The present study investigated the relationship between level of security clearance in engineering occupations and stress. A total of 63 male employees in the field of engineering and design with varying levels of security clearance employed by a large Southwestern defense company participated in the study. Data was obtained utilizing the Engineering Stress Questionnaire which measures sources of stress, work locus of control, social support, job difficulty, job characteristics, perceived stress, and demographic variables. T-tests revealed no statistically significant differences between employees with low security clearances and high security clearances with regard to perceived stress level. However, correlational support was found for hypotheses involving social support, job difficulty, job characteristics, sources of stress, and perceived stress. Path analysis was performed to investigate the impact of variable relationships.

Submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master’s Degree in Technology: Chiropractic, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017. / Background The imperative of clinical education in chiropractic is to endow students with the clinical competencies and professional attributes necessary for independent practice. The clinical practicum exposes chiropractic students to the realities, demands and expectations of patient care through immersion into the clinical learning environment. Various authors emphasise the importance of obtaining a student’s perspective of their experiences within this environment as it is essential to curriculum development and improvement, delivery of quality clinical education, and student satisfaction with their standard of education. Interestingly, unlike in other health professions’ disciplines, the clinical experiences of chiropractic students who have commenced their clinical practicum have scarcely been described in international literature. This study is the first of its kind to record the clinical experiences of chiropractic students during their clinical practicum in South Africa. Aim The aim of this study was to explore and describe the clinical experiences of first-time registered Master’s chiropractic students during their clinical practicum component at the Durban University of Technology Chiropractic Day Clinic in 2016. Method A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive approach was utilised. A purposive sample of 15 first-time registered Master’s chiropractic students was interviewed. Their clinical experiences during the clinical practicum were obtained through semi-structured interviews. Seven key questions, each relating to a specific aspect of the clinical practicum, were used to stimulate discussion. The data were recorded electronically and thereafter transcribed. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. Results Four main themes were identified, viz. undergraduate education and pre-clinical preparation; experiences within the clinical learning environment; inter-personal relationships in a clinical learning environment, and appraisal of the clinical practicum. Participants reported that the undergraduate and pre-clinical preparatory phase needed to be more practically orientated in order to provide relevance and cohesion to clinical learning. Significant experiences in the clinical learning environment included personal and professional growth and development, perceptions of preparedness for independent practice, perceptions of patient responses to chiropractic care, administrative duties and clinic infrastructure. The interpersonal relationships that contributed to the overall clinical experience were between students and their clinical supervisors, and students and the administrative staff. The appraisal of the clinical practicum included highlights and positive aspects that shaped the attitudes, values and philosophies of students, as well as the challenges and obstacles they encountered within the clinical learning environment. Conclusion This is the first South African study to document the clinical experiences of first-time registered Master’s chiropractic students. These clinical experiences were based on a variety of organisational and curriculum-orientated factors, as well as interpersonal dynamics. While students acknowledged and appreciated the critical importance of clinical education, and valued the learning opportunities within the clinical setting, they also provided constructive feedback on matters needing improvement to enhance the overall clinical experience. The lack of exposure to patient care prior to the commencement of the clinical practicum negatively impacted the clinical experiences. It is recommended that the findings of this study be utilised by the key stakeholders within chiropractic education to enhance chiropractic clinical education in South Africa. / M

The paper analyzes the evolution of the labor market in Sergipe and micro reference to the years 2000 to 2013. In the meantime, it was found that the occupations grew 29,3% (Census 2000 and 2010, IBGE), while private employment to the state grew 103,8% (RAIS 2002 and 2013 MTE), influenced by new growth cycle in Brazil and local incentives. Also, it was noticed that some micro-regions had higher and other lower growth rates of occupations and jobs the state. Thus, to study the causes of the phenomenon will use the shift-share analysis that attaches to the expansion of contribution plots in employment or the structural components of the business lines or competitive differentiation (or locational) of each micro-region, for it will be used the IBGE activities classification. / O trabalho analisa a evolução do mercado de trabalho em Sergipe e microrregiões tomando como referência os anos 2000 até 2013. Nesse intervalo, constatou-se que as ocupações cresceram 29,3% (Censos 2000 e 2010, IBGE), enquanto o emprego privado para o estado cresceu 103,8% (RAIS 2002 e 2013, MTE), influenciados pelo novo ciclo de crescimento do Brasil e incentivos locais. Também, percebeu-se que algumas microrregiões obtiveram maiores e outras menores taxas de crescimento de ocupações e empregos que o estado. Assim, para estudar as causas do fenômeno será utilizado o método diferencial-estrutural (shift share analysis) que atribui à expansão das parcelas de contribuição no emprego ou a componentes estruturais dos setores de atividade ou a diferenciação competitiva (ou locacional) de cada microrregião, para isso será utilizada a classificação de atividades do IBGE.

