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Preparing Transitions: The Impact of Vocational Role Models on Occupational Aspirations Within Social Contexts
Get PDFThe formation of occupational aspirations, an important prerequisite of successful school‐to‐work transitions, is embedded in different social contexts, including youths' families and peers. At the same time, adolescents are guided by various career orientation activities, including vocational role models, that provide them with information on available career options and stimulate career decision‐making. In this study, we combine both strands of research and examine how vocational role model effects unfold in the different social contexts that students are embedded in, potentially enabling or constraining intervention effects. Based on a large‐scale role model intervention study comprising 1,190 students in Germany, we first examine how peer and family contexts are associated with students' occupational aspirations as key dimensions of social influence. Our results show that both peer and parental social contexts are related to students' career aspirations, with descriptive peer norms and injunctive peer and parent norms being the most relevant. Second, we show that unique encounters with vocational role models are, on average, related to increased occupational aspirations for the presented occupation, extending previous empirical findings to the VET context. Third, we examine whether and how role modelling interacts with students' social embeddedness. We do not find statistically significant interactions between the examined social contexts and the role model intervention. Hence, role model effects apply even in contexts that convey strong norms. Nevertheless, we find subtle patterns suggesting that role model effects are more pronounced when peers convey adverse norms and less knowledge regarding an occupation and when peers' self‐efficacy is high. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed
Longitudinal Associations Between Perceived Inclusivity Norms and Opinion Polarization in Adolescence
Get PDFAffective polarization, characterized by emotional hostility and behavioral avoidance toward ideological opponents beyond mere policy disagreements, can pose a significant threat to social cohesion. However, this phenomenon remains relatively unexplored in adolescence. This longitudinal study investigates whether perceived inclusivity norms - emphasizing equality‐based respect, open and constructive dialogue, and communal unity - reduce opinion‐based affective polarization among adolescents. Using a sample of 839 students from two demographically distinct German secondary schools (grades 7-11), we developed and validated measures of polarization tailored to adolescents, capturing dialogue orientation and social distance toward ideological outgroups. Results revealed stable ideological subgroup differences in norms and attitudes, with conservative students exhibiting lower descriptive and prescriptive inclusivity norms and higher affective polarization compared to their liberal peers. However, a significant proportion of adolescents demonstrated fluid political orientations over time, highlighting the malleability of early political identities. Cross‐lagged analyses showed no evidence that inclusivity norms directly reduce affective polarization, although early dialogue orientation significantly predicted greater social openness in diverse settings. Our findings advance the understanding of adolescent political identity development by demonstrating that while ideological orientations remain unstable during this period, group‐based differences in norm perceptions and polarization tendencies are already evident. We emphasize how this developmental fluidity presents both opportunities and challenges for interventions, suggesting that effective depolarization strategies must account for the distinct characteristics of adolescent political socialization and the varying influence of school‐based normative contexts
Scoring German Alternate Uses Items Applying Large Language Models
Get PDFThe alternate uses task (AUT) is the most popular measure when it comes to the assessment of creative potential. Since their implementation, AUT responses have been rated by humans, which is a laborious task and requires considerable resources. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in automatically scoring AUT responses in English as well as in other languages, but it is not clear which method works best for German data. Therefore, we investigated the performance of different LLMs for the automated scoring of German AUT responses. We compiled German data across five research groups including ~50,000 responses for 15 different alternate uses objects from eight lab and online survey studies (including ~2300 participants) to examine generalizability across datasets and assessment conditions. Following a pre-registered analysis plan, we compared the performance of two fine-tuned, multilingual LLM-based approaches [Cross-Lingual Alternate Uses Scoring (CLAUS) and the Open Creativity Scoring with Artificial Intelligence (OCSAI)] with the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-4) in scoring (a) the original German AUT responses and (b) the responses translated to English. We found that the LLM-based scorings were substantially correlated with human ratings, with higher relationships for OCSAI followed by GPT-4 and CLAUS. Response translation, however, had no consistent positive effect. We discuss the generalizability of the results across different items and studies and derive recommendations and future directions
Die Rechte als Wohlfühloase: Rezension zu "Die Gefühlsgemeinschaft der AfD: Narrative, Praktiken und Räume zum Wohlfühlen" von Florian Spissinger
Get PDFFlorian Spissinger: Die Gefühlsgemeinschaft der AfD: Narrative, Praktiken und Räume zum Wohlfühlen. Promotion, Bd. 15. Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich 2024. 978-3-8474-3063-
Features of the Metalinguistic Approach to Affixal Morphemes
