Researchers and counsellors have observed a range of stress reactions in emergency service workers even after extreme and putatively traumatic incidents. Various studies have…
Abstract
Researchers and counsellors have observed a range of stress reactions in emergency service workers even after extreme and putatively traumatic incidents. Various studies have sought to delineate characteristics of incidents or of individuals which account for differences in appraisal and stress reactions. Few studies have examined expectations of stress and stressors in recruits to emergency work. Looks at such expectations in firefighter recruits, measured at the beginning and end of their training program, and compares their predictions with actual ratings from a group of experienced firefighters in the same organization. Most of the recruits already had some familiarity with the emergency environment. Stress ratings for items dealing with other people in the emergency work context increased over training. Discusses the relationships between predictions of stress, training, and task performance.
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Recruits entering a firefighting training program gave predictions about the likelihood of positive or negative reactions after a stressful emergency call‐out. Their results were…
Abstract
Recruits entering a firefighting training program gave predictions about the likelihood of positive or negative reactions after a stressful emergency call‐out. Their results were compared with a group of experienced firefighters. Recruits more frequently checked positive than negative reactions, a pattern resembling that of the experienced firefighters. The recruits, however, were generally more optimistic than the experienced group, and this did not change significantly across training. Expectations of positive reactions are not necessarily good or bad. Excessive expectation about positive reactions may increase vulnerability when emergency workers cannot do anything to save lives or prevent destruction. Alternatively, an excessive reliance on positive reactions may form a type of addiction making the emergency worker vulnerable to subsequent breakdown in coping and performance. Recruits’ expectations can be addressed during training, especially those expectations that put emergency workers at risk in disaster and emergency environments.
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Emergency workers vary in their levels of experience, both in terms of years of service and involvement with traumatic incidents, and both types can influence vulnerability to…
Abstract
Emergency workers vary in their levels of experience, both in terms of years of service and involvement with traumatic incidents, and both types can influence vulnerability to stress. Opposing arguments can be made that experience has a sensitising or desensitising effect. Experienced emergency workers are shown to be more at risk in some studies and less so in others. It is proposed that the relationship between experience and stress is not necessarily linear, as is frequently assumed in such studies. This paper presents a test of linear and quadratic trends on stress and related variables across three groups of experienced firefighters. The results support the proposition that the relationship between stress and experience is quadratic, with stress highest in the middle experience group, and lowest in the low and high experience groups. This result is not explained by differences in actual traumatic exposures or coping practices. Other possible reasons are discussed.
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Carmen C. Moran and Neil R. Britton
Coping style has been examined across a variety of stressful encounters,but surprisingly little is known about coping in the emergency ordisaster context. Examines coping…
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Coping style has been examined across a variety of stressful encounters, but surprisingly little is known about coping in the emergency or disaster context. Examines coping strategies and impact of events in emergency workers who generally have not been exposed to major events in the course of their emergency role. The profile of scores suggests that emergency workers are problem‐focused and are less inclined to assuage problems through emotion‐focused coping, thus supporting the popular notion of emergency workers as task‐oriented and committed to action. Discusses the extent to which this profile may enhance wellbeing and prevent stress symptoms following emergency events.
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Rossana Perez-del-Aguila, Patricia Rodriguez Aguirre and Jimena Cuba Blanco
This chapter explores how eight children from five Bolivian migrant families living in Madrid perceive their participation within their families. Children understand their…
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This chapter explores how eight children from five Bolivian migrant families living in Madrid perceive their participation within their families. Children understand their participation as taking responsibility for domestic chores and taking care of younger siblings. Children's ideas of participation are associated with their school experience and are about simply having a voice in everyday mundane interactions with adults and peers.
Parents' cultural values, power and authority dominate decisions in the family. These children were born in Spain and practices in their family homes are influenced by their parent's strong cultural ties with Bolivia. The data collected show that the lives of these children and their views of participation need to be understood beyond the binary of the Global North and Global South (Twum-Danso Imoh et al., 2019).