The concept of biodata is defined as an assessment and evaluation of demonstrated to be related to personality structure, personal adjustment, or success in social, educational, or occupational pursuits.

The paper examines the extent to which the prestige value of a retiree’s former occupation increases the likelihood that they will make a transition into volunteering after retirement. Following social production function theory, we assume that when a person retires, the prestige value attached to their former occupation fades. The fact that volunteering has the character of a collective good provides the opportunity to gain social prestige to offset the loss of occupational prestige. However, the extent of the incentive to volunteer will be distributed unequally across occupations: the higher the former occupational prestige value, the higher the perceived loss of prestige after retirement. Thus, doing a job with high prestige value increases the incentive to volunteer in retirement. This assumption is tested, using data taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) 1992-2013. The sample contains 1,631 workers and 589 retirees, 278 of whom transitioned into volunteering during the observation window. Based on Kaplan-Meier-Failure-Estimates and complementary log-log hazard models, findings show a positive effect of occupational prestige on the transition into volunteering. Thus, the loss of high occupational prestige can be compensated by the social prestige associated with volunteering. Formal volunteering in retirement follows, albeit to a lesser extent, the logic of the occupational social strata.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse empirically, proposing new methods to tackle disputed questions in the literature of political and labour economics, the Italian institutional setting both in a political competition context and in the occupational structure. The first paper explores the relationship between transfers from central state to political aligned municipalities and the effect of these transfers on local electoral consensus. This study contributes to the empirical literature of the political determinants of spikes in central transfers in pre-electoral periods and of the electoral benefits of pork barrel measures for incumbent politicians. Despite several findings of strong evidence that intergovernmental fiscal transfers rise during election years, in the Italian case researchers investigated little the political incentives that lay behind these increases or the success of these transfers in attracting votes. We focus on the so called swing municipalities, defined as those in which the probability of winning is close to one-half, analysing data of Italian comuni with more than 15 000 inhabitants, in the period 2007-2014. From an empirical perspective, every attempt to estimate the causal impact of political alignment on the amount of federal transfers is clearly complicated by endogeneity issues. Without a credible source of exogenous variation in political alignment, the empirical correlation between alignment and transfers (if any) can be completely driven by socio-economic factors influencing both dimensions. We propose a new model specification to account for the endogeneity issue arising when estimating the causal impact of political alignment on transfers: the unpredicted change in the government occurred in 2011 after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and the following appointment of Mario Monti as prime minister. We perform our empirical estimation in two steps: first, we apply the close-race RDD setup (Lee 2008) to assess the impact of political alignment on transfers. Results from the close-race RDD show that aligned municipalities receive more grants, with this effect being stronger before elections. At a second empirical stage, we perform a local linear regression of the re-election probability of the local incumbent on transfers, including the first stage error term to have our coefficient of interest measuring only the effect of politically-driven transfers on electoral outcomes, and we conclude that this probability increases as grants increase. The second paper stems from the observation of the most recent phenomena in the domestic and foreign labour market: technological progress has been associated to a crowding-out of cognitive-skill intensive jobs in favour of jobs requiring soft skills, such as social intelligence, flexibility and creativity. Soft skills can be defined as interpersonal, human, people or behavioural skills necessary for applying technical skills and knowledge in the workplace. The nature of the soft skills make them hardly replaceable by machine work, and Among soft skills, creativity is one of the hardest to define and to codify, therefore, creativity-intensive occupations have been shielded from automation. In our work, we focus on creativity, starting from its definition in order to get significant insights on which occupational profiles in Italy can be considered creative and to explore their dynamics in the labour market. A possible analytical definition of creativity comes from the seminal work of Edward De Bono. According to his pioneering research in the field, lateral thinking is strictly related to creativity and it can be described along four dimensions: 1) fluidity, as the ability of a subject to give the highest possible number of answers to a certain question; 2) flexibility, as the number of categories to which we can bring back these questions; 3) originality: ability of expressing new and innovative ideas; 4) processing: ability of realizing concretely one’s ideas. We apply this definition to a uniquely detailed occupational dataset on tasks, skills, work attitudes, and working conditions regarding all Italian occupations: the Inapp-Istat Survey on Occupations (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni, ICP hereafter), an O*NET-type dataset developed by the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis. The Survey on Occupations, in fact, presents a list of skills and competences and workers are asked to identify those they make use of in performing their job. Inside this list, we identify 25 skills associated to creativity and we formulate a Matrix Completion (MC) optimization problem, as discussed theoretically in Mazumder (2010). Matrix Completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which we generate by obscuring randomly 10%, 25% and 50% of the entries in the columns associated with the creative skills, given a fixed row (occupation). In our analysis, we use a formulation of the problem known as Nuclear Norm Minimization and we solve it with the Soft Impute Algorithm. We conclude our analysis on social skills in our third paper where we analyse the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on soft skills in the context of Italian occupations, operating in about 100 economic sectors. We leverage detailed information from ICP, the Italian O*Net, and we simulate the impact of Covid-19 on those workplace characteristics and working style that were more seriously hit by the lockdown measures and the new sanitary dispositions (physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely, ecc.). We simulate three possible scenarios based on the intensity of the effects of COVID-19 on some working conditions, such as working from home, keeping physical distance and so on. We then apply matrix completion, a machine learning technique used in recommendation systems, in order to predict the levels of soft skills required for each occupation when working conditions change, as these changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions showing a lower intensity in the use of soft skills, with respect to the predicted one, are exposed to a deficit in their soft-skill endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity or higher unemployment, thus enhancing the negative effects of the pandemic.

The Czech Armed Forces (CAF) constitutes the most important element within defense system of Czech republic. Primary role of CAF is to defend country against foreign invasion to which purpose should its build-up and structure correspond. From the perspective of military theory defined by Carl von Clausewitz, there is pivotal component in case of composition of CAF which is porportion of individual arms and services. Proportion of military occupations matching these arms and services as well as combat and support parts of CAF is of primary concern in this work. This relationship is also compared with composition of United States Armed Forces due to fact that these are the most important and the most effective armed forces in the contemporary world. Based on this comparison, there can arise some of generally valid principles and procedures for developing the armed forces which can be also applied in case of CAF. Geopolitical position of Czech republic and its historical context is also taken into consideration in this work.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This exploratory study looks at the underrepresentation of certain groups, especially women, in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) occupations. Using longitudinal data, it investigates the impact of math and technical abilities as well as social status measures such as sex, race/ethnicity and household income on STEM career choice, arguing that social status variables have an important influence apart from abilities, with an emphasis on gender. Results show significant impacts of sex, race/ethnicity, income and both math and technical skills on STEM career choice; however, only sex, math and technical skill have statistically significant impacts when controlling for all other variables, with technical skill having the strongest impact in all tests. Implications of these findings are discussed, confirming previous studies but also setting the groundwork for inclusion of technical skill in research on STEM areas. Future efforts are argued to focus on technical ability, as well as gender and mathematical adroitness.

From the socio-economic turmoil of the 20th century, Japan has repeatedly revealed its resilience. During these trying times, scientific work has been an important element in Japan's economic development. However, the 1990s revealed weaknesses in this “economic miracle.” During this period, several socio-structural factors have contributed to this social landscape. Future successes in Japanese socio-economic spheres will partially depend on scientific work. In this study, it is suggested that identifying structural factors in the Japanese “system” that contribute to its scientific organizations is key to ascertaining a more coherent assessment of scientific work in Japan. This assessment can lead to more in depth analyses of the interconnections between science and society. The focus of this study is on scientific institutes and their organizational structure. The social networks that interconnect these institutes and couple their scientific work with other elements of Japanese culture are essential in the analysis of Japan's scientific enterprise. In the present study, a qualitative case study methodology is used to explore socio-structural networks within the cultural field of scientific work in Tsukuba, Japan. The structure of scientific work in Japan is composed of several cultural and material elements which have been distilled into two themes for evaluative purposes. These themes include cultural factors and scientific production/economic affairs. Through a reflexive-thematic lens an analysis of scientific work is conducted. Central to the method used in this study is a series of structured and un-structured in-person interviews using a format of open-ended questions. Most informants in this study were chosen by administrators of the institutes involved. Although, I did participate in assuring diversity in the sample, there is possible bias inherent in management's choices of particular informants. These interviews were held during the month of October 2002 in five separate university and non-university institutes in Tsukuba, Japan. The findings in this study reveal common, contradictory and idiosyncratic aspects that have important cultural and scientific/economic effects across organizational types. Common attributes include the observation of universal “top-down” organizational hierarchies with networks of labor being accumulated through elite scientists. Generally, informants perceived little to no effect from the national economy on their particular institute's funding of science. Scientists spent an extraordinary amount of time at work and conducted highly specialized work tasks. The publishing activity concentrated among elite scientists while utilization of foreign scientists and contingent workers were segregated. Also, the use of tacit knowledge as a principal training tool was universally observed across institutes. Contradictory attributes include scientists' attitudes toward their work versus the city they live in, government policy versus actual laboratory work, and publishing versus conference presentations. The idiosyncratic attributes focus on levels of organizational formality across organizations. The organizational formality is related to the individual scientists' perceptions of what they enjoyed most about their work. Thus, scientists that enjoyed the 'processes' of their work tended to be located in more formal organizations whereas those scientists who enjoyed “discovery” were situated in less formal organizations. It is likely that the different levels of organizational formality observed in this study are associated with other elements of laboratory culture. Also, the composition of foreigners and women varied remarkably across institutes. Yet, their use in laboratories is relatively similar. / Ph. D.

Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur arbetsmiljö och arbetsrelaterad stress påverkar välmående hos personer som är anställda inom serviceyrken. Detta gjordes genom en kvantitativ metod, en webbaserad enkätundersökning där delar av skalan QPS-Nordic (rollförväntningar, kontroll i arbetet, social interaktion, organisationskultur och samband mellan arbete och privatliv) användes. Välmående mättes med hjälp av välmåendeskalan, som mäter välmåendet under den senaste veckan. Det deltog 122 personer. Hypoteserna som testades var om det fanns ett signifikant samband mellan psykosociala faktorer i arbetet, ålder, utbildningsnivå, anställningstyp och kön, och välmående hos personer som är anställda inom serviceyrken. Datan analyserades med hjälp av multipel regressionsanalys och resultaten visade att psykosociala faktorer på arbetet, högre utbildning jämfört med gymnasial utbildning samt kön var signifikanta prediktorer för en högre nivå av välmående hos personer som är anställda inom serviceyrken. Från den här studien kunde vi dra slutsatsen att psykosociala faktorer i arbetet och en högre utbildning är viktiga för att främja välmående hos personer som arbetar inom serviceyrken. / The purpose of this study was to investigate how the work environment and work-related stress can affect well-being in people employed in service occupations. This was done using a quantitative method, a web-based survey using parts of the QPS-Nordic scale (Role expectations, job control, social interaction, organizational culture, and work-life balance). Well-being was measured using the Well-Being Scale, which assesses well-being over the past week. There were 122 participants. The hypotheses tested were whether there was a significant association between psychosocial factors at work, age, educational level, employment type, and/or gender and well-being in service occupations. The data was analyzed using multiple regression analysis and the results showed that psychosocial factors at work, higher level of education compared to a high school education and gender were significant predictors of better well-being in service occupations. Based on this study we can conclude that psychosocial factors at work and a higher level of education are important for promoting well-being among people working in service occupations.