Couples’ Work Schedules and Child-Care Use in the Netherlands

Various aspects of parental work schedules affect the opportunities and constraints that parents encounter when arranging care for their children. This study examined the extent to which the combination of couples’ work schedules was associated with their use of different types of child care, focusing on parental, formal, and informal child care. We considered multiple dimensions of couples’ work schedules, namely, the timing of work, schedule flexibility, and home-based telework. Data from a recent Dutch survey were used, including information about 1599 dual-earner couples with children aged 0–6 years. The results indicated that paid work during nonstandard hours increased the amount of parental child care that was provided by one parent while the other parent was working, whereas work during evenings, nights, and weekends decreased the likelihood of using both formal and informal child care. Results further revealed gender differences for nonstandard hours and schedule flexibility. We found stronger effects of mothers’ work schedules, indicating that a gender-neutral approach to parental work is not justified. These results indicate that the timing of parental work is important to consider when examining not only parental child care but also formal and informal child-care use. We provide recommendations for future research, specifically regarding the possible consequences for parental well-being.     

Paternal Caregivers’ Parenting Practices and Psychological Functioning among African American Youth Living in Urban Public Housing

Structural factors associated with public housing contribute to living environments that expose families to adverse life events that may in turn directly impact parenting and youth outcomes. However, despite the growth in research on fathers, research on families in public housing has practically excluded fathers and the role fathers play in the well‐being of their adolescents. Using a sample of 660 African American adolescents recruited from public housing, we examined the relationship between paternal caregivers’ (i.e., fathers’ and father figures’) parenting practices and adolescents’ depressive symptoms, attitudes toward deviance, and self‐efficacy. Using a latent profile analysis (LPA), we confirmed a four‐class model of paternal parenting practices ranging from high to low levels of monitoring and encouragement. Results from a one‐way ANOVA indicated that paternal caregivers with high (compared to moderate) levels of encouragement and monitoring were associated with youth who reported less depressive symptoms, higher levels of self‐efficacy, and less favorable attitudes toward deviance. Discriminant analysis results indicated that approximately half of the sample were correctly classified into two paternal caregiver classes. The findings provide evidence that some of these caregivers engage in parenting practices that support youths’ psychological functioning. More research is needed to determine what accounts for the variability in levels of paternal encouragement and supervision, including environmental influences, particularly for paternal caregivers exhibiting moderate‐to‐low levels of paternal encouragement and monitoring.     

Informal Hierarchy and Team Creativity: The Moderating Role of Empowering Leadership

Although there is growing evidence that strong informal influence hierarchies can enhance teams' core task performance, recent theorising suggests that such informal hierarchies may, at the same time, stifle team creativity. The current study draws from the Motivated Information Processing in Groups (MIP-G) model to empirically examine this latter notion. Moreover, we build on functional leadership theories to propose that the link between informal hierarchy strength and team creativity hinges on a formal team leader's empowering leadership. Using a sample of 56 organisational work teams comprising 304 individuals from a wide range of industries, we found that stronger informal influence hierarchies related negatively with team creativity when the formal leader exhibited little empowering behaviour. When the formal leader acted in more empowering ways, by contrast, this negative relationship was dampened. These findings provide new knowledge on the role of informal influence hierarchies for team creativity and advance our understanding of how informal hierarchical relations and formal leadership processes can jointly shape important team outcomes.     

Ethnic Match and Treatment Outcomes for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center Clients

This study investigated the effects of client ethnicity and client‐counselor ethnic match on treatment outcomes (i.e., GAF‐difference [from the Global Assessment of Functioning Axis V rating of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, American Psychiatric Association, 1994] and client visitation) of 1,946 child and adolescent community mental health center clients. After controlling for 7 other variables, no differences were observed after adjustment among client ethnicities, age groups, or ethnic match on the GAF‐difference dependent measure. Ethnically matched African American child and adolescent clients had fewer mental health visits than did their nonmatched counterparts. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Towards a Sociological turn in Contextualist Moral Philosophy

Contextualist moral philosophers criticise hands-off liberal theories of justice for abstracting from the cultural context in which people make choices. Will Kymlicka and Joseph Carens, for example, demonstrate that these theories are disadvantageous to cultural minorities who want to pursue their own way of life. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's critique of moral reason radicalises contextualist moral philosophy by giving it a sociological turn. In Bourdieu's view it is not enough to provide marginalised groups or subgroups with equal access to public institutions and specific cultural rights—in some cases this may in fact be detrimental. He contends that scientists, politicians and other intellectuals have a duty to take seriously the social presuppositions of free deliberate choice and public opinion and to support cultural minorities with instruments to liberate themselves from their often precarious situation.     

