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This paper empirically examines differences in how 50-year-olds imagine their future. It draws on answers to an open-ended survey question in a large British cohort study—the National Child Development Study. Over 6,700 written responses about respondents’ imagined future are examined using text mining methods. Results from a relative frequency analysis and a topic model reveal differences according to gender, occupational class, and educational qualification. The cohort members’ written texts reflect different lifestyles. Men are more likely to mention sport, like golf and football, whereas women are more prone to use words related to family and friends. Respondents with a degree are more likely to write about cultural activities, such as museum or theater visits. Overall, the findings reveal gendered and socially stratified patterns in individual future perceptions, contextualized in relation to leisure, health, and family.
Recombinant DNA technology is an essential area of life engineering. The main aim of research in this field is to experimentally explore the possibilities of repairing damaged human DNA, healing or enhancing future human bodies. Based on ethnographic research in a Czech biochemical laboratory, the article explores biotechnological corporealities and their specific ontology through dealings with bio-objects, the bodywork of scientists. Using the complementary concepts of utopia and heterotopia, the text addresses the situation of bodies and bio-objects in a laboratory. Embodied utopias are analyzed as material semiotic phenomena that are embodied by scientists in their visions and emotions and that are related to potential bodies and to future, not-yet-actualized embodiments. As a counterpart to this, the text explores embodied heterotopias, which are always the other spaces, like biotechnological bio-objects that are simulated in computers or stored in special solutions.
By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.
Problematisiert wird, dass der Aufsatz von Revers und Traunmüller Erkenntnisinteresse und Positionalität der durchgeführten Forschung verschleiert. Eine Offenlegung wäre notwendig, um die Grundlagen der schwerwiegenden methodischen Probleme, der Fallauswahl und der unbelegten Behauptungen des Aufsatzes verstehen zu können. Im Widerspruch zu der falschen Annahme, dass Meinungsfreiheit grenzenlos sei und auch mit einer Freiheit einhergehe, andere zu diskriminieren, legt meine Replik die Notwendigkeit (siehe Grundgesetz und Gleichbehandlungsgesetz) dar, dass auch an den Universitäten Diskriminierungen aktiv vermieden werden müssen.
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools providing voting advice to their users. This voting advice is based on the match between the answers of the user and the answers of several political parties to a common questionnaire on political attitudes. To visualize this match, VAAs use a wide array of visualisations, most popular of which are the two-dimensional political maps. These maps show the position of both the political parties and the user in the political landscape, allowing the user to understand both their own position and their relation to the political parties. To construct these maps, VAAs require scales that represent the main underlying dimensions of the political space. This makes the correct construction of these scales important if the VAA aims to provide accurate and helpful voting advice. This paper presents three criteria that assess if a VAA achieves this aim. To illustrate their usefulness, these three criteria—unidimensionality, reliability and quality—are used to assess the scales in the cross-national EUVox VAA, a VAA designed for the European Parliament elections of 2014. Using techniques from Mokken scaling analysis and categorical principal component analysis to capture the metrics, I find that most scales show low unidimensionality and reliability. Moreover, even while designers can—and sometimes do—use certain techniques to improve their scales, these improvements are rarely enough to overcome all of the problems regarding unidimensionality, reliability and quality. This leaves certain problems for the designers of VAAs and designers of similar type online surveys.
Aktuelle wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Sinnerleben Beschäftigter thematisieren vor allem die Problematik eines belastungsbedingten Sinnverlustes. Danach leiden immer mehr Beschäftigte darunter, ihre Arbeit nicht mehr als sinnvoll empfinden zu können. Eine solche Perspektive lässt allerdings die subjektiven Gestaltungsleistungen und Aneignungsformen von Arbeit aus dem Blick geraten. Diesen wendet sich der Beitrag zu, indem er danach fragt, inwieweit sich unterschiedliche Formen der Aneignung von Arbeit identifizieren lassen. Auf der Basis von Interviews mit vierzig hochqualifizierten Beschäftigten werden drei unterschiedliche Aneignungsmodi mit ihren inhärenten Ambivalenzen identifiziert. Jeder Modus steht für eine spezifische Sichtweise auf die eigenen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten und für eine Form der primären Sinnzuschreibung in der Arbeit. Differenziert werden drei Idealtypen – „progressive Sinngestaltung“, „widerständige Sinnbewahrung“ sowie „pragmatische Sinnbewahrung“ –, anhand derer die Heterogenität und die Ambivalenzen der Aneignung professioneller Arbeit deutlich werden. Der Beitrag liefert so Erkenntnisse über die subjektiven Praktiken des Bedeutsam-Machens von Arbeit und trägt zur Erforschung des Zusammenspiels von Arbeit und Subjektivität bei.
