In a representative survey of the Dutch population we found that people with low levels of education and disabled people are using the Internet for more hours a day in their spare time than higher ...educated and employed populations. To explain this finding, we investigated what these people are doing online. The first contribution is a theoretically validated cluster of Internet usage types: information, news, personal development, social interaction, leisure, commercial transaction and gaming. The second contribution is that, based on this classification, we were able to identify a number of usage differences, including those demonstrated by people with different gender, age, education and Internet experience, that are often observed in digital divide literature. The general conclusion is that when the Internet matures, it will increasingly reflect known social, economic and cultural relationships of the offline world, including inequalities.
Research suggests that transgender people face high levels of discrimination in society, which may contribute to their disproportionate risk for poor health. However, little is known about whether ...gender nonconformity, as a visible marker of one's stigmatized status as a transgender individual, heightens trans people's experiences with discrimination and, in turn, their health. Using data from the largest survey of transgender adults in the United States, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (N = 4,115), we examine the associations among gender nonconformity, transphobic discrimination, and health-harming behaviors (i.e., attempted suicide, drug I alcohol abuse, and smoking). The results suggest that gender nonconforming trans people face more discrimination and, in turn, are more likely to engage in health-harming behaviors than trans people who are gender conforming. Our findings highlight the important role of gender nonconformity in the social experiences and well-being of transgender people.
This paper introduces the R package lavaan.survey, a user-friendly interface to design-based complex survey analysis of structural equation models (SEMs). By leveraging existing code in the lavaan ...and survey packages, the lavaan.survey package allows for SEM analyses of stratified, clustered, and weighted data, as well as multiply imputed complex survey data. lavaan.survey provides several features such as SEMs with replicate weights, a variety of resampling techniques for complex samples, and finite population corrections, features that should prove useful for SEM practitioners faced with the common situation of a sample that is not iid.
Convenience and low prices have enabled ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to position themselves amongst the most valuable companies within the transportation sector. They now account ...for the lion share of activities in the platform economy and play an increasing role within our cities. Despite this, very little is known about the type of people that use them, nor the purpose and timing of trips. In addition to this, their effect on other modes, such as taxis and public transit, remains, for the most part, widely unexplored. By comparing the socioeconomic and trip characteristics of ride-hailing users to that of other mode users, we find ride-hailing to be a wealthy younger generation phenomenon. While our results show that ride-hailing is too minute and inconsequential to influence the ridership level of other more substantial modes of travel overall, when considering specific market segments, the rise of ride-hailing corresponds to a significant decrease in taxi ridership and a rise in active modes of travel. Moreover, due to the specific age, timing, and purpose of our subsample, we believe that ride-hailing may effectively reduce drunk-driving, and are convinced that as this mode increases in importance in the future, it will have a much more pronounced effect on the level of ridership of other modes as well.
This cross-cultural study examines the effects of individual characteristics (i.e., consumers' need for uniqueness and self-monitoring) and brand-associated variables (i.e., social-function attitudes ...toward luxury brands and affective attitude) on U.S. and Chinese consumers' purchase intention for luxury brands. A total of 394 college students in U.S. and China participated in the survey. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), this study finds that U.S. and Chinese consumers' self-monitoring positively influences social-function attitudes toward luxury brands. Social-function attitudes toward luxury brands positively influence consumers' purchase intention through affective attitude. Attitude plays an important mediating role between social-function attitudes toward luxury brands and purchase intentions. The article closes with theoretical and practical implications.
Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit ...men's and women's ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men's and women's preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women's relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men's to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.
