly leads to the identification of new principles – which then can be added to the open-ended list. We illustrate our approach by examining a context where distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable value influences in science is both needed and tricky: transdisciplinary research. publishedVersion

In many Western countries, coresidential unions of lower educated people are less stable than those of higher educated people. A prominent explanation of this gradient in union dissolution holds that the lower educated experience more strain. Evidence for this explanation has been limited by a focus on only the economic dimension of strain and on only one partner in each union. In this study, we broadened the concept of strain to cover multiple life domains and capture the experience of both partners in each union. To do so, we used longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (N = 52,574 union-years; 7,930 unions). Generalized structural equation models showed that lower educated individuals experienced more strain not only in the economic domain but also in other life domains. Moreover, lower educated individuals tended to have partners who experienced more strain as well. In total, the joint experience of life strains explained 49% of the education gradient in union dissolution. These results suggest that life strains are pivotal to the stratification of family life.

International audience; Scientists, as human beings, sometimes make mistakes. The aim of this case study was to examine the misreferencing practice of scientists. Citations of two documents about the neuroimaging of a dead salmon were collected. A total of 173 references were extracted from Google Scholar and analyzed by both qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings reveal a reference error rate of 93.1%, involving 419 authors. Sociological and bibliometric data about the authors were collected and revealed that referencing errors can be committed by all types of researchers. Further, a major referencing error was discovered in 22.5% of the citing documents, involving 121 authors, that is, the citation of a poster as if it were an article published in a prestigious journal. This major error was committed by the more prolific and recognized researchers. The higher the first author’s number of citations, number of publications or h-index, the more major reference errors (citing a “ghost” paper) were committed. Nevertheless, the ScienceDirect database bears some responsibility, as it indexed abstracts of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting as journal articles that had never been published in the prestigious NeuroImage journal. Finally, this case study raises epistemological concerns about research and its dissemination.; Le chercheur, comme tout être humain, est susceptible de commettre des erreurs qui questionnent sa rigueur et son éthique. Cet article propose d’explorer un type d’erreur inédit : le référencement d’un article qui n’existe pas, un article fantôme. Pour ce faire, 174 documents faisant référence à une étude se rapportant à la neuroimagerie d’un saumon mort ont été extraits depuis Google Scholar et étudiés au moyen d’une méthode mixte (quantitatif et qualitatif). Les résultats obtenus montrent que 93,1 % des documents, impliquant 421 co-auteurs, comptent au moins une erreur de référencement. Plus encore, 23,0 % des documents citent un article fantôme. Cette erreur majeure de référencement (citer un article fantôme) est commise par les chercheurs les plus reconnus et cités du corpus. Toutefois, la responsabilité de cette erreur devrait être partagée avec la base de données bibliographique ScienceDirect qui indexe les résumés des posters présentés lors du colloque Organization for Human Brain Mapping comme des articles publiés dans la prestigieuse revue NeuroImage. Enfin, cette étude met en lumière plusieurs problèmes épistémologique inhérents à la pratique de la recherche et à sa diffusion.

Most academic journals have a fairly consistent look: they are structured similarly, their text is divided into similar sections; for example, they have an abstract at the beginning of the manuscript, and their text is usually organized in two columns. There may be different reasons for this similarity, ranging from the need to contain publication costs by using less page space to conforming to an internationally well-accepted format that may be perceived as the hallmark of academic articles. We surveyed 35 medical journals founded before 1960 and looked for their change in format over time and how this was experienced by and explained to readers. We then discussed what recent research has shown about the effects of layout on reading, looking for further explanations as to why this format was so successful.

Although studies point to a relationship between debt and crime, there is a limited understanding of their reciprocal relationship and possible mediating risk factors. Moreover, knowledge about the prevalence and scope of debt among offenders is lacking. Therefore, the present study analyzed 250 client files including risk assessment data from the Dutch probation service on the prevalence of debt and possibly related risk factors. The results show that debt is highly prevalent and complex, which underlines the importance of acquiring more knowledge about debt as a potential risk factor for relapse during supervision. It was found that problems with regard to childhood and living situation, education and work/daytime activities, and mental and physical health may be possible underlying risk factors in the relationship between debt and crime. These insights can help professionals adequately support clients with regard to debt in order to prevent recidivism.

This study investigates the effect of journalists’ gender on the perceived credibility of news articles. In an experiment, participants evaluated the credibility of two different news articles with a typical male and female topic either written by a female or male journalist. News articles written by male journalists were perceived as significantly more credible overall, but especially when the article had a typical male topic. Both effects were stronger for female participants than for male participants. Younger male participants rated female journalists overall as less credible compared to older male participants. The experiment highlights that audiences still have a preconceived idea about what female journalists are meant to report about, while generally giving preference to male journalists. This underlines the need for a better visibility of female journalists in all areas of reporting to viably change these perceptions.

