A structural equation model relating unemployment stress,spiritual intelligence,and mental health components: Mediators of coping mechanism

This study aimed to evaluate a hypothesized structural model that reflects the relationship between unemployment stress, spiritual intelligence and mental health components. The sample of the study consisted of (761) unemployed adults (412 males and 349 females), their ages ranged between 30 to 48 year. They were divided into two samples: the first consisted of (352) unemployed adults to test the validity and reliability of the scales used in this study. And the second sample consisted of (409) unemployed adults to evaluate the hypothesized structural model. Researcher prepared the unemployment stress scale, and used the spiritual intelligence scale‐27, as well as prepared the short version of the mental health components scale based on the mental health scale‐50. In order to find how unemployment stress and spiritual intelligence predict the mental health components, the hypothesized model was examined using structural equation modeling. The results of test the proposed structural model concluded that the independent variable: unemployment stress contributed statistically significant directly to predict of the five dimensions of mental health components: mental mindfulness, flexibility, self‐efficiency, social support and happiness as dependent variables. At the same time, the independent variable: unemployment stress contributed statistically significant indirectly and proportionally to the prediction of the five dimensions of mental health as dependent variables through the dimensions of spiritual intelligence: spiritual mindfulness, spiritual abilities, spiritual presence as median variables. The proposed model of unemployment stress, spiritual intelligence and mental health components has a good fitness with the data were collected, and able to predict mental health among unemployed adults.     

Transformative Illegality: How Condoms ‘Became Legal’ in Ireland, 1991–1993

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.     

State Facilitated Economic Abuse: A Structural Analysis of Men Deliberately Withholding Child Support

Economic abuse is well established as a widespread and damaging element of intimate partner violence. However research largely addresses cohabiting couples, with few detailed explorations of women’s longer-term experiences after separation. Further, researchers have not developed a gendered analysis of child support related economic abuse. Such an analysis requires understanding gender as a framework that organises institutions and relationships in ways that build and reproduce hierarchical relations of difference. In this paper, I present data from in-depth interviews with 37 single mothers to pursue a structural analysis of how men’s deliberate withholding of child support (termed child maintenance in some countries) can be a form of economic abuse that is facilitated through gendered state processes and institutions that order child support transfers. I argue that masculine financial discretion structures policy and organizational practices in ways that legitimate men’s financial agency at the expense of women’s financial autonomy. On-going compliance issues are not the result of a failure of Australia’s Child Support Program, but suggest that the state’s role can be one of regulation, not prevention, of economic abuse. Thus, Australia’s Child Support Program normalises the potential for post-separation economic abuse.     

Globalised Imaginaries of Love and Hate: Immutability,Violence, and LGBT Human Rights

The U.S.-led global LGBT human rights campaign, formalised on International Human Rights Day 2011, sutures human rights policing with a politics of protection. Centred on a singular LGBT victim of violence, the campaign’s multiple projects legitimate military and financial intervention under the auspices of human rights. This article examines the regulatory production of globalised LGBT rights through the nexus of international LGBT human rights/hate crime laws, U.S. asylum law, and equal protection treatment of sexual orientation. I argue that the juridical and ideological frameworks that guide state action in each of these areas converge in the construction of an immutable LGBT identity that is the object of racialised, culturally othered violence. This rendering of sexual difference through the flattening of culture elides structural violence and advances human rights imperialism.     

Public History and the Study of Law: Reviewing <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Limehouse Golem</Emphasis> (2017)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.     

State,Society, and Informality in Cities of the Global South

Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethnographic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data.     

No Colonial Working Class,No Post-Colonial Development: a Comparative-Historical Analysis of Two Oil-Rich Countries

Development sociologists generally agree that states play a critical role in promoting, as well as in impeding, development. However, far less scholarly consensus exists on the precise historical processes that lead either to strong or to weak states. This paper investigates the factors that shape varied state capacities through a comparative-historical analysis of two similar countries with divergent development outcomes—Trinidad and Tobago and Gabon. In the 1960s, both countries had comparably large amounts of oil wealth, minimal state involvement in the economy, and low levels of development. In the 1970s, state capacity in Trinidad and Tobago dramatically increased and the country went on to achieve high levels of development. The Gabonese state, on the other hand, remained weak resulting in persistent low levels of development. This paper traces the divergence in state capacity to variations in working class mobilization, specifically the particular type of working class movements in each country and the political opportunity contexts. In doing so, this paper reveals new agents and contingencies producing state capacity that are not predominantly discussed in the contemporary development literature, and the meso-level mechanics by which these agents are successful or constrained in doing so.     

Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled cross-sectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa’s TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice.

Ethical issues in pro‐social advertising: the Australian 2006 White Ribbon Day campaign

• The Australian White Ribbon Day 2006 campaign was severely criticized by mental health professionals and those working in the family and domestic violence sector because of depictions of suicide and self‐harm in the television advertisement and accompanying promotional materials. The White Ribbon Day (WRD) National Leadership Group (NLG) rejected all requests by concerned groups to not use these campaign materials. They and their apologists claimed that such violent imagery was necessary to attract men's attention and was being misinterpreted as depicting suicide attempts.
• With preliminary ethics approval we set out to assess reactions to the television advertisement. After 24 interviews, the testing was terminated by the university research ethics officer after two male respondents demonstrated significant distress after viewing the ad. Furthermore, the results by that stage showed that there were perceived messages of suicide in the ad. These results were sent to the WRD NLG with a request to reconsider proceeding with the television advertisement and associated materials. Mental health and domestic violence organizations lodged similar requests. All requests were rejected. The case raises a number of ethical issues for pro‐social organizations when dealing with sensitive issues and using execution techniques that may impact negatively on vulnerable audiences.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.