Practical Pluralism in the Empirical Study of Social Investment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Burgoon
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Complex Character ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Active Labour Market Policies ◽  
Active Labour

This chapter explores the empirical challenges of understanding the socioeconomic implications of social investment welfare reform. Such understanding is crucial to gauging the pay-offs and pitfalls of social investment, but is also extremely difficult, given the complex character of social investment and its multiple and interacting consequences for work and well-being. Such complexity, the chapter contends, yields an unusually strong tension between relevance and rigour that dooms any dialogue among social scientists and practitioners with clashing methodological commitments. The present study argues in favour of a practical pluralism to facilitate such dialogue. This pluralism entails combining and comparing empirical work across the full spectrum of relevance and rigour. The chapter illustrates the problems and pluralist solutions with a combination of macro-country-year and macro-individual-year analysis of how active labour-market policies (ALMP) affect the poverty of vulnerable citizens.

Social Investment and the Matthew Effect

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliano Bonoli ◽  
Bea Cantillon ◽  
Wim Van Lancker
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Parental Leave ◽  
Matthew Effect ◽  
Investment Strategies ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Active Labour Market Policies ◽  
Active Labour ◽  
The Matthew Effect ◽  
Matthew Effects

There are reasons to assume that spending on social investment is more susceptible to Matthew Effects than spending on social protection. Due to the gravity of social and cultural stratification, more vulnerable segments of societies tend to find it hard to navigate their way to the educational system, the labour market, and public services. Therefore, although social investment strategies have the potential to mitigate social and cultural inequalities, spending on capacitating services will tend to be more beneficial to the middle and upper classes, thereby creating an adverse redistribution of resources. This unintended and reinforcing effect has been shown by empirical research on the benefits of childcare, parental leave, some active labour-market policies, and higher education. Appropriate policy designs may reduce such adverse effects, but are unlikely to eliminate them completely. This requires that redistributive and protective issues should be firmly addressed in policy and discourse.

Positive risk-taking: Mixed-methods validation of a self-report scale and evidence for genetic links to personality and negative risk-taking

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Wales Patterson ◽  
Lilla Pivnick ◽  
Frank D Mann ◽  
Andrew D Grotzinger ◽  
Kathryn C Monahan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Youth Development ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Sensation Seeking ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Population Based ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Personality Factors ◽  
Positive Behaviors ◽  
Adolescent Risk

Adolescents are more likely to take risks. Typically, research on adolescent risk-taking has focused on its negative health and societal consequences. However, some risk-taking behaviors might be positive, defined here as behavior that does not violate the rights of others and that might advance socially-valuable goals. Empirical work on positive risk-taking has been limited by measurement challenges. In this study, we elicited adolescents’ free responses (n = 75) about a time they took a risk. Based on thematic coding, we identified positive behaviors described as risks and selected items to form a self-report scale. The resulting positive risk-taking scale was quantitatively validated in a population-based sample of adolescent twins (n = 1249). Second, we evaluated associations between positive risk-taking, negative risk-taking, and potential personality and peer correlates using a genetically informed design. Sensation seeking predicted negative and positive risk-taking equally strongly, whereas extraversion differentiated forms of risk-taking. Additive genetic influences on personality accounted for the total heritability in positive risk-taking. Indirect pathways from personality through positive and negative peer environments were identified. These results provide promising evidence that personality factors of sensation seeking and extraversion can manifest as engagement in positive risks. Increased understanding of positive manifestations of adolescent risk-taking may yield targets for positive youth development strategies to bolster youth well-being.

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