Search results for "Sozialwissenschaften"
showing 10 items of 37 documents
Work-life balance during the COVID-19 outbreak: the case of Latvia
2020
This paper aims to shed light on work-life balance in Latvia during the state of emergency The COVID-19 outbreak has led many governments to introduce lockdowns While imposed restrictions may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may also result in substantial damage to population well-being The COVID-19 outbreak in Latvia demonstrates the extent and ways in which socio-demographics factors have determined different patterns of behaviour, attitudes, employment changes and harmonised work and life balance The study describes the chronological development of COVID-19 in the country It describes labour migration to and from Latvia before the COVID-19 outbreak It provides geographical f…
In search of a theoretical framework of factors influencing work and life balance
2021
Work and life balance (WLB) has gained noticeable attention amid the pandemic. Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, the increasing pace of life encouraged the investigation of individual and organisational aspects of WLB. Physically and mentally healthy people help society develop and grow. Health issues caused by work and life imbalance lead to dissatisfaction with both work and life, which, in turn, leads to higher stress and stress-related illnesses, for instance, burnout. From the organisational point of view, WLB is a factor in analysing the efficiency of an enterprise. The consequences of a work-life imbalance are intentional or unintentional absence, high employee turnover, low prod…
Posted Migration and Segregation in the European Construction Sector
2015
Worker ‘posting’ or temporary migration of manual workers sent by their employers to work on projects abroad has become increasingly prominent in the European construction industry. It is now normal to find groups of workers from all around Europe on construction sites, living in nearby temporary accommodations, moving on to other projects or back home when the project is complete. This article highlights the interaction between the social and spatial segregation and transnational mobility of these workers in the European Union construction labour market. We argue that the work-focused and employer-dominated nature of the posted workers' social world abroad contributes to their segregation …
A European mind? Europeanisation of football fan discussions in online message boards
2021
Across Europe, national professional football leagues have seen increasing numbers of players from other EU states, while the Champions League and the Europa League have become a focal point for ma...
A `little world of your own': stigma, gender and narratives of venereal disease contact tracing
2008
As in other countries, in order to protect the public from venereal disease (syphilis and gonorrhoea), contact tracing in New Zealand has been a public health strategy since the mid-20th century. So far, scholars have predominantly focused on the aspect of control of the cases traced. Based on a rare interview with a female contact tracer, together with a range of archival material, this article aims to expand the scholarship by focusing on the tracer instead of the patient. Using Erving Goffman's original concept of `courtesy stigma', the article will show that his idea can be nuanced to take into account contact tracers and the ways in which this stigma can be refracted through gender. Wo…
Construct validity of the anxiety sensitivity index-3 in clinical samples
2012
"Using two clinical samples of patients, the presented studies examined the construct validity of the recently revised Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3 (ASI-3). Confirmatory factor analyses established a clear three-factor structure that corresponds to the postulated subdivision of the construct into correlated somatic, social, and cognitive components. Participants with different primary clinical diagnoses differed from each other on the ASI-3 subscales in theoretically meaningful ways. Specifically, the ASI-3 successfully discriminated patients with anxiety disorders from patients with nonanxiety disorders. Moreover, patients with panic disorder or agoraphobia manifested more somatic concerns …
Between context and comparability: Exploring new solutions for a familiar methodological challenge in qualitative comparative research
2020
Finding the balance between adequately describing the uniqueness of the context of studied phenomena and maintaining sufficient common ground for comparability and analytical generalisation has widely been recognised as a key challenge in international comparative research. Methodological reflections on how to adequately cover context and comparability have extensively been discussed for quantitative survey or secondary data research. In addition, most recently, promising methodological considerations for qualitative comparative research have been suggested in comparative fields related to higher education. The article’s aim is to connect this discussion to comparative higher education rese…
The Process of Pregnancy: Paradoxical Temporalities of Prenatal Entities
2021
AbstractIn this article, we reflect on the particular temporal structure of pregnancies and prenatal entities with the aim to contribute to the field of the sociology of pregnancy. Medical models and technology shape today’s notion of pregnancy as a linear, nine-month developmental process that leads to the birth of a child. Through ultrasound technology and prenatal examinations, prenatal entities have thus historically gained a present ‘being’ as a developing, unborn child. While these ideas undoubtedly greatly influence the participants’ interpretations, a culturalistic perspective on time alone does not do justice to the phenomenon’s lived tensions and the temporal complexity of the phe…
Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment as a Challenge to Research Ethics
2016
This article analyzes the ethical discussion focusing on the Facebook emotional contagion experiment published by the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> in 2014. The massive-scale experiment manipulated the News Feeds of a large amount of Facebook users and was successful in proving that emotional contagion happens also in online environments. However, the experiment caused ethical concerns within and outside academia mainly for two intertwined reasons, the first revolving around the idea of research as manipulation, and the second focusing on the problematic definition of informed consent. The article concurs with recent research that the era of social med…
Localizing the politics of privacy in communication and media research
2020
While previous communication and media research has largely focused on either studying privacy as personal boundary management or made efforts to investigate the structural (legal or economic) condition of privacy, we observe an emergent body of research on the political underpinnings of privacy linking both aspects. A pronounced understanding of the politics of privacy is however lacking. In this contribution, we set out to push this forward by mapping four communication and media perspectives on the political implications of privacy. In order to do so, we recur on Barry’s (2002) distinction of the political and the politics and outline linkages between individual and structural dimensions…