Manufacturing firms operating in rapidly changing and highly competitive markets have embraced the continuous process improvement mindset. They have worked to improve quality, flexibility, and ...customer response time using the principles of Lean thinking. To reach its potential, lean must be adopted as a holistic business strategy, rather than an activity isolated in operations. The lean enterprise calls for the integration of lean practices across operations and other business functions. As a critical component for achieving financial control, management accounting practices (MAP) need to be adjusted to meet the demands and objectives of lean organizations. Our aim is to help both researchers and practitioners better understand how lean MAP can support operations personnel with their internal decision making, and operations executives and business leaders in their objective of increasing lean operations performance as part of a holistic lean enterprise strategy. We use survey data from 244 U.S. manufacturing firms to construct a structural equation model. We document that the extent of lean manufacturing implementation is associated with the use of lean MAP, and further that the lean MAP are related in a systematic way: simplified and strategically aligned MAP positively influences the use of value stream costing, which in turn positively influences the use of visual performance measures. We also find that the extent of lean manufacturing practices is directly related to operations performance. More importantly, lean manufacturing practices also indirectly affect operations performance through lean MAP. These findings are consistent with the notion that lean thinking is a holistic business strategy. In order to derive the greatest impact on performance, our results indicate that operations management cannot operate in a vacuum. Instead, operations and accounting personnel must partner with each other to ensure that lean MAP are strategically integrated into the lean culture. In sum, lean MAP provide essential financial control that integrates with and supports operations to achieve desired benefits.
Deliberative democracy as a theoretical enterprise has gone through a series of phases or 'turns'. The most recent manifestation of this dynamic is the idea of the 'deliberative system', of which a ...variety of formulations have been proposed. An important initial reflective synthesis of work on deliberative systems is the recent essay, 'A systemic approach to deliberative democracy'. Co-authored by an impressive range of deliberative theorists (Jane Mansbridge, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis Thompson, and Mark Warren, the essay has become a manifesto for the systemic turn (henceforth we refer to the essay as the 'Manifesto'). In this article, we offer a critical reconstruction of the systemic turn and, more particularly, the theoretical trajectory proposed by the Manifesto. Specifically, we distinguish the characteristics of currently dominant approaches to deliberative systems, arguing that there are good reasons to be cautious concerning the merits of this systemic turn and sceptical in respect of its credentials as an expression of deliberative democracy as a political ideal. Having offered a sustained critique of the current trajectory of the deliberative systems literature, we sketch two constructive alternatives. Adapted from the source document.
•This study provides an overview of the most commonly used predictors of entomophagy (eating of insects).•Contrary to other studies, food neophobia was not found to be the key predictor of ...willingness to consume insects.•We propose a set of nine variables to predict the willingness to consume insects.•Possible two-way interaction effects were evaluated and one meaningful pair was discovered.
A great deal of attention has been dedicated to entomophagy (i.e., the eating of insects) in Western Europe in the last few years. Several studies have accounted for the importance of entomophagy, the evaluation of insects’ nutritional benefits, and their potential for the market. Specifically, predictors of the acceptance and consumption of edible insects, including attitudinal beliefs and values, have been examined by means of mathematical models. This study provides an overview of the predictors that are currently used to explain the willingness to consume insects. Based on a survey conducted in Switzerland, this study includes, to the best of our knowledge, all these predictors in an encompassing tobit regression model and reports the magnitude of their effects to select a set of predictors that can be used for future studies. Moreover, it discusses the interaction-effects between those predictors.
We found a set of nine significant variables reliably predicting the willingness to consume insects: convenience orientation, the discernibility of insects in food, expected food healthiness, the need for familiarity, food neophobia, food technology neophobia, the perceived health benefits of meat, and the binary variables gender and prior consumption. For the present data, food neophobia was not found to be the key predictor of willingness to consume insects, but shares its rank with various predictors. Further, the analysis revealed one meaningful two-way interaction effect.
A large literature documents that women are different from men in their choices and preferences, but little is known about gender differences in the boardroom. If women must be like men to break the ...glass ceiling, we might expect gender differences to disappear among directors. Using a large survey of directors, we show that female and male directors differ systematically in their core values and risk attitudes, but in ways that differ from gender differences in the general population. These results are robust to controlling for differences in observable characteristics. Consistent with findings for the population, female directors are more benevolent and universally concerned but less power oriented than male directors. However, in contrast to findings for the population, they are less tradition and security oriented than their male counterparts. They are also more risk loving than male directors. Thus, having a woman on the board need not lead to more risk-averse decision making.
This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.
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