Robin Samuel

Advances in understanding energy consumption behavior and the governance of its change : outline of an integrated framework

Transforming today’s energy systems in industrialized countries requires a substantial reduction of the total energy consumption at the individual level. Selected instruments have been found to be effective in changing people’s behavior in single domains. However, the so far weak success story on reducing overall energy consumption indicates that our understanding of the determining factors of individual energy consumption as well as of its change is far from being conclusive. Among others, the scientific state of the art is dominated by analyzing single domains of consumption and by neglecting embodied energy. It also displays strong disciplinary splits and the literature often fails to distinguish between explaining behavior and explaining change of behavior. Moreover, there are knowledge gaps regarding the legitimacy and effectiveness of the governance of individual consumption behavior and its change. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to establish an integrated interdisciplinary framework that offers a systematic basis for linking the different aspects in research on energy related consumption behavior, thus paving the way for establishing a better evidence base to inform societal actions. The framework connects the three relevant analytical aspects of the topic in question: (1) It systematically and conceptually frames the objects, i.e. the energy consumption behavior and its change (explananda); (2) it structures the factors that potentially explain the energy consumption behavior and its change (explanantia); (3) it provides a differentiated understanding of change inducing interventions in terms of governance. Based on the existing states of the art approaches from different disciplines within the social sciences the proposed framework is supposed to guide interdisciplinary empirical research.

Bildung – Arbeit – Erwachsenwerden

Der Ubergang von der Schule ins Erwachsenen- und Erwerbsleben ist eine entscheidende und kritische Lebensphase. Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass diese Transition in modernen Gesellschaften langer, anforderungsreicher, unubersichtlicher und risikoreicher geworden ist. Der vorliegende Band beleuchtet diese Transition aus Sicht der Okonomie, Padagogik, Psychologie und Soziologie. Dazu werden disziplinare und interdisziplinare Beitrage sowie aktuelle empirische Zugange prasentiert, die die biografische Phase von der Grundbildung bis zum Eintritt ins Erwerbsleben umfassen.

The Role of Perceived Stress and Self-Efficacy in Young People’s Life Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study

Life satisfaction is an important indicator of successful development. However, adolescents’ life satisfaction tends to be relatively unsteady, and environmental influences play a critical role in shaping life satisfaction among adolescents in the transition to young adulthood. Given the paramount importance that education plays in adolescents’ lives, adolescents’ life satisfaction may vary as a function of school-related stress experience. At the same time, coping resources may help reduce adverse effects of stress on life satisfaction. With this in mind, we examined whether, and to what extent, perceived stress in education and general self-efficacy (a resource that facilitates coping) affect the life satisfaction of adolescents in transition to young adulthood. We distinguished between baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy and within-person change in stress and self-efficacy to determine whether life satisfaction is sensitive to fluctuations in stress and self-efficacy when person-specific levels of stress and self-efficacy are taken into account. Estimating growth curve models on data from a panel study on the life trajectories of compulsory-school leavers (n = 5126, 55.3 % female), we found that baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy, as well as within-person change in stress and self-efficacy, affected adolescents’ life satisfaction. Moreover, our results showed that baseline self-efficacy mitigated the negative effect of baseline stress on life satisfaction. These findings improve our understanding of two major psychological determinants of adolescents’ life satisfaction and extend our knowledge of life satisfaction trajectories during the transition to young adulthood.

Psychological, Educational and Sociological Perspectives on Success and Well-Being in Career Development

Back Cover Text This collection covers how success and well-being relate to each other in early career development in the domains of employment and education. It gives a conceptual overview of success and well-being as established in the psychological research tradition, complemented by educational and sociological approaches. The volume presents articles on success and well-being in applied contexts, such as well-being as an individual resource during school-to-work transition, or well-being and success at the workplace. Work psychologists, social psychologists, educational researchers, and sociologists will find this book valuable, as it provides unique insights into social and psychological processes afforded by the combination of disciplines, concepts, and a diversity of approaches. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1. Introduction Robin Samuel, Manfred Max Bergman, Anita C. Keller and Norbert K. Semmer 2. The Influence of Career Success on Subjective Well-Being Andrea E. Abele-Brehm 3. Upper-Secondary Educational Trajectories and Young Men’s and Women’s Self-Esteem Development in Switzerland Sybille Bayard, Monika Staffelbach, Phillip Fischer and Marlies Buchmann. 4. Young People’s Progress after Dropout from Vocational Edu-cation and Training: Transitions and Occupational Integration at Stake. Longitudinal Qualitative Perspective Barbara Duc and Nadia Lamamra 5. Success, Well-Being and Social Recognition: An Interactional Perspective on Vocational Training Practices Stefano A. Losa, Barbara Duc and Laurent Filliettaz. 6. Agentic Pathways toward Fulfillment in Work Jeylan T. Mortimer, Mike Vuolo and Jeremy Staff 7. The How and Why of the Relationship between Job Insecuri-ty, Subjective Career Success, and Turnover Intention Cecile Tschopp and Gudela Grote 8. Work Experiences and Well-Being in the First Years of Professional Work in Switzerland: A Ten-Year Follow-up Study Wolfgang Kalin, Anita C. Keller, Franziska Tschan, Achim Elfering and Norbert K. Semmer 9. The Meaning and Measurement of Well-Being as an Indicator of Success Anita C. Keller, Norbert K. Semmer, Robin Samuel and Manfred Max Bergman

