Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090283

Authors: Gibson Makamure

This qualitative study addresses a significant gap in existing literature concerning the emotional, psychological, and academic consequences of gender-based violence (GBV) among high school learners in Eswatini, a context where culturally embedded norms and systemic challenges may shape how GBV is experienced, disclosed, and addressed. While prior research underscores the detrimental effects of GBV, limited attention has been given to learners’ accounts within Eswatini’s socio-cultural landscape. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, data were collected from 36 learners (18 girls and 18 boys) across six high schools. Thirty learners participated in six focus group discussions, with five learners in each group, while an additional six learners participated in individual semi-structured interviews. No participant participated in both methods. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. Three overarching themes were developed inductively: (1) emotional trauma and demotivation, characterised by feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, and withdrawal; (2) psychological effects, including anxiety, shame, isolation, and psychological distress; and (3) a decline in academic performance and engagement, reflected in perceived difficulties with concentration, attendance, participation, motivation, and academic performance. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model was subsequently used as an interpretive lens to examine how individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and broader societal contexts shaped participants’ accounts. The study also considers similarities, differences, and contradictions in girls’ and boys’ accounts and recognises that participants occupy different positions in relation to GBV, including experiences of victimisation, witnessing, and acknowledgement of harmful behaviour. Because the study is qualitative and cross-sectional, the findings describe participants’ perceived relationships between GBV and educational and psychosocial experiences rather than establishing causal effects. The study highlights the importance of trauma-informed school environments, accessible psychosocial support, effective safeguarding and referral mechanisms, gender-responsive prevention, and coordinated interventions across ecological levels.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090282

Authors: Se-Won Kim

As sports content platforms increasingly occupy a central role in consumers’ media consumption and fitness-related activities, understanding the factors that encourage sustained user engagement has become an important research concern. Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been widely recognized as a strategic tool for enhancing consumer perceptions and organizational reputation, prior research has focused primarily on traditional sports organizations and general commercial settings, with limited attention given to its influence within digitally mediated sports content platform environments. Therefore, this study investigates the relationships among CSR, empathy, attitude, and usage intention in the context of sports content platforms. Data were collected in Republic of Korea from 225 university students who regularly use sports content platforms. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the proposed conceptual framework. The findings reveal that CSR positively influences empathy and attitude, while empathy positively influences attitude. In addition, attitude is positively associated with usage intention. However, CSR does not directly influence usage intention, and empathy does not exhibit a direct relationship with usage intention. These results suggest that users’ continued engagement with sports content platforms is shaped more by evaluative attitudes than by direct emotional responses or perceptions of social responsibility alone. The study contributes to the literature by extending CSR research beyond traditional sports organizations into digitally transformed sports content platform environments and by identifying the psychological mechanisms through which CSR shapes user behavior in digital sports media environments. It also offers practical guidance for platform operators seeking to strengthen long-term user relationships through socially responsible initiatives.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090281

Authors: Eduarda Ferreira Maria João Silva

Social inequalities often persist despite widespread endorsement of universal norms such as fairness and equality. One explanation is that actors interpret these principles differently in practice, generating divergent forms of action within the same institutional setting. This study examines this process in the context of gender equity in STEM education by analysing how teachers organise beliefs, awareness, pedagogical practices, responsibility, and the perceived value of gender equality when reasoning about pedagogical fairness. Using an exploratory case study with a theory-guided, person-centred typological classification approach, questionnaire data from teachers in a Portuguese school cluster (Grades 1–12) were analysed through quantitative classification and interpretive analysis of open-ended responses. Rather than differing only in degree of commitment to equality, teachers’ reported reasoning was organised into three theory-guided orientations: Procedural Impartiality (fairness as identical treatment), Compensatory Intervention (fairness as corrective action), and Reflexive Professional Responsibility (fairness as situated professional judgement). The resulting profiles showed differentiated configurations across the five analytical dimensions, particularly in the relative organisation of awareness, pedagogical practices, responsibility, and the perceived value of gender equality. Descriptive subgroup distributions also suggested tentative variation across disciplinary field, sex, and teaching experience, although these patterns should not be interpreted as systematic or generalisable associations. The findings indicate that teachers’ reported reasoning can be organised into distinct theory-guided orientations and suggest that shared commitments to gender equality may coexist with different professional interpretations of fairness and legitimate pedagogical intervention. The study therefore proposes a framework for examining how equity is interpreted as a professional category in educational contexts, while recognising that further research is needed to examine how such orientations relate to observed classroom practices and student outcomes.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090280