The research employed the ‘routes of participation’, a playful and creative research method that aimed to empower children to explore their ‘interdependent agency’ (Abebe, 2019) and the meaning of participation within the context of their family lives. We conclude that any successful intervention with children needs to understand the meaning of what children say in relation to the various situations in which they live. Listening to children's voices and paying attention to the language that they use in their everyday lives should continue to be the basis of child-centred research and child-centred practice. The chapter encourages to reflect on the value of culturally grounded playful activities to understand children's agentic experiences and their contribution that they can make to their own lives.
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Sohel Mehedi, Md Akhtaruzzaman and Rashid Zaman
We examine the relationship between board demographic diversity, board structural diversity, board capital diversity and corporate carbon performance (CCP). Additionally, we…
Abstract
Purpose
We examine the relationship between board demographic diversity, board structural diversity, board capital diversity and corporate carbon performance (CCP). Additionally, we investigate how corporate sustainable resource use mediates these relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
We utilize unbalanced panel data from Refinitiv Eikon covering 9,960 global firms from 2002 to 2022. We conduct a panel regression analysis to examine the relationship between board demographic diversity, board structural diversity, board capital diversity and CCP. In addition, we estimate entropy balancing estimation and two-step system GMM to address endogeneity issues.
Findings
The results indicate that board demographic diversity (including tenure, gender, and cultural diversity), structural diversity (such as board independence, board size, CEO-chairman duality, board meetings, and board compensation), and capital diversity (comprising board member affiliation and specific skills) all have a positive and significant association with corporate carbon performance. Additionally, our findings reveal that corporate sustainable resource use fully mediates the relationship between board demographic diversity and CCP and partially mediates the relationship between board structural diversity, board capital diversity, and CCP.
Practical implications
Our study findings are based on a diverse range of global firms, ensuring that the results address the global challenges of firm-level climate change response and governance issues.
Originality/value
Our group diversity constructs offer new insights into the literature and further advance research on board group diversity. Additionally, for the first time, we explore the mediating role of sustainable resource use through the resource-based view (RBV) between-group diversity attributes and corporate carbon performance.
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Teresa Jurado-Guerrero, Jordi M. Monferrer, Carmen Botía-Morillas and Francisco Abril
Most studies on work–life support at workplaces consider work–life balance to be a women’s issue, either explicitly or implicitly. This chapter analyses how fathers who are…
Abstract
Most studies on work–life support at workplaces consider work–life balance to be a women’s issue, either explicitly or implicitly. This chapter analyses how fathers who are involved caregivers are supported or hindered in attaining work–life balance by their workplaces. It explores the following three questions: (1) why fathers value some job adaptations over others compared with mothers; (2) how organizational cultures influence the work–life balance of new fathers and (3) what differences exist across public and private sectors as well as large versus small companies. A qualitative approach with three discussion groups and 22 involved fathers enables us to explore these issues for large companies, public sector workplaces and small businesses. We find that tight time schedules, flextime, telework, schedule control and fully paid nontransferable leaves of absence constitute policies that favor involved fatherhood, while measures without wage replacement generate fear of penalization in the workplace and do not fit the persistent relevance of the provider role. In addition, un-similar supervisors, envy, lack of understanding and gender stereotypes among co-workers and clients constitute cultural barriers at the workplace level. Contrary to our expectations, small businesses may offer a better work–life balance than large companies, while the public sector is not always as family-friendly as assumed.
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In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and…
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In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and international reports prove that this is a difficult aim to achieve purpose. Training both preservice and in-service teachers is vitally important for technology to become part of everyday school life. But to achieve this, we must move away from the techno-centric focus of technology. This chapter analyzes the importance of focusing on implementing technologies in the learning activities that teacher-trainers design to prepare preservice teachers. We describe seven types of activities: assimilative, informative management, applicative, communicative, productive, experiential, and evaluation. All of these technology-based learning activities, organized in learning sequences, potentially help teachers to come to terms with technological knowledge in their pedagogical content area.