Geschlechterungleichheiten im intergenerationalen Bildungstransfer in der Schweiz

Bildungsverlaufe sind in den letzten Jahrzehnten heterogener und diskontinuierlicher geworden (Blossfeld und Shavit 1993). Trotz zunehmender Pluralisierung der Lebensverlaufe bestehen soziale Ungleichheiten fort und verscharfen sich sogar stellenweise (Berger und Kahlert 2005; Buchholz et al. 2009; Lamprecht und Stamm 1996). Widmer und Ritschard (2009) gehen davon aus, dass die Pluralisierung von Lebensverlaufen in der Schweiz geschlechtsspezifischen Mustern folgt. Das wirft die Frage auf, inwiefern sich damit – neben sozialen Ungleichheiten, die auf verschiedener soziookonomischer oder kultureller Herkunft beruhen – auch geschlechtsspezifische soziale Ungleichheitsmuster verbinden. Gut belegt ist ein betrachtlicher Wandel im Bildungsverhalten von Mannern und Frauen, der in den letzten Jahrzehnten stattgefunden hat: Junge Frauen gelten dabei als Gewinnerinnen der Bildungsexpansion, weil sie die jungen Manner bei den hoheren Bildungsabschlusse uberholt haben (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2008; SKBF 2010: 113, 122). Die erhohte Bildungsbeteiligung von Frauen scheint sich aber bislang nicht in einer starkeren Vertretung in hoheren beruflichen Positionen oder ihren Ausbildungen entsprechenden Lohnen widerzuspiegeln (Bielby und Baron 1994; Cornelisen 2005; Leemann und Keck 2005; Magnusson 2009). Frauen und Manner orientieren sich bei der Ausbildungswahl immer noch an geschlechtsspezifischen Berufsbildern (Eccles 2005; Leemann und Keck 2004), gleiches gilt fur Lehrstellenverantwortliche, wie Imdorf (2006) es fur einige ausgewahlte Berufsfelder zeigen konnte. Viele Berufsfelder werden nach wie vor von einem Geschlecht dominiert (Leemann und Keck 2005; Schafroth 2004). Zudem konnte fur die Schweiz nachgewiesen werden, dass junge Frauen haufiger verzogert in eine zertifizierende Sek. II-Ausbildung1 einsteigen (Hupka 2003; Hupka et al. 2006).

How unemployment scarring affects skilled young workers: evidence from a factorial survey of Swiss recruiters

We ask how employers contribute to unemployment scarring in the recruitment process in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. By drawing on recruitment theories, we aim to better understand how recruiters assess different patterns of unemployment in a job candidate’s CV and how this affects the chances of young applicants being considered for a vacancy. We argue that in contexts with tight school-work linkage and highly standardised Vocational Education and Training systems, the detrimental effect of early unemployment depends on how well the applicant’s profile matches the requirements of the advertised position. To test this assumption, we surveyed Swiss recruiters who were seeking to fill positions during the time of data collection. We employed a factorial survey experiment that tested how the (un)employment trajectories in hypothetical young job applicants’ CV affected their chances of being considered for a real vacancy. Our results show that unemployment decreases the perceived suitability of an applicant for a specific job, which implies there is a scarring effect of unemployment that increases with the duration of being unemployed. But we also found that these effects are moderated by how well the applicant’s profile matches the job’s requirements. Overall, the worse the match between applicant’s profile and the job profile, the smaller are the scarring effects of unemployment. In sum, our findings contribute to the literature by revealing considerable heterogeneity in the scarring effects of unemployment. Our findings further suggest that the scarring effects of unemployment need to be studied with regard to country-specific institutional settings, the applicants’ previous education and employment experiences, and the job characteristics.

