Attitudes and Social Support: Determinants of Job-Seeking Behavior and Well-Being among the Unemployed1

What determines job-seeking behavior following a job loss? What are the mental health consequences of an unsuccessful job search? These questions were addressed in a longitudinal panel survey of 297 recently unemployed people, over a four-month period of their lives. In support of the Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) attitude-behavior model, intention to try hard to seek reemployment was the main significant predictor of job-seeking behavior during the subsequent four months. Intention, along with affirmation support from a significant other regarding the value of job search, accounted for 24% of the variance in job-seeking behavior. The attitude toward job seeking and the subjective norms (perceived social pressure to seek reemployment) were the main determinants of the intention, accounting for 69% of its variance. The unemployed person's attitude toward job seeking and subjective norms were, in turn, determined by (a) perceived instrumentality (expectations that job-seeking will lead to reemployment), (b) perceived economic hardship, (c) social support from the significant other (usually the spouse) in the form of affirmation of the value of job-seeking activities, and (d) the significant other's perception of the instrumentality of various job-seeking behaviors and of subjective norms regarding job-seeking. Other analyses showed that social support can counteract the negative effects of unsuccessful job search on mental health and that such effects are particularly pronounced among the more highly motivated job seekers. The implications of these findings for intervention programs are discussed.     

Self-Efficacy and Job-Seeking Activities in Unemployed Ethnic Youth

Abstract

The authors examined variables predicting the self-efficacy and the job-seeking activities of 103 unemployed ethnic youth from diverse cultural backgrounds. Whereas self-esteem and acceptance by the host culture were significant predictors of self-efficacy, the major predictors of job seeking were (a) the extent to which the ethnic youth felt accepted by members of the dominant culture and (b) the difference between their cultural backgrounds and the dominant host culture. Implications of these findings for enhancing the employment of ethnic youth are discussed.     

Individual and Contextual Dynamics of Innovation-Use Behavior in Organizations

The innovation literature suggests that both organizational context and individual characteristics influence employees' innovation-use behavior. However, the question of how contextual factors and individual characteristics operate together to predict innovation-use behavior has remained ambiguous. This study examined 2 plausible ways that individual and perceived contextual variables can interplay to predict innovation-use behavior: mediation and moderation. The results, based on 191 employees of an electronics company, showed that 2 of the 3 relationships between perceived organizational context and innovation-use behavior were partially mediated by individual characteristics. In addition, in 1 of the 3 relationships examined, individual and contextual variables interacted to predict innovation-use behavior. This study contributes to the literature by conceptually integrating and empirically investigating the interplays between individual and contextual factors beyond their independent contributions to innovation-use behavior.     

The Dynamics of Indexical Belief

Indexical beliefs pose a special problem for standard theories of Bayesian updating. Sometimes we are uncertain about our location in time and space. How are we to update our beliefs in situations like these? In a stepwise fashion, I develop a constraint on the dynamics of indexical belief. As an application, the suggested constraint is brought to bear on the Sleeping Beauty problem.     

Studying the Dynamics of Problem Behavior Across Multiple Time Scales: Prospects and Challenges

As a commentary on the Special Issue, this paper discusses recent advances in the study of change across several time scales. It points out the importance of specifying time scales and putative patterns of change when characterizing problem behavior over developmental time scales. Methods for studying risk and protective mechanisms through observation of social interaction are also discussed as a way to study influences that operate in real time. Methods for studying episode-level interaction patterns that result from such real-time influences are also discussed, along with ways to integrate these with longitudinal assessments to study the effects of social interaction on problem behavior across developmental time scales.     

The Dynamics of Argumentative Discourse

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with...     

The Dynamics of Vocational Sponsorship

Five forms of job entry and retention dealing with sponsoring authority are discussed. Based on personality types, they are compared to Heath's psychological model. Implications for vocational planning of clients are considered.     

The Behavior of Controllers

The Psychological Record - The present experiment demonstrated a procedure analyzing the behavior of controllers by measuring undergraduates’ responses that produced consequences to other...     

I Will Follow Him: Myth, Reality, or Forced Choice—Job-Seeking Experiences of Dual-Career Couples

Recent PhDs in psychology and biological sciences with spouses who were also professionals were surveyed; the focus was on their joint job-seeking. Couples frequently described egalitarian decision rules. But traditional patterns were also evident, particularly among the biological-science sample. Egalitarianism decreased in the actual job decisions made, but here the traditional alternative was frequently cited as a forced choice. Responses to simulations showed egalitarian decisions to be common under low constraint conditions. Constraints such as the need for a job and time pressure produced more nonegalitarian decisions. However, under these hypothetical conditions, the constraints were as likely to produce nontradi-tional as traditional following. It is suggested that the high traditionality of actual job decisions is, at least in part, a result of institutional constraints.     

The Dynamics of Visual Word Recognition

This article provides an overview of a dynamical systems approach to visual word recognition. In this approach, the dynamics of word recognition are characterized in terms of a connectionist network model. According to this model, seeing a word results in changes in the pattern of activation over the nodes in the lexical network such that, over time, the network moves into an attractor state representing the orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties of that word. At a slower timescale, a learning process modifies the strengths of the connections among the nodes in a way that attunes the network to the statistical regularities in its environment. This view of word identification accommodates a wide body of empirical results, a representative sampling of which is discussed here. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of some of the theoretical issues that should be addressed as the dynamical approach continues to develop.     

The Dynamics of Perceived Financial Difficulties

The perceptions of individuals regarding their own economic situation are sometimes used to measure individuals’ welfare or standard of living, thereby complementing the conventional income-based approach. While the importance of using longitudinal data when analysing the determinants of perceptions has recently been emphasized, the question of state dependence—the extent to which the past affects the present—has rarely been accounted for in the subjective economic well-being literature. The main contribution of the current paper is precisely to investigate the issue of state dependence in perceived financial difficulties. The application of an endogenous switching Markov model to data from the Luxembourg socioeconomic panel ‘Liewen zu Lëtzebuerg’ for the period 2003–2009 leads to the conclusion that there is a sizeable proportion of genuine state dependence, which confirms the importance of appropriately taking into account dynamic issues when modelling subjective variables.     

The Dynamics of Bimanual Circle Drawing

A bimanual circle drawing task was employed to elucidate the dynamics of intralimb and interlimb coordination. Right-handed subjects were required to produce circles with both hands in either a symmetrical (mirror) mode (i.e. one hand moving clockwise, the other counter-clockwise) or in an asymmetrical mode (i.e. both hands moving clockwise or counter-clockwise). The frequency of movement was scaled by an auditory metronome from 1.50 Hz to 3.25 Hz in8 (8-sec) steps.In the asymmetrical mode,distortions ofthe movement trajectories, transient departures from the target pattern of coordination, and phase wandering were evident as movement frequency was increased. These features suggested loss of stability. Deviations from circular trajectories were most prominent for movements of the left hand. Transient departures from the required mode of coordination were also largely precipitated by the left hand. The results are discussed with reference to manual asymmetries and mechanisms of interlimb and intersegmental coordination.     

The Four Causes of Behavior

Comprehension of a phenomenon involves identifying its origin, structure, substrate, and function, and representing these factors in some formal system. Aristotle provided a clear specification of these kinds of explanation, which he called efficient causes (triggers), formal causes (models), material causes (substrates or mechanisms), and final causes (functions). In this article, Aristotle's framework is applied to conditioning and the computation-versus-association debate. The critical empirical issue is early versus late reduction of information to disposition. Automata theory provides a grammar for models of conditioning and information processing in which that constraint can be represented.