Little research exists on what works in the supervision of offenders with debt problems. This qualitative study aims to provide insight into the barriers probation officers and clients experience during supervision regarding debt and the support that clients need. Interviews were conducted with 33 Dutch probation officers and 16 clients. The results show that debt often negatively influences clients’ lives and hinders their resocialization. Probation officers lack effective methods to support clients with debt problems. To adequately help clients with debt problems, probation officers should obtain more knowledge about effective interventions and collaborate more closely with debt specialists from the probation supervision outset.

En abril del ano 2015 se promulgo la ley que creo el acuerdo de union civil en Chile. Este articulo investiga las principales ideas discutidas en el debate legislativo y del rol que cumplieron profesores de derecho de familia invitados como expertos al mismo. Proponemos que la participacion de estos abogados fue marginal dentro y fuera del Congreso. Como consecuencia, la ley que creo el acuerdo de union civil presento serias falencias. En este articulo proponemos considerar las batallas intra-profesionales por el reconocimiento de un saber experto, como un factor clave en la formulacion de politicas en materia de genero y sexualidad. Y de paso, esperamos abrir un debate desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria que reimagine al derecho de familia desanclado de relaciones diadicas, centradas en la atraccion sexual y orientadas a la procreacion. In Chile, a bill recognizing civil unions for same-sex and opposite-sex couples was signed into law in April 2015. In this article, we analyze the parliamentary debate on the civil union’s law and the role of law professors invited as experts in the debate. We conclude that their position as experts was marginal inside and outside the Congress. As a result, the parliament approved the law with several shortcomings. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, we propose that intraprofessional battles over expertise are a crucial factor to understand better the formulation of gender and sexual policies in Latin America. Second, from an interdisciplinary approach, we propose to reimagine family law decoupled from norms centered on dyadic and romantic relationships and oriented to procreation.

Family formation, a process that includes union formation, fertility, and their timing and order, has become increasingly diverse and complex in Europe. We examine how the relationship between socio-economic background and family formation has changed over time in France, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, using first wave Generations and Gender Survey data. Competing Trajectories Analysis, a procedure which combines event-history analysis with sequence analysis, allows us to examine family formation as a process, capturing differences in both the timing of the start of family formation and the pathways that young adults follow. Regarding timing, socio-economic background differences in France and Sweden have remained relatively small, whereas in Italy and Romania higher parental education has become more strongly associated with postponement. Pathways tend to diverge by socio-economic background, particularly in Sweden and France. These results indicate that while family formation patterns have changed, they continue to be stratified by socio-economic background.

Several lexica for sentiment analysis have been developed and made available in the NLP community. While most of these come with word polarity annotations (e.g. positive/negative), attempts at building lexica for finer-grained emotion analysis (e.g. happiness, sadness) have recently attracted significant attention. Such lexica are often exploited as a building block in the process of developing learning models for which emotion recognition is needed, and/or used as baselines to which compare the performance of the models. In this work, we contribute two new resources to the community: a) an extension of an existing and widely used emotion lexicon for English; and b) a novel version of the lexicon targeting Italian. Furthermore, we show how simple techniques can be used, both in supervised and unsupervised experimental settings, to boost performances on datasets and tasks of varying degree of domain-specificity., 12 pages, 2 figures

In recent years, policymakers have begun to problematize how legislation stands in the way of the digitalization of the public sector. We are witnessing the emergence of a new phenomenon, digital-ready legislation, which implies that, whenever possible, new legislation should build on simple rules and unambiguous terminology to reduce the need for professional (human) discretion and allow for the extended use of automated case processing in public-sector organizations. Digital-ready legislation has potentially wide-ranging consequences because it creates the conditions for how public organizations are digitalized. The processes, practices, choices, and responsibilities for drafting digital-ready legislation, however, are not well-described or debated. Digital-ready legislation is a dormant issue. This paper develops the notion of the “double darkness” of digitalization to account for this. Based on a qualitative study, the paper investigates how digital-ready legislation as a sociotechnical arrangement is shaped by policy tools and by a complex, collaborative process where responsibility for legislation is fragmented. It argues that although the policy tools are aimed at making actors responsible for digitalization and creating clarity about the process, actors seem to be reluctant to take on the responsibility for making political decisions related to digitalization.

Order of evidence presentation affects the evaluation and the integration of evidence in mock criminal cases. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the order in which incriminating and exonerating evidence is presented influences cognitive dissonance and subsequent display of confirmation bias. Law students (N = 407) were presented with a murder case vignette, followed by incriminating and exonerating evidence in various orders. Contrary to a predicted primacy effect (i.e. early evidence being most influential), a recency effect (i.e. late evidence being most influential) was observed in ratings of likelihood of the suspect’s guilt. The cognitive dissonance ratings and conviction rates were not affected by the order of evidence presentation. The effects of evidence presentation order may be limited to specific aspects of legal decisions. However, there is a need to replicate the results using procedures and samples that are more representative of real-life criminal law trials.

