Vocational Interests and Career Goals: Development and Relations to Personality and Middle Adolescence

Cross-sectional research implies a close relation of vocation interests, goals, and traits, yet little is known about their reciprocal development over time. This longitudinal study examined development of Things/People (T/P) and Data/Ideas (D/I) vocational interests and career goals in relation to Big Five personality traits among 292 Swiss adolescents with a cross-lagged panel design with two measurement points over 1 year from seventh to eighth grade. Interests and goals were significantly related within time and showed significant interactions across time. Traits related significantly and equally to interests and goals within time and predicted their development across time except for T/P goals. Goals and interests possessed incremental validity above traits in affecting each other. Implications include the need to account for dynamic processes in the development of goals and interests and their systematic relation to traits in theory and practice.

The role of chance events in the school-to-work transition: The influence of demographic, personality and career development variables

Chance events are considered important in career development, yet little empirical research is available on their predictors and consequences. The present study investigated socio-demographic (gender, nationality, school-type), personality (openness, locus of control) and career development variables (career decidedness, career planning) in relation to perceived chance events with a retrospective (N = 229, eleventh grade), and 1-year longitudinal prospective study (N = 245, eighth/ninth grade) among Swiss adolescents. The results showed that the majority of both groups reported a significant influence of chance events on their transition from compulsory school to vocational education or high school. Importance of chance events related to socio-demographics and personality but not career preparation. Career preparation and chance events predicted subjective career success in terms of wish correspondence and overall satisfaction with transition outcome among the younger cohort. Implications include the necessity to integrate both thorough career preparation and chance events in theory and counseling practice.

In Search of Political Influence: Strategic Choices and Media Coverage of Political Parties, Interest Groups and Social Movements in Western European Countries

Outside lobbying is a key strategy for social movements, interest groups and political parties for mobilising public opinion through the media in order to pressure policymakers and influence the policymaking process. Relying on semi-structured interviews and newspaper content analysis in six Western European countries, this article examines the use of four outside lobbying strategies – media-related activities, informing (about) the public, mobilisation and protest – and the amount of media coverage they attract. While some strategies are systematically less pursued than others, we find variation in their relative share across institutional contexts and actor types. Given that most of these differences are not accurately mirrored in the media, we conclude that media coverage is only loosely connected to outside lobbying behaviour, and that the media respond differently to a given strategy when used by different actors. Thus, the ability of different outside lobbying strategies to generate media coverage critically depends on who makes use of them.

Ethical Consumption and Social Context: Experimental Evidence from Germany and the United States

This research examines the role of social context in ethical consumption, specifically, the extent to which anonymity and social control influence individuals' decisions to purchase organic and Fair Trade coffee. Our research design overcomes biases of prior research by combining framing and discrete choice experiments in a survey. We systematically vary coffee growing method (organic or not), import status (Fair Trade or not), flavor, and price across four social contexts that vary in degree of anonymity and normative social control. The social contexts are buying coffee online, in a large grocery store, in a small neighborhood shop, and for a meeting of a human rights group. Subjects comprise 1,103 German and American undergraduate students. We find that social context indeed influences subjects' ethical consumer decisions, especially in situations with low anonymity and high social control. In addition, gender, coffee buying, and subjective social norms trigger heterogeneity regarding stated ethical consumption and the effects of social context. These results suggest previous research has underestimated the relevance of social context for ethical consumption and overestimated altruistic motives of ethical consumers. Our study demonstrates the great potential of discrete choice experiments for the study of social action and decision making processes in sociology.

A common mechanism underlying food choice and social decisions

People make numerous decisions every day including perceptual decisions such as walking through a crowd, decisions over primary rewards such as what to eat, and social decisions that require balancing own and others’ benefits. The unifying principles behind choices in various domains are, however, still not well understood. Mathematical models that describe choice behavior in specific contexts have provided important insights into the computations that may underlie decision making in the brain. However, a critical and largely unanswered question is whether these models generalize from one choice context to another. Here we show that a model adapted from the perceptual decision-making domain and estimated on choices over food rewards accurately predicts choices and reaction times in four independent sets of subjects making social decisions. The robustness of the model across domains provides behavioral evidence for a common decision-making process in perceptual, primary reward, and social decision making.

Culture and the social context of health inequalities

There has been a great deal of interest and debate recently concerning the linkages between inequality and health cross-nationally. Exposures to social and health inequalities likely vary as a consequence of different cultural contexts. It is important to guide research by a theoretical perspective that includes cultural and social contexts cross-nationally. If inequality affects health only under specific cultural conditions, this could explain why some of the literature that compares different societies finds no evidence of a relationship between inequality and health in certain countries. A theoretical framework is presented that combines sociological theory with constructs from cultural psychology in order to identify pathways that might lead from cultural dimensions to health inequalities. Three analyses are carried out. The first analysis explores whether there is a relationship between cultural dimensions at the societal level and self-rated health at the individual level. The findings suggest that different cultural norms at the societal level can produce both social and health inequalities, but the effects on health may differ depending on the socio-cultural context. The second analysis tests the hypothesis that health is affected by the density of social networks in a society, levels of societal trust, and inequality. The results suggest that commonly used measures of social cohesion and inequality may have both contextual and compositional effects on health in a large number of countries, and that societal measures of social cohesion and inequality interact with individual measures of social participation, trust, and income, moderating their effects on health. The third analysis explores whether value systems associated with vertical individualist societies may lead to health disparities because of their stigmatizing effects. I test the hypothesis that, within vertical individualist societies, subjective well-being will be affected by a social context where competition and the Protestant work ethic are valued, mediated by inequality. The hypothesis was not supported by the available cross-national data, most likely because of inadequate measures, missing data, and the small sample of vertical individualist countries. The overall findings demonstrate that cultural differences are important contextual factors that should not be overlooked when examining the causes of health inequalities. ^