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Reviews, from an anthropological perspective, three 1993 additions to the Gulf Publishing Company's “Managing Cultural Differences” Series. This trilogy is comprised of the…
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Reviews, from an anthropological perspective, three 1993 additions to the Gulf Publishing Company's “Managing Cultural Differences” Series. This trilogy is comprised of the volumes Developing the Global Organization: Strategies for Human Resource Professionals, Transcultural Leadership: Empowering the Diverse Workforce, and Multicultural Management: New Skills for Global Success. Examines the five concepts of globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism, transcultural, and empowerment central to the trilogy and to anthropology, and as they are used in both. Views the global paradox — a bigger world economy requires the more powerful smallest of players (e.g., entrepreneurs) — as a useful framework for understanding these and related concepts as they operate in the global village today, and as they may be employed throughout and beyond the 21st century. Finally, reports on: (1) the training, transformation and development tasks of global managers of complexity in business as well as in government, academia, and the military; and, (2) the intercultural learning strategies through which these tasks are achieved and through which these managers, the multicultural workforce and teams they lead, and their organisations are empowered to contribute, collaborate and fully participate in producing their major project: Service, country, group, business, or social structure through the mixture of peoples or technology” (p. 242). This suggests a process, a becoming. In Developing the Global Organization, Robert T. Moran, Philip R. Harris and William G. Stripp continue that globalisation is both a way to think and to act. Specifically, it moves individuals “away from parochialism towards transnationalism”. And it nurtures a state of mind geared toward a more effective use of personal and organisational resources (p. 299).
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Jason Yip, Wendy Roldan, Carmen Gonzalez, Laura R. Pina, Maria Ruiz and Paola Vanegas
This study aims to investigate the collaboration processes of immigrant families as they search for online information together. Immigrant English-language learning adults of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the collaboration processes of immigrant families as they search for online information together. Immigrant English-language learning adults of lower socioeconomic status often work collaboratively with their children to search the internet. Family members rely on each other’s language and digital literacy skills in this collaborative process known as online search and brokering (OSB). While previous work has identified ecological factors that impact OSB, research has not yet distilled the specific learning processes behind such collaborations.
Design/methodology/approach
For this study, the authors adhere to practices of a case study examination. This study’s participants included parents, grandparents and children aged 10–17 years. Most adults were born in Mexico, did not have a college-degree, worked in service industries and represented a lower-SES population. This study conducted two to three separate in-home family visits per family with interviews and online search tasks.
Findings
From a case study analysis of three families, this paper explores the funds of knowledge, resilience, ecological support and challenges that children and parents face, as they engage in collaborative OSB experiences. This study demonstrates how in-home computer-supported collaborative processes are often informal, social, emotional and highly relevant to solving information challenges.
Research limitations/implications
An intergenerational OSB process is different from collaborative online information problem-solving that happens between classroom peers or coworkers. This study’s research shows how both parents and children draw on their funds of knowledge, resilience and ecological support systems when they search collaboratively, with and for their family members, to problem solve. This is a case study of three families working in collaboration with each other. This case study informs analytical generalizations and theory-building rather than statistical generalizations about families.
Practical implications
Designers need to recognize that children and youth are using the same tools as adults to seek high-level critical information. This study’s model suggests that if parents and children are negotiating information seeking with the same technology tools but different funds of knowledge, experience levels and skills, the presentation of information (e.g. online search results, information visualizations) needs to accommodate different levels of understanding. This study recommends designers work closely with marginalized communities through participatory design methods to better understand how interfaces and visuals can help accommodate youth invisible work.
Social implications
The authors have demonstrated in this study that learning and engaging in family online searching is not only vital to the development of individual and digital literacy skills, it is a part of family learning. While community services, libraries and schools have a responsibility to support individual digital and information literacy development, this study’s model highlights the need to recognize funds of knowledge, family resiliency and asset-based learning. Schools and teachers should identify and harness youth invisible work as a form of learning at home. The authors believe educators can do this by highlighting the importance of information problem solving in homes and youth in their families. Libraries and community centers also play a critical role in supporting parents and adults for technical assistance (e.g. WiFi access) and information resources.
Originality/value
This study’s work indicates new conditions fostering productive joint media engagement (JME) around OSB. This study contributes a generative understanding that promotes studying and designing for JME, where family responsibility is the focus.