The goal of our study was to examine whether differences in the sensitivity and intrusiveness of fathers and mothers from gay-, lesbian-, and heterosexual-parent families (57 French couples, 47 Dutch couples, and 31 British couples) with their first-born infants were explained by gender or caregiver role, while controlling for nesting within families, infant temperament, and twinship. We assessed the sensitivity and intrusiveness of 147 primary caregivers (45 fathers, 102 mothers) and 123 secondary caregivers (68 fathers and 55 mothers). All infants were conceived using assisted reproductive techniques and averaged 4 months of age. They were videotaped at home with both parents while engaged in play, feeding, and other childcare (bathing or changing) and these videotapes were coded for sensitivity and intrusiveness. Information about relative levels of caregiving, infant temperament, and twinship was collected via parent report questionnaires. Mixed linear models showed that sensitivity while playing, cleaning, and feeding were not predicted by parental gender, relative parental involvement, and the interaction between parental gender and parental caregiver role. Models for intrusiveness while playing and feeding showed similar results. However, intrusiveness during cleaning was predicted by parental gender and the interaction between parental gender and caregiver role. Post-hoc analyses showed that secondary caregiving fathers showed more intrusive behavior during cleaning (M = 1.51, SD = 0.09) than secondary caregiving mothers (M = 1.26, SD = 0.10). Our results also showed that contextual factors, such as having singletons or twins, infant temperament, and country of residence were related to parenting behavior. In sum, our findings do not support presumptions that mothers are more capable of providing better quality care than fathers, or that, at this early stage, primary caregiving parents are better attuned to their infants than those who are less involved.

Despite the risk of employee victimization, research on deviant citizen behavior in frontline encounters is limited. When passengers are issued a fine on the bus, they sometimes respond aggressively toward the ticket inspector. This article identifies how citizens present themselves in ticket fining events and examines how their self-representations are related with aggressive acts toward frontline workers. Data comprise video footage of 40 events recorded with occupational body-worn cameras from public buses in Denmark. Using in-depth qualitative video analysis, the study systematically analyzes the encounters for citizen self-presentation and aggression. Five self-presentation types are identified, comprising passengers appearing innocent, honest, wronged, defiant, or superior in the inspector encounters. In aggressive events, passengers in particular perform the defiant and superior self-presentation types and typically perform more types than in the nonaggressive events. The findings yield insights into aggressive frontline encounters with an enlarged understanding of the range of reactions and counterattacks during these events. Recognizing these presentations and changing responses could help frontline workers prevent exposure to aggression on the job.

Existing literature predominantly viewed and examined the different subsystems within the family system as mediating mechanisms in relation to child outcomes. Even though family systems theory stresses that these different subsystems can offer a buffering capacity, much less attention has gone to the moderating roles that the different subsystems within the family might play. In the current study, we focus on associations between fathers’ and mothers’ sensitivity and toddler's receptive language ability and we investigated whether and to what extent the association between fathers’ and mothers’ sensitivity (i.e. the dyadic parent-child relationship) and children's receptive language ability was moderated by equal parenting involvement (i.e. the triadic coparenting relationship). Our sample consisted of 103 Dutch native families, with 103 fathers, 103 mothers and 103, 3-year-olds. Results demonstrated after controlling for child sex and educational background of the family, neither fathers’ nor mothers’ sensitivity contributed uniquely to children's receptive language ability. Furthermore, we did not find moderation between the dyadic parent-child relationship (i.e., paternal and maternal sensitivity) and the triadic coparenting relationship (i.e., equal parenting involvement) in relation to children's receptive language scores in our study. Possible explanations for our findings and future directions are discussed.

The religiosity of people migrating into secular European countries has posed many questions for policymakers and scholars alike, particularly where it concerns Islam. Rather than opposing migrants’ religious identities with secular values, this article examines shifts and tensions between the ‘multiple secularities’ of Muslim women and integration policy alike, through an ethnography of wellbeing. Set in the Netherlands, it demonstrates that Muslim women of Pakistani background embrace a secularity characterised by respect and religious liberty but that despite a ‘modernisation’ of values, their religion remains the source of their secularity. Dutch integration policy, however, has shifted from a secularity accommodating religious diversity to one characterised by individual liberty (placed in opposition to religion), and, increasingly, towards the progress of a culturally homogeneous nation. By thus failing to recognise religious sources and alternative social dimensions of human wellbeing, Dutch policy risks undermining secular values generally and alienating Dutch Muslims specifically.