To Live Apart or Together: Integration Outcomes of Astronaut Versus Dual-Parent Household Strategies

In this paper, we examine the interactions between transnationalism and integration in a case-control study. Using a typology of interactions, the study assesses how a transnational household form affects structural and socio-cultural integration. The research draws upon 20 interviews with Chinese immigrants to Vancouver, Canada, to compare the integration experiences of women in transnational split households with those of women in dual-parent households. In the transnational split households, the women live with their children in the receiving nation-state, while their husbands reside and work in the country of origin. The findings illustrate an antagonistic relationship between transnationalism, and employment and financial integration. In contrast, results show a transnational split household approach positively affects housing and socio-cultural integration as compared to a dual-parent household strategy.     

Living at Work and Intra-worker Sociality Among Migrant Farm Workers in Canada

This article examines how the dormitory labour system as it is employed in the agricultural streams of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) affects workers’ everyday sociality. In the article, I demonstrate how the physical compression of home and work into a singular geographic site shapes workers’ identities and everyday relationships. Drawing on findings gathered from interviews with migrant farm workers from Mexico and Guatemala working in Southern Ontario, I explore how the requirement to warehouse temporary foreign workers directly on employer property collides with workers’ ability to establish an autonomous and dignified life in Canada. In particular, I demonstrate how the TFWP agricultural dormitory system produces inter-generational dynamics that intensify worker self-discipline and generates gender dynamics that support the development of a hyper-productive transnational workforce.     

Structural Barriers to Inclusion in a Latino Immigrant New Destination: Exploring the Adaptive Strategies of Social Service Organizations in South Carolina

A growing number of Latino immigrants are settling in immigrant new destinations with restrictive anti-immigrant policies. Poverty and legal status create obstacles to social and economic inclusion in these places. Theoretically, local social service providers are in a structural position to ameliorate these obstacles, but the localized nature of service delivery in the USA requires that immigrants physically travel to access these supports. A growing literature on new destinations has begun to identify barriers to inclusion in immigrant new destinations, but few have explored how local mainstream social service providers are developing strategies to address these concerns. Building on the immigrant new destinations literature and the expansion of immigration enforcement to these areas, this qualitative study examines barriers to services in South Carolina from the perspective of local organizations. In-depth interviews with leaders from 50 direct service providers yield several themes related to structural barriers and organizational strategies to respond to these barriers. Cutting across these themes are limitations imposed by state-level policies and the impact of social exclusion due to marginalized legal status. We discuss the implications of this context for social service providers and the social inclusion of low-income Latino immigrants in South Carolina.     

New Migrants in Residential Aged Care: Managing Diversity in Not-for-Profit Organisations

This paper draws on qualitative interviews with migrant Indo-Asian and African personal care workers and registered and enrolled nurses employed by two not-for-profit residential aged care organisations in Australia: AnglicareSA and Resthaven Inc. The paper examines the way these culturally and linguistically diverse staff talk about the safe organisational environment provided by their employers, while in the wider Australian environment, low levels of hostility towards migrants and refugees are a constant cultural force. We demonstrate the impact of these organisations’ foundational ethics and values that influence how human resource diversity management strategies impact on the quality care provided to residents. We argue that this ethic and these human resource strategies act as conduits for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) staff to integrate into the workforce and as a mechanism in assisting new migrants to transition into the wider Australian society, while at the same time enriching the care of the older persons.     

Cultural Involvement and Preference in Immigrant Acculturation

Measures of cultural involvement (CI) and cultural preference (CP) incorporate Berry’s integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization outcomes, locating them at the ends of two axes suggested by Szapocznik et al. (International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 4 (3–4), 353–365, 1980) in a bidimensional space formed by origin culture and destination culture scales. Each measure combines information from both origin culture and destination culture scales, retains the continuous properties of these scales, connects two of the four-category acculturation outcomes, and has theoretical significance and potential comparability across studies of different immigrant populations. Together they offer a quantitative measure of variations in the structural relation between an immigrant group and its new destination culture, and should reveal new insights into the acculturation process.     

Adherence predictors in an Internet-based Intervention program for depression

Internet-delivered psychotherapy has been demonstrated to be effective in the treatment of depression. Nevertheless, the study of the adherence in this type of the treatment reported divergent results. The main objective of this study is to analyze predictors of adherence in a primary care Internet-based intervention for depression in Spain. A multi-center, three arm, parallel, randomized controlled trial was conducted with 194 depressive patients, who were allocated in self-guided or supported-guided intervention. Sociodemographic and clinical characteristics were gathered using a case report form. The Mini international neuropsychiatric interview diagnoses major depression. Beck Depression Inventory was used to assess depression severity. The visual analogic scale assesses the respondent’s self-rated health and Short Form Health Survey was used to measure the health-related quality of life. Age results a predictor variable for both intervention groups (with and without therapist support). Perceived health is a negative predictor of adherence for the self-guided intervention when change in depression severity was included in the model. Change in depression severity results a predictor of adherence in the support-guided intervention. Our findings demonstrate that in our sample, there are differences in sociodemographic and clinical variables between active and dropout participants and we provide adherence predictors in each intervention condition of this Internet-based program for depression (self-guided and support-guided). It is important to point that further research in this area is essential to improve tailored interventions and to know specific patients groups can benefit from these interventions.     

Disentangling perceptual and psycholinguistic factors in syntactic processing: Tone monitoring via ERPs

Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393–1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm interacts with statistical learning and speech perception. Past results with this monitoring technique have pointed to an end-of-clause effect in parsing—a structural effect—but we here show that the issues are a bit more nuanced. Firstly, we report two Experiments (1a and 1b), which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: (a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and (b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover helps neutralize differences between sentences with slightly different structures. These two factors are then successfully discriminated by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a monitoring task, with Experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components—the first associated with temporal uncertainty, the second with processing load in dual tasks—correlate with RTs. Finally, Experiment 3 behaviorally segregates the two factors by placing the last tone at the end of sentences, activating a wrap-up operation and thereby both disrupting the decreasing tendency and highlighting structural effects. Our overall results suggest that much care needs to be employed in designing click-detection tasks if structural effects are sought, and some of the now-classic data need to be reconsidered.     

Referential and Non-referential Uses of the Third Person Pronominal Subject in Spanish

This paper studies the role of two different types of motivation that have been proposed to explain the use of subject personal pronouns in Spanish, namely their function as indications for the addressee to identify the subject’s referent, and their suitability for expressing informational values such as contrastiveness or focus. This study focuses exclusively on third-person forms and relies on conversational data. The distribution of third-person pronouns is analysed combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. It will be argued that the informational and referential properties of subject personal pronouns are by themselves insufficient to account for their expression, their occurrence depending crucially on their activation through the previous use of units of the same type.     

The impact of education on intergenerational occupational mobility in Spain

Intergenerational occupational mobility is a topic that has attracted considerable interest in the sociological and economic literature for developed countries. In particular, one of the central issues in political debate is the role of education on the intergenerational social mobility. The modern capitalist economies are characterised by continual technological changes which lead to the need of a highly skilled workforce. In this potentially meritocratic society, the equality of opportunities, the efficient allocation of talent and the education can be instruments that encourage the social mobility and decrease the effect of the parents' economic status on the career of their children. This paper takes into account these facts and sheds empirical evidence for Spain about the relationships between social origin, educational attainment and occupational destination. The methodology applied consists of the specification and estimation of discrete choice models, and the empirical analysis is based on data provided by the Living Condition Survey (LCS) conducted for the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE).