Career and work attitudes of blue-collar workers,and the impact of a natural disaster chance event on the relationships between intention to quit and actual quit behaviour

Despite being part of a highly visible and important occupational group, blue-collar workers have, to date, been under-represented in careers research. We explore the relevance and applicability of new career concepts to blue-collar employees, specifically, bus drivers. Based on a survey of 112 bus drivers, we test a model specifying the relationship between career attitude, perceived organizational support, psychological contract, and job satisfaction, as well as intention to quit. Employing a two-phase data collection process, we also test relationships between intentions and actual quit behaviour. Our results support the validity of career theories for blue-collar workers but with notable exceptions, such as lack of relationships between protean career and intention to quit. Contrary to intention-behaviour theory we find that actual quit behaviour was not related to intention to quit, which we attribute to a significant external chance event, a devastating earthquake, which took place during the study period. In addition, we identify relationships that appear to be unique to blue-collar workers.     

Observing Christian faith during the childhood years

This paper presents the treasure and cultivate model as a research tool for observing Christian faith in the childhood years. The model seeks to treasure and preserve the natural and innate aspects of a child’s faith and spirituality, whilst simultaneously seeking to develop and cultivate other facets. It is proposed that this balanced approach leads to a childhood faith that is both wholesome and a resource to the child. Observation and logging of a child’s faith in this way provides a tool that allows surveying of characteristics that may influence faith. In the future, this research tool may be used to inform those who seek to foster a child’s religious faith in order that such nurture may be both healthy and resourceful. The paper describes a research project of 61 children aged three to thirteen years old, from six Christian denominations in North West England.     

Centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes: a pilot outcome study

Centering prayer is a spiritual and religious form of meditation grounded in the history of Christian contemplative prayer. Despite its popularity, empirical research investigating centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes is relative sparse. This pilot outcome study explored the effect of a centering prayer workshop on participants’ (N?=?9) depression, anxiety, stress, spiritual transcendence, religious crisis, faith development, and mindfulness. Several significant changes were noted over the course of the six-week study, including decreased anxiety and stress, and increased faith development and mindfulness. Interestingly, we noted that participants likely also experienced a spiritual or religious struggle that follows the established spiritual development paradigm called the Dark Night of the Soul. The study did not include a control group, and so did not account for effects related to history, maturation, or regression to the mean. Nevertheless, the initial results prove promising to develop more sophisticated research programmes that replicate the study’s findings.     

The effect of geographic indication in advertising background pictures on product evaluation: The moderating role of familiarity

This study investigates whether geographic indications in the backgrounds of advertising pictures might affect the viewer's evaluation of a product. The findings reveal that participants in the proximal geographic indication evaluated the product more favourably than those in the distal geographic indication when they were exposed to feasibility‐related information. By contrast, participants in the distal geographic indication evaluated the product more favourably than those in the proximal geographic indication when they were exposed to desirability‐related information. However, familiarity with geographic indications eliminated this effect.     

Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison

The ability to evaluate scientific claims and evidence is an important aspect of scientific literacy and requires various epistemic competences. Readers spontaneously validate presented information against their knowledge and beliefs but differ in their ability to strategically evaluate the soundness of informal arguments. The present research investigated how students of psychology, compared to scientists working in psychology, evaluate informal arguments. Using a think-aloud procedure, we identified the specific strategies students and scientists apply when judging the plausibility of arguments and classifying common argumentation fallacies. Results indicate that students, compared to scientists, have difficulties forming these judgements and base them on intuition and opinion rather than the internal consistency of arguments. Our findings are discussed using the mental model theory framework. Although introductory students validate scientific information against their knowledge and beliefs, their judgements are often erroneous, in part because their use of strategy is immature. Implications for systematic trainings of epistemic competences are discussed.     

Communicating power and resistance: exploring interactions between aboriginal youth and non-aboriginal staff members in a residential child welfare facility

Aboriginal youth are highly overrepresented within the child welfare system. High-risk youth are often placed in out-of-community residential placements. Such residential placements have been described by some as a continuation of colonial practices. Using communication theory as a conceptual model, we propose a qualitative analysis of micro-interactions that take place between Aboriginal youth and non-Aboriginal workers during the management of high-risk behaviors within a residential program. Three broad categories of interaction emerge from the data: complementary, symmetrical/complementary (where youth show a form of submission despite resistance), and symmetrical (characterized by a power struggle). Despite the diversity of interactions along this symmetrical to complementary continuum, interventions always start and finish in the same fashion. Moreover, the nature of interactions depended mostly on how quickly youth accepted the consequences of their behaviors. We also extracted five categories related to culture, race or context that are perceived as influencing the interactions that take place between staff and youth. The analysis of micro-interactions within clinical, organizational, social and historical contexts points to mechanisms by which asymmetrical power relations may be replicated on a day-to-day basis despite the best intentions of residential workers.     

So Close and Yet So Far: Construal Level Moderates Cultivation Effects

The cultivation effect is well established: The more media we consume, the more our worldviews come to reflect the mediated world. Several advancements have been made in the past decade exploring the processes underlying the effect. Importantly, the judgments are often heuristically based (Shrum, 2001 Shrum, L. J. (2001). Processing strategy moderates the cultivation effect. Human Communication Research, 27, 94–120.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2009 Shrum, L. J. (2009). Media consumption and perceptions of social reality: Effects and underlying processes. In J. Bryant &; M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 50–73). New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), with relevance of the media information an important moderator of this process. Mental construal level, in which people are considered to be thinking on a relatively concrete (psychologically close, specific) level or a relatively abstract (psychologically distant, general) level, may influence these cognitive processes. The present studies find that mental construal level (concrete or abstract) moderates the classic cultivation effect for first-order judgments. Specifically, concrete construal encourages the cultivation effect with a stronger relationship between media consumption and violence prevalence estimates, but abstract construal reduces the effect. Comparison to a control condition in Experiment 2 indicates that concrete construal may be the default state for cultivation effects. One possible explanation for the effect of construal on cultivation effects is that construal influences relevance of and reliance on media cues in judgment formation.     

How consumers respond to missing a quantity discount with multiple price breaks

This study investigates how consumers evaluate and respond to different discount schemes (i.e., one versus multiple price breaks) in the wake of a missed quantity discount. Two field experiments are conducted. The results demonstrate that promotions with multiple price breaks (e.g., 2 for 30% off and 3 for 40% off) will result in a higher likelihood of purchasing one item at the regular price than promotions with only a single price break (e.g., 2 for 30% off) when a quantity discount is missed. The results of Experiment 2 reveal that increasing the number of price breaks (i.e., from two to three) can strengthen the assimilation of the advertised regular price into consumers' internal reference price range when there is a greater interval between the two price breaks (e.g., 2 for 30% off, 5 for 40% off, and 8 for 50% off) and that subsequently raises consumers' purchase likelihood if they are not able to take advantage of the promotional price. Finally, the effect of the discount scheme on purchase likelihood is shown to be mediated by the internal reference price. These observations have important implications for retailers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.