Ethnic and racial differences in body size perception and satisfaction

Body dissatisfaction in women in the United States is common. We explored how women from various racial and ethnic groups used figural stimuli by exploring differences in current and preferred silhouette, and their discrepancy. We surveyed 4023 women aged 25–45 in an online investigation. Participants were identified using a national quota-sampling procedure. Asian women chose a smaller silhouette to represent their current body size, which did not remain significant after adjusting for self-reported BMI. After controlling for BMI, African American women selected a smaller silhouette than White women to represent their current size. Both African American and women reporting “Other” race preferred larger silhouettes than White women even after controlling for BMI. The discrepancy score revealed lower body dissatisfaction among African American than White women. Understanding factors that promote body satisfaction differentially across racial and ethnic groups could become a tool in appropriately tailored interventions designed to prevent eating disorders.     

Positive and negative effects of family involvement on work-related burnout

We aimed to explain the influence of family involvement on feelings of burnout among employees who combine work and family tasks. As proxies for family involvement, we used the family structure (partner, number and age of children) and family tasks (e.g. hours spent on household chores). We compared conflict theory and enrichment theory, and investigated how well they explain the relationship between family involvement and feelings of burnout. Based on a sample of 1046 employees at 30 Dutch organizations, the results showed that the presence of young children and doing more household chores were positively related to feelings of burnout, whereas having children reduced employees’ feelings of burnout. We also investigated interaction effects of gender and gender-role norms. We conclude that family life can reduce work-related burnout and that for men, the relationship between family involvement and feelings of burnout differs depending on whether they have traditional or modern gender-role norms.     

Boys will be boys: a pre‐line‐up gameplay has beneficial effects on boys' but not girls' identification performance

Fifty children, aged between 4 and 7 years, underwent a sequential photo line‐up procedure in order to identify a man they had met the previous day. Half of the participants engaged in a pre‐procedure gameplay with the female interviewer. It was hypothesised that the game would stimulate rapport building and would ultimately result in an increased performance during the line‐up procedure. The beneficial effect was indeed observed, but only for the male participants. This finding suggests that gameplay may be a fruitful strategy to decrease child witness discomfort and to increase participation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The association of depression and sense of belonging with suicidal ideation among older adults: applicability of resiliency models

Suicide among older people, especially men, is a significant problem. In this study the applicability of the compensatory, the risk-protective, the challenge, and the protective-protective models of resiliency for the prediction of suicidal ideation from depression (the risk factor) and sense of belonging to the community (the protective factor) was investigated. A total of 351 retired Australians (130 males and 221 females), with a mean age of 71.31 years (SD = 7.99), completed the Zung Depression Scale, the suicide subscale of the General Health Questionnaire, and the Sense of Belonging Instrument. When sense of belonging (psychological) was the protective factor, results indicated support for the risk-protective model for men and women, and for the compensatory model for women only. In contrast, when sense of belonging (antecedents) was the protective factor, support was evident for the compensatory model for men and women, and for the challenge model for women only. Results indicate that interventions should be developed to enhance sense of belonging among aging adults.     

Excess use of general practitioners by obese adults: does health-related quality of life account for the association?

As general practitioners (GP) are seeing, and are likely to continue to see, increasing numbers of obese patients in their practices, it is relevant to know with which needs these patients enter general practice. The present study aims to determine whether besides physical comorbidities, health-related quality of life (HRQOL) accounts for associations of obesity with GP use. In a general population survey in Augsburg, Germany (KORA-Survey S4 1999/2001), anthropometric body mass (BMI in kg/(m(2))), physical comorbidities, HRQOL (the 12-item Short Form; SF-12), and visits to GP were assessed, and analyzed by logistic and zero-truncated negative binomial regressions (two-part model). Gender, age, socio-economic status, marital status, health insurance, and place of residence were adjusted for. The sample consisted of N = 942 residents aged 25 - 74, who had been randomly sampled from 17 cluster-sampled communities, and were either normal-weight, overweight, moderately obese, or severely obese. The moderately obese group had higher odds than the normal-weight to report any GP use; however, while being predictive, neither physical comorbidity nor HRQOL mediated this. In contrast, with regard to number of GP visits among users, the severely obese group (BMI >/= 35) reported significantly more visits than the normal-weight group, and both physical comorbidity and physical (but not mental) HRQOL accounted for this. In conclusion, physical comorbidity and HRQOL mediate excess use of GP by severely obese users in terms of number of visits. Thus, for this group, subjective physical health seems to be important besides physical comorbidities, suggesting for general practice to focus both on evaluated and perceived needs of these patients.