Political economy influences the design, implementation, and outcome of safety net and other social insurance programs, but there is no general consensus among policymakers about how to account for political economy concerns in policy decisions. This paper tries to provide a conceptual framework for doing so, with a focus on the establishment of permanent systems of social assistance and social...

Attempts to measure and analyze public opinion attitudes toward racial/ethnic minorities often confront the "social desirability" problem: those who have prejudiced attitudes are rarely willing to admit them to surveyors. Instead, they may be more likely to give a socially acceptable answer rather an accurate reflection of their views. Previous research has clearly established that this effect ...

The transmission of social attitudes has been investigated as a possible model of cultural inheritance in a sample of 3810 twin pairs from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Twin Registry. Six social attitude factors were identified and univariate genetic models fitted to scores on each factor. A joint multivariate genetic analysis of the six attitude factors, church attendance...

OBJECTIVE We compared the effects of two brief psychoeducation programs and social skills training on the negative attitudes of mothers with a son who has schizophrenia. METHODS 15 mothers with strong negative feelings towards a sons with schizophrenia were assigned by convenience to participate in one of three brief (5 session) group programs at an outpatient clinic: lecture-based psychoeduc...

Harary’s structural balance theory based on the idea of Heider explains social processes and is used to account for social actor’s attitudes toward another. We propose a social value emergence model in the form of an agent-based simulation model. In this model, the structural balance theory is used to explain the feelings, attitudes and beliefs. Each agent is in effort to reach balanced states ...

Modern culture, based on disinhibition of cultural trends and on heterodirection, is promoting openmindedness attitudes towards ethnic diversity, but on the other hand also new forms of social representations of the foreigner. Social representation is situated between the psychic field and the social one; it is the representation of oneself and of the other one, hanging between social categorie...

How well can statistical models disentangle the effects of social influence from homophily in observational network data, and under what conditions do they models fail?1 Many outcomes of interest to social scientists – such as obesity, political attitudes, altruism, and drug use – are highly correlated within social networks.2 However, behaviors and attitudes tend to be correlated in social net...

Attitudes play a significant role in determining how individuals process information and behave. In this paper we have developed a new computational model of population wide attitude change that captures the social level: how individuals interact and communicate information, and the cognitive level: how attitudes and concept interact with each other. The model captures the cognitive aspect by r...

High school students are a common target group in initiatives addressing discriminatory attitudes towards people with mental illness. However, these initiatives are rarely evaluated and documented. The aim of our paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based educational intervention for improving adolescents' attitudes and reducing the desire for social distance from people with ment...