Get PDFIn the modern era, the approach to linguistic phenomena from different prisms is noteworthy for its relevance. Among these approaches, the anthropocentric and psycholinguistic approaches stand out for their weight. While using language, a person demonstrates metalinguistic ability when they separate the form of words from the meaning, break the word into parts, think about its components, and come up with their own "etymology".The article explores the nuances of the metalinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to affixal morphemes as a grammatical category, emphasising the need for a multidisciplinary approach to linguistic phenomena. The metalinguistic role of affixes is important in shaping how meaning is constructed and conveyed in language. By modifying words, expressing relationships, and focusing on the interpretation of concepts, affixes facilitate a deeper understanding of language and its function, extending beyond the mere combination of sounds or letters. They allow for the expression of more abstract, complex, and nuanced ideas in communication.In general, affixes not only perform grammatical functions but also provide metalinguistic information for the expression and understanding of language itself. This provides language users with additional information about meaning, structure, and social function. The article also analyses the issues of grammatical conceptualisation, which involves the formation of various knowledge states by the stages of human cognitive development and pays attention to the metalinguistic role of affixes as an important aspect that allows for a deep analysis of language and the communication process
Elise Reimarus's crucial contribution to the Pantheismusstreit: Bridging divides in Enlightenment philosophy
Get PDFDieser Artikel stellt drei miteinander verknüpfte Thesen zu Elise Reimarus' Rolle in den frühen Phasen des Pantheismusstreits auf: (I) dass ihr Engagement für die Förderung des Dialogs zwischen gegensätzlichen philosophischen Perspektiven maßgeblich dazu beitrug, die Kluft zwischen Friedrich Jacobi und Moses Mendelssohn zu überwinden; (II) dass ihr dialogischer Ansatz in der Philosophie einen eigenständigen Beitrag zum Pantheismusstreit darstellt, der sich von den Positionen sowohl Jacobis als auch Mendelssohns unterscheidet; (III) dass Jacobi Reimarus’ Erkenntnisse zur Verbreitung seiner eigenen Ansichten über Philosophie und Spinozismus vereinnahmte. Zur Begründung dieser Thesen ist der Artikel wie folgt gegliedert: In der Einleitung werden der aktuelle Forschungsstand zu Reimarus und ihrer Bedeutung für den Pantheismusstreit dargestellt (1); es folgen eine Analyse von Jacobis Konzeption des Spinozismus und dessen philosophischen Implikationen (2); eine Untersuchung der vermittelnden Bemühungen von Reimarus und ihrer eigenständigen philosophischen Grundlagen (3); sowie eine abschließende Diskussion, die die breitere Bedeutung von Reimarus’ Beiträgen zu dieser Debatte bewertet (4)
Democratic Leadership Revisited
Get PDFPolitical theorists such as James MacGregor Burns (1978/2010), J. Ronald Pennock (1979), and Eric Beerbohm (2015) have argued that democratic leaders, to be democratic, must forge joint commitments with their followers before they act. But what happens when leaders act without doing so? Does this make them undemocratic? In this article, I challenge this standard, stepwise model of democratic leadership. I outline alternative models of democratic leadership that do not require leaders to forge joint commitments with their followers before they act. Democratic leaders must provide justifications for their actions, and they must be held accountable for them, but they might nevertheless act before they forge joint commitments with followers. In a trust‐based model of democratic leadership, for example, trust functions as a temporary stand‐in for justification, giving democratic leaders leeway to make decisions without first consulting their publics or forging joint commitments with them. In the hindsight model of democratic leadership, the consequences of actions can take the place of - or supplement - the justifications leaders provide. I argue that these alternative models of democratic leadership are more consistent with practices of leadership in the real world of politics. I illustrate the theory with two examples: The first focuses on Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's decision to introduce the Goods and Services Tax in 1991; the second examines German Chancellor Angela Merkel's leadership during the European "migrant crisis" in 2015
Book review: Edler, Jakob; Walz, Rainer (2024): Systems and innovation research in transition - Research questions and trends in historical perspective
Get PDFA See-Through Curtain of Varying Texture: Negotiating Power and Material Realities in Engaged Journalism
Get PDFAcknowledging the networked nature of journalism and shifting power relations between actors in the hybrid media system, this article invokes the metaphor of "the curtain" that separates journalists and external actors/forces in discussions on journalistic autonomy (Coddington, 2015) and applies it to the engaged journalism practices of four media startups. It places "the curtain" in the hybrid media systems paradigm and its relational ontology (Chadwick, 2017) to examine to what extent that concept applies to engaged journalism, a participatory media practice that, by definition, involves publics in journalistic processes. Drawing on interviews with engaged journalism producers in Pakistan, Romania, Malaysia, and the UK, this comparative cross-border study explores the power relations within the actor constellations involved in journalistic co-creation. The outlets examined favour a relational approach to knowledge production, in which they prioritise mutual listening and learning - together with their communities. However, there is still a separation between journalists and audiences/publics. Examining the power negotiations that shape engaged journalism in different parts of the world, this study sheds light on the unique texture of each hybrid media space of co-creation. It offers a nuanced conceptualisation of hybridity, suggesting that engagement can lend itself to varying degrees of openness. The study findings challenge idealistic notions of participation by showing that, even in engaged journalism practice, participation remains tightly controlled by journalists and is subject to their negotiation of capacity-enabling and capacity-limiting forces within the constraints of the context-specific material realities