Are team personality and climate related to satisfaction and software quality? Aggregating results from a twice replicated experiment

Research into software engineering teams focuses on human and social team factors. Social psychology deals with the study of team formation and has found that personality factors and group processes such as team climate are related to team effectiveness. However, there are only a handful of empirical studies dealing with personality and team climate and their relationship to software development team effectiveness. Objective We present aggregate results of a twice replicated quasi-experiment that evaluates the relationships between personality, team climate, product quality and satisfaction in software development teams. Method Our experimental study measures the personalities of team members based on the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) preferences and perceptions. We aggregate the results of the three studies through a meta-analysis of correlations. The study was conducted with students. Results The aggregation of results from the baseline experiment and two replications corroborates the following findings. There is a positive relationship between all four climate factors and satisfaction in software development teams. Teams whose members score highest for the agreeableness personality factor have the highest satisfaction levels. The results unveil a significant positive correlation between the extraversion personality factor and software product quality. High participative safety and task orientation climate perceptions are significantly related to quality. Conclusions First, more efficient software development teams can be formed heeding personality factors like agreeableness and extraversion. Second, the team climate generated in software development teams should be monitored for team member satisfaction. Finally, aspects like people feeling safe giving their opinions or encouraging team members to work hard at their job can have an impact on software quality. Software project managers can take advantage of these factors to promote developer satisfaction and improve the resulting product.

Transnationality and Social Integration within Lifestyle Migration. A comparative study of two cases in Mexico and Spain

International mobility in search of amenity spaces for long-stay tourism is a growing phenomenon. U.S. citizens have practiced this lifestyle migration for decades to Latin American countries, especially to Mexico. British citizens move to Spain for similar reasons. In this paper we make a comparative analysis of these two international contexts in order to gain greater insight into the diversity and breadth of this type of migration. The study uses quantitative surveys administered at each field site. First, we analyze the phenomenon of U.S. citizens’ mobility to Mazatlán, Mexico. Second, we analize citizens from the United Kingdom residing in El Campello, Spain. In particular we compare their socio-demographic profiles, transnational practices and some patterns of social integration.

The biology of human conflict; an anatomy of behavior, individual and social,

Mode of access: Internet.

Gray's model of personality and aggregate level factor analysis

Previous research shows that correlations tend to increase in magnitude when individuals are aggregated across groups. This suggests that uncorrelated constellations of personality variables (such as the primary scales of Extraversion and Neuroticism) may display much higher correlations in aggregate factor analysis. We hypothesize and report that individual level factor analysis can be explained in terms of Giant Three (or Big Five) descriptions of personality, whereas aggregate level factor analysis can be explained in terms of Gray's physiological based model. Although alternative interpretations exist, aggregate level factor analysis may correctly identify the basis of an individual's personality as a result of better reliability of measures due to aggregation. We discuss the implications of this form of analysis in terms of construct validity, personality theory, and its applicability in general. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

Contingent on context? Social work and the state in Australia, Britain, and the USA

The notion that social work is an international profession, operating with generally similar goals, methodologies, and common values is considered critically. Examining the political and social contexts of three countries with liberal democratic governments-Australia, Britain and the United States-the role of social work within the welfare processes of each country is compared. While social work as an identifiable professional activity shares some features, it is argued that the idea of its having a core essence needs to be tempered with a realistic assessment of the importance of contextually created difference. Recent and rapid developments in the institutional context, such as those experienced in these three countries, further underscore the limited utility of the notion of a common professional project.

Appetitive motivation predicts the majority of personality and an ability measure: a comparison of BAS measures and a re-evaluation of the importance of RST

Our first study develops a measure of appetitive motivation and our second study compares several measures of Gray's (1987) behaviour activation system (BAS) in the prediction of the surface scales of personality. In particular, we were interested in determining the utility of the new appetitive motivation scale and Dickman's functional impulsivity scale. In comparison to other well-known measures, both scales were generally good predictors. We conclude that the appetitive motivation scale is a promising measure of BAS based upon construct validation. Contrary to previous studies which have suggested that BAS is a generally poor predictor of the surface scales of personality, we discovered appetitive motivation to be an important predictor of personality in general. Interestingly, the scale was also predictive of scores on the Baddeley reasoning test. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The relationship between personality and drinking restraint in an alcohol dependent sample

Consistent relationships have been demonstrated between problem drinking and certain personality characteristics. A contemporary cognitive model of alcohol misuse, drinking restraint, has recently shown promise in furthering our understanding of problematic drinking. This study examined the potential association between drinking restraint and personality characteristics in 168 alcohol dependent inpatients. Subjects completed the short-scale Revised Eysenck Personality Scales (EPS-R; Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985), Temptation and Restraint Inventory (TRI; Collins & Lapp, 1992), Alcohol Dependence Scale (ADS; Skinner & Allen, 1982) and drinking measures including quantity, frequency and weekly drinking total. Results indicated that although there was some conceptual overlap between drinking restraint and personality factors, the TRI had a unique relationship with indices of problem drinking once personality factors were taken into account. This indicates that restrained drinking and personality, although related, are discrete constructs. While restrained drinking may aid in the understanding of current drinking behavior, personality characteristics appear to contribute to the etiology and maintenance of drinking problems. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.