Authors: Ana María Arias-Uriona Beno Schraepen

Social inclusion has become a widely shared normative commitment across research on education, health and development, yet its enactment often remains uneven and difficult to sustain. This concept paper develops the idea of “Lost in Inclusion” to examine how inclusion is translated, unsettled and partially lost as it moves across theory, method and territory. Drawing on practice vignettes from four years of a transdisciplinary community-based research project in rural Bolivia, the article explores three sites of tension: the encounter between epistemic openness and academic demands for certainty; the translation of participation into intervention-oriented action; and the recognition of children and young people as knowledge producers. Rather than treating barriers as pre-existing obstacles, the article argues that barriers may emerge through the very practices intended to enact inclusion. It distinguishes between where inclusion gets lost, as inclusive commitments become legible within institutional and methodological logics, and how researchers and partners may become lost in the pursuit of inclusion itself when its normative force makes tensions difficult to question. The article proposes a relational and ethically reflexive approach to inclusion-oriented research, in which success depends less on eliminating tension than on protecting the conditions that keep participation and recognition open to negotiation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090279

Authors: Nicola Taylor Andy Pringle Clare M. P. Roscoe

Global concern surrounding declining outdoor play, physical activity, and children’s engagement with natural environments has prompted increased interest in nature-based early childhood education (ECE). Within such settings, outdoor spaces are positioned as central to learning, supporting embodied and authentic interaction with the natural world. Despite expansion in provision, limited research has examined how parents and practitioners conceptualise the value of nature-based ECE or how their perspectives intersect across ecological contexts. This qualitative study investigated the key perspectives of parents and practitioners in nature-based ECE settings in England. Following institutional ethical approval, 16 participants were recruited: seven parents (all female) of children aged three to five years attending nature-based ECE settings and nine practitioners (eight females, one male). Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: Protecting children’s rights; Nature as a context for whole-child development; Risk, resilience, and physicality; Communities of learning; and Beyond the setting: systemic pressures and parental fears. Choosing nature-based ECE reflects a proactive, health-promoting decision grounded in parental values concerning children’s rights to nature and outdoor play. Practitioner commitment was similarly values-driven, centred on children’s freedoms and positioned in tension with prevailing societal norms. Key findings illuminate practitioners’ concerns regarding the perceived absence of outdoor-based provision across mainstream ECE and schooling, highlighting the need for clearer regulatory frameworks to establish quality outdoor play in nature as a systemic entitlement.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090278

Authors: Ambar Dwi Erawati

Mental health significantly impacts state performance, productivity, public services, health care costs, and tax revenue. The 5.0 Revolution has redefined productive work as continuous, raising expectations for constant activity and responsiveness and heightening work-related stress. Excessive work stress, known as burnout, is not classified as a medical condition but is recognized as “unmanaged work burnout syndrome.” This research examines the need to strengthen legal frameworks to provide preventive protection against burnout for employees. The researcher conducted doctrinal research using primary legal sources, including the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 13 of 2003 concerning Manpower (as amended), the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 2 of 2022 concerning Job Creation, Law No. 17 of 2023 concerning Health, the Regulation of the Minister of Health Number 3 of 2023 concerning Health Service Tariff Standards, and the Regulation of the Minister of Health Number 19 of 2024 concerning Community Health Centers. We also reviewed secondary sources, such as scientific journal articles and books. We analyzed these sources using legal interpretation and synthesis, applying grammatical and systematic methods. To strengthen the legal framework, we recommend providing psychological consultation services in companies, implementing mental health screenings for employees, and enhancing psychological well-being services at health centers.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090277

Authors: Carmen Amelia Trujillo Rocío León-Carlosama Johanna Paulina Flores Ruano Fabio Elton Cruz Góngora

Environmental interpretation (EI) in protective forests remains an underexplored field, despite its demonstrated potential for fostering emotional place attachment and conservation attitudes. This study aims to design and evaluate in situ the “Magical Portal of Biodiversity and Culture” self-guided interpretive trail at the “Los Arrayanes” Protective Forest (16 ha, Montúfar Canton, Carchi Province, Ecuador), a native arrayan forest (Myrcianthes hallii) deeply rooted in the ancestral territory of the Pasto-Tuza people, and to formulate educommunicational strategies. The trail design is grounded in Tilden’s interpretive principles, Morales’s topic–theme structure, and Ham’s TORE model, and it formulates Environmental Education and Communication Strategies. A qualitative, multimethod design was employed, with in situ field observation, participatory action research (PAR) workshops with the de Monteverde community, and in-depth interviews with seven key informants (March–April 2026); data were analyzed through the hermeneutic interpretive method and validated through categories, method, and theory triangulation, member checking, and researcher reflexivity. The analysis yielded five emergent categories: (1) vital and heritage place attachment; (2) psychological restoration and sensory reconnection; (3) environmental curiosity and empathy; (4) situated conservation learning; and (5) community governance and intergenerational education. Additionally, it identified six educommunicational strategies: (1) sensory learning; (2) storytelling; (3) participatory interaction; (4) guided self-learning; (5) situated learning; and (6) the biocultural approach. These findings provide empirical evidence that biocultural interpretation promotes conservation attitudes and community participation. In practical terms, this research offers protected-area managers, community organizations, and interpretation planners a model replicable for designing self-guided interpretive trails in biodiverse territories where living biocultural heritage is at risk.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090276

Authors: Adriana Martins Gallo Carlos Laranjeira Juliane Pagliari Araujo Wanessa Cristina Baccon Francielle Renata Danielli Martins Marques Jackeline Tiemy Guinoza Siraichi Amira Mohammed Ali Feten Fekih-Romdhane Maria Aparecida Salci Lígia Carreira

Digital technologies seem to contribute to health promotion and disease prevention, allowing older people to benefit from targeted health interventions supported by digital resources. The current study aimed to develop a substantive theory focusing on the experiences of older people who use smartphone technology daily and its repercussions on healthy aging. This qualitative study employed Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory approach. Purposeful and theoretical sampling was used to recruit 37 older Brazilian people from a community extension project that integrates nurses who offer personalized guidance and support using smartphone devices. Individual phone-call interviews and reflective journals were conducted between August 2022 and March 2023. Four interrelated theoretical categories emerged: (1) technological progress during the aging process; (2) technological learning using smartphones and participation in virtual groups; (3) expanding social and personal development through smartphone communication; and (4) virtual groups for older people on healthy aging. The core category “Experiencing guided smartphone use as a resource for healthy aging” portrays the individual, social and cultural aspects involved in the habits and attitudes that older people develop to promote independence and quality of life. This study offers valuable insights into the daily use of smartphones by older people, and its repercussions on individual and social issues that bring people and places closer together, expand the social network, and modify communication patterns. The findings indicate that older adults undergo changes and adaptations in their daily lives and in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, and that using digital applications such as smartphones contradicts the stereotype of fragility or limited understanding associated with aging. The findings can also help with the implementation of policies and practices aligned with a more person-centred care approach.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090275

Authors: Inês Sofia Pinto António Manuel Marques Maria Helena Santos

This exploratory study aims to identify and characterize the negative effects associated with the phenomenon of tokenism for Portuguese female bodybuilders, as well as the strategies they follow to integrate and remain in a context where men are significantly the majority and whose culture is marked by hegemonic masculinity. We conducted semi-structured interviews with seven men and eight women practicing bodybuilding and performed a thematic analysis of their recorded statements. Our analyses confirm that the context of bodybuilding is strongly gendered, in which, being a minority, women have more visibility, and organizational and group practices serve to diminish their efforts and results, placing them in an ambiguous and paradoxical territory.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090274

Authors: María Mónica Chachi Espinoza Adrián García Chachi Natalia Giovanna Chachi Quiroz

This study explores how transnational higher education networks may contribute to the development of more inclusive and sustainable communities through collaborative learning, institutional capacity building, and cross-cultural academic cooperation. Higher education institutions increasingly play an important role in promoting social inclusion, active citizenship, and sustainable development beyond their traditional functions of teaching and research. Using the Erasmus+ SOLIDARIS project as an interpretive case study, this research examines how collaboration among European and Latin American universities supported the development of shared competency frameworks, faculty learning processes, and institutional practices related to inclusion and civic engagement. This study adopted an interpretive qualitative documentary case study design based on the Erasmus+ SOLIDARIS project. The documentary corpus comprised project reports, training materials, competency frameworks, and selected institutional documents and project outputs generated during the initiative. The findings indicate that sustained transnational collaboration was associated with institutional learning, collaborative academic practices, and the co-design of educational tools that supported inclusive participation and capacity-building processes across diverse institutional contexts. The analysis also highlights challenges related to contextual adaptation, organizational asymmetries, and the sustainability of collaborative initiatives beyond external funding periods. The study contributes to discussions on the role of higher education institutions as agents of sustainable and inclusive communities, suggesting that transnational university networks may support long-term social engagement, institutional innovation and context-sensitive collaborative responses.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090273

Authors: María Sánchez-Jiménez Pablo Fernández-Arias Álvaro Antón-Sancho Diego Vergara

The increase in STEAM (Science, Technology, Arts, and Mathematics) graduates in sparsely populated rural areas could help boost the technical, economic, and social development of these regions. One of the main obstacles to increasing the number of STEAM graduates is the underrepresentation of women in these fields. This study analyzes the factors that lead young people from sparsely populated areas of Spain to choose STEAM degrees and the reasons they attribute to the underrepresentation of women. To this end, the responses to a specially designed questionnaire were analyzed from 299 young students aged 13 to 18 from different sparsely populated areas of Spain. The results show that male students are more influenced than female students by the labor market demand for STEAM degrees, while female students are more affected by the academic guidance they receive, especially older female students. Females understand that poor academic guidance and the lack of female STEAM role models are the main causes of the gender gap in STEAM degrees, while males attribute this gap mostly to the personal preferences of females.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090272

Authors: Ramil I. Hasanov Galib Gafarli Zeynab Giyasova Jeyhun Hajiyev Aladdin Aliyev Ilhama Mahmudova Muslum Mursalov

Income inequality remains a persistent structural challenge in advanced economies, with important consequences for economic stability, social cohesion, and the effectiveness of public policy. This study investigates the determinants of income inequality in the United Kingdom over the period 1980–2021 by combining ARDL, FMOLS, and NARDL approaches to assess long-run equilibrium relationships and potential nonlinear distributional effects. The ARDL bounds test confirms the presence of a stable long-run cointegrating relationship between the Gini index and its socioeconomic determinants, indicating that fiscal conditions, labour market dynamics, economic development, and income structure move together over time. The FMOLS estimates show that GDP per capita and unemployment are positively associated with inequality, whereas public social spending, government expenditure on education, tax revenue, and the income share of the fourth quintile are negatively related to the Gini index in the long run. These results underline the importance of redistribution, human capital investment, and labour market stability in moderating income disparities. The NARDL estimates suggest directionally different responses to positive and negative changes in the upper-middle-income share. Positive changes are associated with lower inequality (−0.931), while negative changes are associated with higher inequality (0.232); however, neither effect is statistically significant. The Wald test likewise fails to reject long-run symmetry (χ2(1) = 0.212, p = 0.646). Overall, the findings support a stable long-run inequality framework while indicating only limited evidence of asymmetric distributional adjustment in the United Kingdom.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16090271

Authors: Oko Chima Enworo Jimi O. Adesina

With only 15.4 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population covered by formal social protection, most people depend on indigenous social provisioning. Despite their extensive coverage and socio-cultural legitimacy, these arrangements remain marginal in policy design, largely due to their persistent framing as residual, informal coping mechanisms within state-centric paradigms. This paper challenges that framing by conceptualising indigenous social provisioning as an institutionally autonomous domain with transformative potential. Using an integrative literature review, the study analyses key provisioning arrangements across sub-Saharan Africa and maps their functions onto the framework of Transformative Social Policy (TSP), which emphasises production, protection, redistribution, reproduction, and social cohesion. The findings show that indigenous systems extend beyond safety net functions to enhancing productive capacities and supporting livelihoods, redistributing resources, sustaining social reproduction, and fostering social cohesion for collective agency. However, their transformative capacity is often limited by internal inequalities. The paper argues that inclusive social policy requires a shift from substitution to institutional complementarity, in which indigenous and formal systems operate as mutually reinforcing pillars. By foregrounding Africa’s institutional heritage, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonise social policy theory and practice.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080270