In the 21st century, the division of housework remains gendered, with women on average still spending more time doing chores than their male partners. While research has studied why this phenomenon is so persistent, few studies have yet been able to assess the effect of gender ideology and socio-economic resources at the same time, usually due to data restrictions. We use data from the pairfam, a new and innovative German panel study, in order to test the effect of absolute and relative resources as well as his and her gender ideology on the division of housework. We employ a life course perspective and analyze trajectories of couples’ housework division over time, using multi-level random effects growth curve models. We find that an egalitarian gender ideology of both him and her significantly predicts more egalitarian division-trajectories, while neither absolute nor relative resources appear to have an effect on the division of housework over time. Furthermore, our results expand the literature by investigating how these processes differ among childless couples and couples who experience the first birth.
The intergenerational transmission of gender: paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes
(2022)
Objective: This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of the influence of paternal involvement in family life—across childhood and adolescence—on the gender-role attitudes of children by the age of 14 or 15.
Background: Recent research suggests that, in post-industrial societies, paternal involvement in family life is increasing. Although previous studies of paternal involvement have considered paternal influences on children's cognitive or socio-emotional development, such studies have not yet addressed paternal influences on children's attitudes toward gender. Relatedly, previous studies on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes have analyzed maternal influences, but have neglected the significance of paternal influences. This study engages both strands of the research by analyzing the effects of paternal behaviors on children's attitudes toward gender roles.
Method: Multivariate linear regressions models were estimated on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC); a survey with biannual observations over 10 years for 2796 children born between 1999 and 2000.
Results: Fathers' time spent on childcare during childhood was associated with gender-egalitarian attitudes in children by the age of 14 or 15. The most powerful predictor of children's gender-role attitudes, however, was the amount of time fathers spent on housework during children's adolescence, both absolute and relative to the amount of time mothers spent on housework. Fathers' unpaid labor at home was as relevant for children's gender-role attitudes as mothers' paid labor in the workforce. These results held after controlling for maternal domestic behaviors and for the gender-role attitudes of both parents.
Conclusion: Father involvement in childcare and housework during childhood and adolescence play an important role in shaping children's gender-egalitarian attitudes.
Children from upper-class families have better cognitive outcomes and fewer behavioural problems than those from working-class families. Previous studies highlighted that the class gap in child development is partially driven by differences in parenting styles, but they rarely looked at multiple, more specific dimensions of parenting, i.e., inductive reasoning, parenting consistency, warmth and anger. This study provides a systematic account of how parental social class shapes these four dimensions of parenting, and how these dimensions affect children’s cognitive outcomes and behavioural problems. Using high-quality, longitudinal data, and both hybrid models and the generalized methods of moments, this study reports two main findings. First, upper-class parents significantly differ from lower-class parents in two parenting dimensions, displaying more inductive reasoning and parenting consistency, but no relevant class differences are found in the two emotion-type dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth and anger). Second, all four parenting dimensions have a strong impact on children’s behavioural problems, while they do not affect cognitive outcomes. An exception is consistency, the only dimension that affects both types of child outcomes. The study underscores the relevance of analysing parenting and child development from a multidimensional approach to better understand how upper-class parents transmit advantage to children.
After a recent spate of terrorist attacks in European and American cities, liberal democracies are reintroducing emergency securitarian measures (ESMs) that curtail rights and/or expand police powers. Political theorists who study ESMs are familiar with how such measures become instruments of discrimination and abuse, but the fundamental conflict ESMs pose for not just civil liberty but also democratic equality still remains insufficiently explored. Such phenomena are usually explained as a function of public panic or fear-mongering in times of crisis, but I show that the tension between security and equality is in fact much deeper and more general. It follows a different logic than the more familiar tension between security and liberty, and it concerns not just the rule of law in protecting liberty but also the role of law in integrating new or previously subjected groups into a democratic community. As liberal-democratic societies become increasingly diverse and multicultural in the present era of mass immigration and global interconnectedness, this tension between security and equality is likely to become more pronounced.