Joaquim Armando Ferreira

Adaptação académica em estudante do 1º ano: diferenças de gênero, situação de estudante e curso

Considering the developmental and contextual approaches in the study of academic adjustment, psychosocial development and academic achievement of first-year college students, the authors analyze the personal and academic experiences of a student sample from University of Minho (n=1273). It was administrated the Questionario de Vivencias Academicas (QVA; Almeida & Ferreira, 1997), organized into 17 subscales considering personal, interpersonal and environmental dimensions of academic adjustment and success. The results present some mean differences between the groups by gender, student status and major in graduation. The conclusion is that these factors should be taken into account in college politics and practices if we want to produce an increase the chances of accademic success among students.

The development and initial validation of the Decent Work Scale.

Decent work is positioned as the centerpiece of the recently developed Psychology of Working Theory (PWT; Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016). However, to date, no instrument exists which assesses all 5 components of decent work from a psychological perspective. In the current study, we developed the Decent Work Scale (DWS) and demonstrated several aspects of validity with 2 samples of working adults. In Study 1 (N = 275), a large pool of items were developed and exploratory factor analysis was conducted resulting in a final 15-item scale with 5 factors/subscales corresponding to the 5 components of decent work: (a) physically and interpersonally safe working conditions, (b) access to health care, (c) adequate compensation, (d) hours that allow for free time and rest, and (e) organizational values that complement family and social values. In Study 2 (N = 589), confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that a 5-factor, bifactor model offered the strongest and most parsimonious fit to the data. Configural, metric, and scalar invariance models were tested demonstrating that the structure of the instrument did not differ across gender, income, social class, and majority/minority racial/ethnic groups. Finally, the overall scale score and 5 subscale scores correlated in the expected directions with similar constructs supporting convergent and discriminant evidence of validity, and subscale scores evidenced predictive validity in the prediction of job satisfaction, work meaning, and withdrawal intentions. The development of this scale provides a useful tool for researchers and practitioners seeking to assess the attainment of decent work among employed adults.

Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire – short form: estudo de adaptação e validação para a população portuguesa

Job satisfaction is the most studied variable in Organizational Psychology (Spector, 1997). However, only a few recent researches on its instruments are available (Saane, Sluiter, Verbeek, & Frings-Dresen, 2003). This research aims to add a contribution to the study of the psychometric qualities of a widely used instrument in this context, the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) – Short Form (Weiss, Dawis, England, & Lofquist, 1967), adapting it to the Portuguese population. In this sample (136 employees), the instrument showed adequate psychometric qualities, with a high values for internal consistency, adequate stability and satisfactory convergent validity (resulting from the correlation with the Cuestionario de Satisfaccion S20/23; Melia & Peiro, 1989). The exploratory factorial analysis revealed a structure that suggests as expected the existence of two factors of job satisfaction. The discussion of the results pinpoints the need for more studies on this field and raised some suggestions for future research.

Career Decision Statuses among Portuguese Secondary School Students: A Cluster Analytical Approach.

Career indecision is a complex phenomenon and an increasing number of authors have proposed that undecided individuals do not form a group with homogeneous characteristics. This study examines career decision statuses among a sample of 362 12th-grade Portuguese students. A cluster-analytical procedure, based on a battery of instruments designed to assess career and personality dimensions, was employed to understand the heterogeneous groupings that underlie the concept of career indecision. Three groups of career decision statuses were identified and their characteristics described. Finally, implications for career counseling interventions are discussed.

Television and aggression: a test of a mediated model with a sample of Portuguese students

ABSTRACT We examined the role of identification with violent TV heroes, enjoyment of TV violence, and perceived reality in TV violence as mediators of the relationship between viewing TV violence and subsequent physical and verbal aggression. A sample of 722 4th, 6th, and 8th grade students from schools in the central region of Portugal completed measures assessing enjoyment of TV violence, perceived reality, aggression, identification with violent TV heroes, and exposure to TV violence. The results showed that the relationship between TV violence and physical aggression is mediated by enjoyment of TV violence, perceived reality in TV violence, and identification with violent TV heroes. The TV violence to verbal aggression relationship was also mediated by enjoyment of TV violence.