Authors: Ibrahim A. Elshaer Chokri Kooli Alaa M. S. Azazz Mansour Alyahya Sameh Fayyad Ghada Ali Abd Elmoaty Mohamed

The rapid adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is transforming higher education by reshaping learning experiences, student engagement, and creativity. However, little is known about the mechanisms through which GenAI enhances creativity, particularly within tourism and hospitality education. Unlike prior studies that primarily examine students’ intention to adopt GenAI, this study explains how GenAI adoption translates into creativity through enhanced learning and learning engagement while accounting for ethical risks. Drawing upon contemporary learning and creativity literature, this study examined how students’ adoption of GenAI influences creativity through the mediating roles of enhanced learning and learning engagement, while also investigating the moderating effect of perceived ethical risks associated with GenAI use. Data were collected from 420 students enrolled in tourism and hospitality faculties and institutes across Egypt. The proposed research model was tested using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings reveal that enhanced learning and learning engagement are the principal mechanisms through which GenAI adoption improves students’ creativity, whereas perceived ethical risks significantly weaken these positive relationships. This study contributed to the emerging GenAI literature by moving beyond technology adoption perspectives to explain how GenAI shapes creativity outcomes in higher education. It further extends tourism and hospitality education research by providing one of the first empirical examinations of the mechanisms through which GenAI enhances student creativity while accounting for ethical concerns. The findings provide practical guidance for higher education institutions seeking to integrate GenAI responsibly while fostering creativity, engagement, and innovative learning environments.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080269

Authors: Monika Tekutienė Daiva Jakavonytė-Staškuvienė

In today’s world, where people are exposed to ever-increasing flows of information, children may find it difficult to regulate their emotions, attention, thoughts and behaviour. Self-regulation is widely recognised as a key factor in children’s learning, emotional well-being and social functioning, yet there remains a lack of research analysing how processes related to self-regulation can be conceptually explored in museum, experiential and sensory educational settings. To address this gap, this study examines the conceptual links between the exhibits and educational activities at the Museum of Feelings, established in Lithuania in 2025, and children’s emotional, cognitive and behavioural self-regulation. The study employed qualitative deductive content analysis. The museum’s exhibits and the associated educational activities were analysed using a coding system derived from the academic literature. The analysis identified three main categories of self-regulation: emotional, cognitive and behavioural. The results of this study reveal that the museum’s exhibits and activities were conceptually linked to all three categories. The activities analysed were linked to the development of emotional vocabulary, the recognition and naming of emotions and bodily sensations, reflection on the interrelationships between thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and behaviour, attention regulation, impulse control, and the exploration of constructive ways of responding to complex emotions and social situations. By revealing how these aspects of self-regulation are given meaning within the experiential museum environment, this study offers a new theoretical perspective on the educational potential of museum activities. However, the identified links are conceptual and theoretical in nature and should therefore not be interpreted as empirical evidence of the museum’s impact on children’s self-regulation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080268

Authors: Hao Liang Anan Pongtornkulpanich

Cultural resources embedded in local traditions are increasingly recognized as contributors to sustainable community development. Even so, the mechanisms through which these resources support sustainability remain insufficiently understood, particularly in living heritage communities. Empirical evidence explaining how cultural resources are translated into sustainable community outcomes through Dynamic Capabilities and Cultural Innovation Ability also remains limited. This study examines how Cultural Capital and Dynamic Capabilities contribute to community sustainability through Cultural Innovation Ability in Buyei Tie-dyeing communities in Guizhou Province, China. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, 503 valid questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM), complemented by semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion. The empirical results demonstrate that Dynamic Capabilities exert a substantial direct effect on Local Community Sustainability (β = 0.429, p < 0.001), while Cultural Capital emerges as a critical determinant of Cultural Innovation Ability (β = 0.468, p < 0.001). Cultural Innovation Ability partially mediates the relationships of Dynamic Capabilities and Cultural Capital with Local Community Sustainability. The study focuses on respondents’ perceptions of community-level processes within this evolving heritage context rather than directly examining how heritage meanings are negotiated, reproduced, or transformed among different actors. The structural model explains 50.1% of the variance in Local Community Sustainability, indicating moderate explanatory power. The findings suggest that Cultural Capital alone may be insufficient to generate stronger sustainability outcomes unless communities can mobilize and transform it under changing conditions. Cultural innovation serves as a key mechanism linking cultural resources to community sustainability. The study contributes to the literature by extending Dynamic Capability Theory to community-based heritage settings and by identifying Cultural Innovation Ability as an important mechanism linking cultural resources to sustainable community development.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080267