Male Breadwinning Revisited: How Specialisation, Gender Role Attitudes and Work Characteristics Affect Overwork and Underwork in Europe

We examine how male breadwinning and fatherhood relate to men’s overwork and underwork in western Europe. Male breadwinners should be less likely to experience overwork than other men, particularly when they have children, if specialising in paid work suits them. However, multinomial logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey data from 2010 (n = 4662) challenges this position: male breadwinners, with and without children, want to work fewer than their actual hours, making visible one of the downsides of specialisation. Male breadwinners wanting to work fewer hours is specifically related to the job interfering with family life, as revealed by a comparison of the average marginal effects of variables across models. Work–life interference has an effect over and beyond the separate effects of work characteristics and family structure, showing the salience of the way work and life articulate.

The Meaning and Measurement of Well-Being as an Indicator of Success

This chapter discusses the conceptualization and measurement of well-being and success, and the relationships between the two. Many scholars in well-being research agree that well-being consists of three components (satisfaction, positive and negative affect). There are less well established definitions in the area of success. Frequently, success is conceptualized in terms of career success, distinguishing between objective and subjective indicators. These indicators most often include salary, status, and career satisfaction; they are sometimes criticized for being inappropriate in current labor markets and as to their individual meaning. In this chapter, we propose to widen the understanding of career success by incorporating the broader concept of work success in terms of success episodes, referring to task performance, pro-social success, appreciation and feedback as indicators of short-term and long-term successes.

The Gendered Interplay between Success and Well-Being during Transitions

Background: Young females have been found to out-perform males in terms of grades and university degrees in many studies. At the same time, young women seem to exhibit lower levels of well-being compared with men. Interestingly, little work has evaluated the interplay between educational success and well-being. However, antecedents and consequences of educational success will likely affect life chances and further educational and occupational trajectories. Purpose: This paper contributes to this important, but as of yet, underdeveloped topic. The interplay between educational success – conceptualised as successful intergenerational educational mobility – and well-being is analysed as a dynamic, reciprocal and gendered process. Sample: Panel data from the Transition from Education to Employment Project (TREE) is used to study the gendered interplay between educational success and well-being. TREE focuses on post-compulsory educational and labour market pathways of the PISA 2000 cohort in Switzerland. It is based on a sample of 6343 young people who left compulsory schooling in 2000. Data were collected annually from 2001 to 2007. At the time of the first interview, the age range of the middle 50% of the youths was between 16.5 and 17.3 years. Design and methods: As previous research shows, episodes of educational mobility will not be evenly distributed over the observed period. Thus, an autoregressive cross-lagged mixture model framework is employed to account for the expected unequal distribution of the variables over time and the multilevel structure of the data. Within this framework, two modelling approaches are combined to test the implied reciprocal relationship between educational success and well-being. In the Latent Transition Analysis part of the model, success is measured as latent classes with fixed outcome categories. In the Autoregressive Structural Equation part of the model, well-being is specified to correlate over time. Models were estimated separately for males and females to allow for different error variances. Results: The models reveal that mechanisms of social comparison are gendered and operate differently at various stages of the observed period. Young females seem to be more likely to succeed and to experience positive effects in terms of well-being during successful episodes when compared to males. On the downside, females’ well-being seems to be more strongly affected by failure. Conclusions: This paper shows that well-being is a gendered personal resource during the transition to adulthood. These findings contribute to the literature on gender differences in educational success as they show how gender, as a social process, operates to create different success and well-being outcomes.

Different but similar: personality traits of surgeons and internists—results of a cross-sectional observational study

Objectives Medical practice may attract and possibly enhance distinct personality profiles. We set out to describe the personality profiles of surgical and medical specialties focusing on board-certified physicians. Design Prospective, observational. Setting Online survey containing the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), an internationally validated measure of the Five Factor Model of personality dimensions, distributed to board-certified physicians, residents and medical students in several European countries and Canada. Differences in personality profiles were analysed using multivariate analysis of variance and Canonical Linear Discriminant Analysis on age-standardised and sex-standardised z-scores of the personality traits. Single personality traits were analysed using robust t-tests. Participants The TIPI was completed by 2345 board-certified physicians, 1453 residents and 1350 medical students, who also provided demographic information. Results Normal population and board-certified physicians’ personality profiles differed (p<0.001). The latter scored higher on conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness, but lower on neuroticism (all p<0.001). There was no difference in openness to experience. Board-certified surgical and medical doctors’ personality profiles were also different (p<0.001). Surgeons scored higher on extraversion (p=0.003) and openness to experience (p=0.002), but lower on neuroticism (p<0.001). There was no difference in agreeableness and conscientiousness. These differences in personality profiles were reproduced at other levels of training, that is, in students and training physicians engaging in surgical versus medical practice. Conclusion These results indicate the existence of a distinct and consistent average ‘physician personality’. Despite high variability within disciplines, there are moderate but solid and reproducible differences between surgical and medical specialties.