Scaling the Information Load of Occupations: Preliminary Findings of the Fit Between Individual Capacities and Environmental Demands

Person—Environment (P-E) fit models provide a conceptually powerful way to think about career development, vocational choice, and occupational success. The work reported here focuses on yet another pair of P-E criteria: self-reported individual capacity for information processing (the ability to tolerate information overload from a variety of stimulus sources), and the corresponding demand characteristics for information processing of the occupational environment. To achieve the aims of this project, the authors have borrowed from the literature on information processing, anthropology, and human factors to define the information load context of the occupational environment. The authors have constructed a P-E congruence scheme for five domains of information processing: information load, interpersonal load, change load, activity structure, and time structure, and employed the methods of psychophysics to quantify occupational environments across these domains. The results of this preliminary work, replicated across two cultures, are presented here.

Development and Validation of a Revised Measure of Individual Capacities for Tolerating Information Overload in Occupational Settings

The anthropologist Edward Hall wrote extensively on the concept of polychronicity in which he documented the differences between people and cultures in the extent to which they differentially managed their daily activities in the context of space and time. In the work reported here, we have broadened the definition of the polychronicity concept that we define as the capacity of the individual to tolerate multiple sources of stimuli and information occurring in both time and space without suffering psychological distress or disorientation. In earlier work, summarized in several publications, we have constructed and validated a 25-item measure of individual capacity for tolerating stimulus loads across the following five information processing dimensions namely, information load, interpersonal load, change load, activity structure, and time structure. Several previous studies by our research group have found significant connections to a variety of behavioral criteria, including the capacity for visual and motor multitasking, arousal levels, speed of processing, and cross-cultural differences. In this article, we report on how we have augmented the number of items in each of the five dimensions, performed item analysis, reassessed the internal consistency reliability of the five subscales, and evaluated the validity of the new subscales against several criteria with a contemporary sample of 431 employed adults drawn from each of the Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC) categories of Holland’s taxonomy.

Individual Differences in Capacity for Tolerating Information Overload Are Related to Differences in Culture and Temperament

Individual differences in the capacity for information processing in complex tasks can be predicted from both personality and temperament that derive from both the biological and social substrates of human development and behavior. If there are cultural differences in brain structure and function that govern information processing, then two different cultures may show biologically based temperamental differences in sensitivity to stimulation (e.g., Pavlov’s Strength of the Nervous System) which in turn may predict individual differences in capacity for tolerating environmentally determined stimulus overloads. We examined the relationship between biologically based measures of Pavlovian Temperament (Strength of Excitation, Inhibition, and Mobility) and an individual differences measure consisting of five dimensions of capacity for tolerating information load. Both direct and indirect effects of country of origin on capacity for information processing were tested in a mediated path analytic model in which Pavlovian Excitation, Inhibition, and Mobility were hypothesized to mediate the relationship between culture and self-reported information processing capacities.

Unemployment: transitions experiences

Work appears as an important determinant in psychological health and well-being (Blustein, 2008). However, the current structure of the labor market is complex, unpredictable and unstable, making it necessary to rethink the meaning of work in human existence. This article focuses on the different types of transitions (voluntary vs. involuntary) as well on the different reactions to unemployment, and presents some intervention strategies in the context of career counseling, conceived as a (possible) response to changes in employment.

Transição e ajustamento de reclusos ao estabelecimento prisional

O sistema prisional e os processos inerentes ao mesmo ainda sao um tema pouco explorado e abordado no nosso pais, comecam-se a dar os primeiros passos na compreensao nao so do sistema punidor e ressocializador em si, como tambem procura compreender as dinâmicas envolvidas: o recluso, adaptacao deste, a delinquencia, a personalidade anti-social, o crime, a punicao. A presente investigacao, procurou atraves de uma abordagem qualitativa compreender as percepcoes e opinioes de um conjunto de reclusos quanto a sua experiencia de vida na transicao de um meio livre para um meio totalitario, e o ajustamento diferenciado que cada recluso fez. Atraves de um guiao de entrevista semi-estruturado procuramos analisar seis grandes dimensoes (estado de saude, situacao familiar, suporte social intra-prisao, prisao actual, transicao e ajustamento, projectos futuros e resiliencia) e as vivencias de cada recluso nestas dimensoes. Verificamos que cada caso e um caso, e para interpretar a opiniao de cada recluso temos que ter em consideracao varios factores, entre eles o factor familiar, factor institucional, as caracteristicas individuais de cada um, a historia de desenvolvimento, o tipo de crime, a percepcao que cada recluso tem do mesmo, o cumprimento de pena. So depois de uma analise e uma abordagem total ao “Self” e que poderemos tentar compreender o individuo no seu todo e a sua adaptacao a prisao.