Authors: Anania Iordache Cosima Rughiniș Răzvan Rughiniș Dinu Țurcanu

Public discussion of artificial intelligence and employment is often reduced to a binary between technological optimism and pessimism. This qualitative study examines 3275 substantive comments from 22 purposively selected English-language Reddit threads, spanning 18 subreddits and thirteen occupational or institutional domains, collected in early April 2026. Drawing on interpretive-repertoire analysis and using sociotechnical imaginaries as a sensitizing framework, the study identifies nine recurring vocabularies through which participants construct relations between AI and human labor: replacement; displacement and stratification; augmentation and complementarity, including augmentation-as-intensification; surveillance and subordination; algorithmic gatekeeping; selective immunity and embodied resistance; adaptation mandate; institutional redesign; and replacement reversal. The sampled discussions suggest occupationally patterned differences in the salience of these repertoires. Creative work discussions frequently foregrounded replacement and stratification, service-work discussions emphasized intensification and control, skilled-trades discussions mobilized embodied immunity, and legal discussions foregrounded institutional redesign. The findings show that vernacular discussion differentiates among multiple locations, mechanisms, and beneficiaries of AI-related change that cannot be captured adequately through a simple optimism–pessimism distinction.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080266

Authors: Orcun Kececi Mustafa Can Koc Selim Akman Dessalegn Wase Mola Pedro Duarte-Mendes Filipe Rodrigues

This cross-sectional study examined the contemporaneous associations among sport passion, sports-themed video gaming motivation, and perceived sport-role task performance. The sample comprised 624 licensed athletes in Türkiye who reported participating in a physical sport and playing a sports video game that matched that sport. Participants completed the Sport Passion Scale, the Sports Video Game Motivation Scale, and a self-report adaptation of the Task Performance Scale for the sport context. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the specified measurement structure, and structural equation modeling with 5000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples was used to estimate simultaneous and indirect associations. Sport passion was positively associated with sports-themed video gaming motivation (β = 0.58) and perceived sport-role task performance (β = 0.29), while gaming motivation was positively associated with perceived sport-role task performance (β = 0.35). The standardized indirect association was 0.20; the corresponding unstandardized estimate was B = 0.22, bias-corrected 95% CI [0.15, 0.30]. Because all variables were self-reported in one survey session, the model describes associations and does not establish temporal ordering, causal mediation, transfer from gaming to sport, or improvement in objective athletic performance.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080265

Authors: Aglaia Zafeiroudi Athanasia Chatzipanteli Ioannis Tsartsapakis Vasiliki Zisi Charilaos Kouthouris

This systematic review adopted a dual-perspective approach to examine how community dance is conceptualized and operationalized in the literature published between 2000 and 2026. The review was reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, with eligibility and search concepts informed by SPIDER. Searches of five bibliographic databases and Google Scholar produced 423 records, of which 30 peer-reviewed articles were included in a thematic and cross-cutting narrative synthesis. Explicit accounts framed community dance through macro-level aspirations toward cultural democracy, equity, social connection, and eco-social sustainability. Implicit operational accounts emphasized micro-level relational, embodied, and pedagogical processes through which these commitments may be pursued, including process-led participation, de-centering of authority, challenges to normative body ideals, non-clinical well-being, and, in a smaller subset, trauma-informed principles. The realization of democratic and inclusive aspirations varied by context, facilitation, participant experience, and institutional conditions. Across both strands, the lived body occurred as an interpretive link between embodied knowledge, participation, and psychosocial well-being. Community dance is provisionally conceptualized as an anti-elitist, leisure-based, process-led participatory practice that seeks to create democratic spaces where diverse bodies share creative agency and relational justice may be pursued in practice. This definition aims to clarify the field’s conceptual identity, offering a cohesive epistemological foundation for future research, policy, and pedagogy.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080264

