Search results for "Europe"
showing 10 items of 6186 documents
Quality of Life in European Older Adults of SHARE Wave 7: Comparing the Old and the Oldest-Old
2021
CASP-12 (Control, Autonomy, Self-realization, and Pleasure scale) is one of the most common internationally used measures for quality of life in older adults, although its structure is not clearly established. Current research aims to test the factor structure of the CASP-12, so as to provide evidence on reliability and external validity, and to test for measurement invariance across age groups. Data from 61,355 Europeans (≥60 years old) from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe wave 7 were used. CASP-12, EURO-D (European depression scale), self-perceived health, and life satisfaction measurements were included. Reliability and validity coefficients, competing confirmatory …
Dialects: Early European Studies
2006
The article begins with an overview of dialectology starting with dictionaries and grammars in Switzerland (forerunners) and in Bavaria (1821, 1827–1837). The tradition of dialect atlases beganworldwide with the data collection for the German linguistic atlas (1877–1888) by Georg Wenker. Research on Germanic dialects other than German began between 1841 and 1860 in Denmark, Norway, and Great Britain (also with dictionaries and grammars). It goes on to show that after French and Italian dialectology had concentrated on written dialect collections, several dialect grammars, e.g., for Paris and surrounding areas, appeared as from 1872, culminating in the enormous French dialect atlas ALF betwe…
Linguistic Diversity as a Problem and a Resource – Multilingualism in European and Finnish Policy Documents
2012
Societies in Europe and across the world are under constant pressure to cope with increasing multilingualism and multiculturalism. This development has its roots in different global and local societal and economic processes. On the one hand, globalization is putting pressure on the economy in that more varied language resources are needed in society. On the other hand, immigration is constantly on the increase, giving rise to what Vertovec (2006) has termed super-diversity, a ‘condition distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified i…
The Well-Being Gap during the Great Recession: The Role of Growth and Institutions
2020
The purpose of this paper is to examine the well-being dynamics across European countries during the Great Recession and to investigate the potential role of the quality of formal institutions in mitigating the negative effect of the economic downturn. This study uses the club convergence methodology by Phillips and Sul (2007; 2009) to group EU-28 countries that present similar features in terms of well-being during the period 2005-2017. The study also applies probit models to investigate the potential role of several social and institutional characteristics that are supposed to affect subjective well-being levels. The results show the existence of a “well-being gap” among European countrie…
Political Advertising on Facebook
2021
Parties have limited opportunities to determine the audiences of their organic communication. However, Facebook offers sophisticated advertising possibilities which enable parties to sponsor their organic messages in order to target them at selected and narrow segments of the electorate. Information on advertising activity was not available in Europe until Facebook has launched its ‘Ad Library’ right before the 2019 European Parliamentary election which provided access to all political ads and its metadata. By drawing on this data, our chapter will advance on the previous country chapters and investigate parties’ advertising activity in the 12 analysed countries with a specific focus on spo…
Immigrants’ Networks, Distance, and Trade Creation Effects: An Study Employing Province-Level Data for Italy, Spain and Portugal
2014
Neoclassical trade theory assumed international flows of goods (commodities) to be substituting for people (factor) flows under certain circumstances. However, recent empirical evidence shows a complementary relationship between these two types of flows, with migration creating new trade exchanges. Immigrants tend to form networks across borders, reducing fixed trade costs. They also retain some preference for their home-produced goods. These two channels provide the rationale of the immigration trade-enhancing linkage. In this study we investigate that issue for the cases of Italy, Spain and Portugal, employing province-level data for the period 2002–2010. Results show that the first chann…
Access to Justice or Access to States Courtss Justice in Europe? The Directive 2008/52/EC on Civil and Commercial Mediation
2013
Modern societies are very much linked to the idea of litigation. A hidden rule seems to exist in the sense that the more advanced a society is the highest level of litigation it suffers. This increase in the level of litigation amounts to a sort of “litigation explosion” that has traditionally been linked to State courts. This explosion is said to put the whole judiciary system under pressure in so far the volume of disputes brought before State courts increases, the proceedings become more and more lengthy and the costs incurred in such proceedings also augment. The goal to tackle this explosion underpins most of the reforms that modern national civil procedure laws have suffered in many c…
Ideology, Nationalism and Law: Legal Tools for an Ideological Machinery in Latvia
2016
For around 25 years Latvia has moved further and further away from Soviet Marxism-Leninist state ideology and has successfully re-integrated with European legal culture. It is obvious that the term ‘ideology’, due to its historical Soviet context, has a mostly negative colouring even nowadays. Integration within the European Union and the implementation of social and political programs and concepts have led to questions raised about leading contemporary ideology (ies) and its (their) role in the development of Latvia’s legal system. The issue of ideologies becomes more complicated and unclear when regarding specific legal reforms or Parliament`s drafts of laws. The article will explore the …
Plant-herbivorous beetle networks : molecular characterization of trophic ecology within a threatened steppic environment
2015
DNA barcoding facilitates many evolutionary and ecological studies, including the examination of the dietary diversity of herbivores. In this study, we present a survey of ecological associations between herbivorous beetles and host plants from seriously threatened European steppic grasslands. We determined host plants for the majority (65%) of steppic leaf beetles (55 species) and weevils (59) known from central Europe using two barcodes (trnL and rbcL) and two sequencing strategies (Sanger for mono/oligophagous species and Illumina for polyphagous taxa). To better understand the ecological associations between steppic beetles and their host plants, we tested the hypothesis that leaf beetl…
From ‘Awkward Partner’ to ‘Awkward Partnership’? Explaining Norway’s Paradoxical Relations with the European Union
2017
Norway is the only Nordic state to have rejected membership of the European Union four times. Applying the conceptual lens of ‘awkwardness’, as developed by Murray et al. (2014), it seems fair to consider the country as an awkward partner in the process of European integration. As a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), however, Norway has been tightly associated with the European Union ever since 1994, actively participating in a large number of EU policies and programs and effectively forging a close partnership that has in itself become increasingly ‘awkward’. This holds true despite the fact that successive Norwegian governments have recently started to embrace a generally more re…