Resilience in Inner City Youth: Childhood Predictors of Occupational Status Across the Lifespan

The present prospective study has followed a cohort of inner city men from adolescence (14±2) until age 65. While previous studies of shorter duration have identified numerous childhood factors that powerfully influence outcomes in young adulthood, this study examined the effect of these well-documented prognostic factors on occupational status across the lifespan. Consistent with previous studies, childhood environmental protector factors and parental social class predicted occupational status at age 25 significantly, but showed progressively weaker prediction at ages 32, 47 and 65. Timely early childhood development proved over time to be a far more important predictor than childhood social environment in adulthood. Ana C. DiRago is a Psychology Ph.D. student in the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research area. She is involved with the Minnesota Twin Family Study. Her research interests include resilience and behavioral genetics in mood and anxiety disorders. George E. Vaillant is a Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has spent the last 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development charting adult development and the recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, and alcoholism. George considers Dan Offer a friend and long distance teacher.     

Public procurement as a means to achieving social gains – progress and challenges in European legislation and standards for accessible information and communication technology

This article explores the European Commission goal of improving the quality and level of accessibility in mainstream information and communication technology (ICT) goods and services available in Member States through the use of public procurement legislation and performance standards. Over the past two decades, the Commission has encouraged Member States to adopt common requirements for accessibility and to strengthen efforts to use these requirements in public procurement. In the absence of significant improvements in the level of accessibility over this time, the Commission has more recently committed to bringing forward legislative proposals to harmonize the accessibility requirements used by Member States. A new procurement directive package contains stronger obligations on public bodies to include accessibility as mandatory requirements in Technical Specifications. In parallel to this, a standardization mandate by the Commission to the European Standards Organizations (ESOs) concluded in March 2014 with the publication of the first European standard on ICT accessibility. In light of these developments, this article analyses the trajectory of European policy in the field of accessibility over the last two decades, and the interplay between European public procurement, standardization and law. It examines how far these developments have succeeded in bringing into being a public procurement eco-system that will nudge the market in Europe to producing affordable and accessible ICT products and services for persons with disabilities.     

Profile of Men Who Are Victims of Physical Violence by an Intimate Partner

The objective of this study was to characterize the profile of men who are victims of interpersonal physical violence (IPV) by an intimate partner. This study is a retrospective analysis of suspected cases of male victims of IPV by an intimate partner, aged 18 years or older, treated at a Forensic Medicine and Dentistry Center in Brazil. Sociodemographic variables of the victims, the types of violence and the patterns of injuries were evaluated. Over this period, 1520 suspected victims of IPV by an intimate partner were examined; 14.6 % (n = 222) of them were men. Based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) two dimensions were formed: the first dimension (internal reliability = 0613) was primarily formed by the relationship between aggressor and victim, the marital status and the type of IPV, and the second dimension (reliability = 0509) by the day of week, the period of day and the marital status.     

Residence patterns of the elderly in early eighteenth-century Iceland

In this article the 1703 Icelandic census is used to shed light on the living arrangements of the elderly during a period of harsh climatic and social conditions. The census is unique in the sense that it includes an entire population of a country at an early date. It was taken on the initiative of the authorities in Denmark with the objective of examining the dire conditions of the Icelandic population and, in particular, assessing the number of paupers and vagrants. The census therefore provides interesting possibilities to analyse the situation of the most vulnerable groups of the society. In a society with low nuptiality rates and a low sex ratio, the risk of becoming dependent on poor relief increased with age. Elderly persons who were not able to retire in the household of an offspring ran the risk of spending their last years as paupers. In the 75 and older age group, no less than 43.5% of women were in the position of a pauper. In line with other recent studies on intergenerational co-residence, this study indicates that the elderly preferred to co-reside with their offspring. Even though elderly couples preferred to remain in the position of head of household, most would co-reside with their children. As regards widowed persons, there were noticeable differences between elderly men and women. Elderly widows were thus more likely than widowers to resign from headship on entering widowhood in order to retire in the household of one of an offspring.     

Economic Crisis and Support for Democracy in Europe

The study of the impact of the economic crisis on attitudes toward democracy tends to be focused on satisfaction with specific democratic institutions. This article expands upon previous research to explore how the current economic crisis can affect core support for democracy as a regime. Based on European Social Survey data for the Eurozone countries, the findings are twofold. It is shown, firstly, that perceptions of the state of the economy have an impact both on satisfaction with and support for democracy, and, secondly, that citizens’ support for democracy is greater in bailed-out countries. In countries that have experienced intervention, the more critical citizens and those less satisfied with the outputs of democracy are the stronger advocates of democracy. The article argues that this is connected with the tendency of critical citizens in bailed-out countries to blame external agents for the economic situation while increasing the saliency of democratic rules as a reaction to the imposition of unpopular measures.     

Corruption as a Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.     

Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the...     

Population data for 15 Y-chromosome STRs in a population sample from Quito (Ecuador)

Population frequencies for the 9 Y-STR loci included in the "minimal haplotype" from Y-STR Haplotype Reference Database (YHRD), plus other 6 Y-STRs (DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, GATA A7.2, GATA H4 and GATA A10) were obtained for a sample of 120 males from Quito (Ecuador). One hundred and sixteen unique haplotypes were identified within the sample. Haplotype diversity (0.9994) was among the highest in comparison to other populations from Iberia and South-America. Genetic distances were calculated and our sample presented significative differences with all other samples, the lowest values being with a Guinean sample.