Authors: Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco Martina Pili

University canteens occupy a structurally significant position within European higher education, functioning simultaneously as food security infrastructures, socioeconomic equalizers, and community-building spaces. Yet, access to these services remains deeply uneven, shaped by financial constraints, logistical barriers, and a frequently underexplored cultural and symbolic dimension that precedes and overrides direct experiential evaluation. Drawing on 56 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with university students in Milan between April and May 2025, this paper investigates how students organize and experience their midday lunch break and what motivates them to access or exclude themselves from the university canteen service. The findings reveal that the student sample departs substantially from the dominant framing in the contemporary literature of the canteen as an existential food-security resource, instead deploying a range of domestic and commercial food tactics that bypass institutional catering entirely. More significantly, the data demonstrates that canteen avoidance is driven less by objective assessments of food quality or pricing than by a stratification of memories in which childhood memories of institutional dining spaces trigger pre-emptive rejection of the university facility before any direct engagement takes place. Against this backdrop, peer socialization emerges as a particularly salient counterforce for overriding both affective aversion and economic and logistical inconvenience, symbolically transforming the canteen from a regimented site of institutional constraint into a shared territory of collective belonging. Taken together, these findings suggest that improving canteen access requires intervention not only at the level of food quality and pricing, but at the level of spatial culture, service typology, and the culinary imagery that students carry with them to campus.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080263

Authors: Heewon Yang Joonho Moon

This study examined how living costs, employment, and smoking are associated with subjective economic status and quality of life among middle-aged Koreans aged 45 to 57, the cohort that will constitute the older population of the coming decades. Drawing on social determinants of health theory, the study specified expenditure on food, vehicles, and housing as curvilinear rather than monotonic correlates of the two outcomes. Data were drawn from the 2022 wave of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Older Adults’ Employment (n = 4392), and quadratic multiple regression models were estimated for each outcome. Food cost and vehicle cost displayed inverted U-shaped associations with subjective economic status, and vehicle cost displayed the same pattern with quality of life, whereas housing cost was negatively and linearly associated with subjective economic status. Employment was positively associated with subjective economic status but negatively associated with quality of life, and smoking was negatively associated with both outcomes. Subjective economic status was, in turn, positively associated with quality of life. These results indicate that the level at which expenditure occurs, rather than expenditure as such, is relevant to how middle-aged Koreans evaluate their economic circumstances and their lives, and they carry implications for welfare policy addressed to the pre-old cohort.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080262

Authors: Nayara Martins Iara Teixeira Guilherme Welter Wendt António Oliveira Henrique Pereira Felipe Alckmin-Carvalho

Social disconnection has become a public-health concern, but it remains unclear whether mental-health symptoms are more closely related to limited social contact or to the subjective experience of loneliness. This cross-sectional study examined 632 self-selected adults living in Portugal, recruited online, and explored whether loneliness helps explain the association between social isolation and psychological distress across small, medium, and large cities. Participants completed self-report measures of loneliness, social isolation, depression, anxiety, stress, and positive and negative affect. Loneliness was a salient experience: the mean score was close to the scale midpoint, and 36.2% of participants scored above it. Higher loneliness was associated with greater psychological distress, greater social isolation, lower positive affect, and higher negative affect. When loneliness was considered together with social isolation, the direct link between isolation and distress became minimal, suggesting that distress was more closely connected to how social disconnection was experienced than to contact frequency alone. This pattern was similar across city sizes, and average levels of loneliness, isolation, distress, and affect did not meaningfully differ between small, medium, and large cities. Overall, the findings are consistent with loneliness as a candidate target for mental-health promotion in this sample of Portuguese adults, although longitudinal studies are needed to clarify causal pathways.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080261

Authors: Gonçalo Santinha Mariana Barros Mariana Amorim Silva Alexandre Fernandes Marta Patrão

This article examines how gender shapes the framing, governance and lived experience of women’s health within a national health system, and what this reveals about translating gender equality commitments into social policy practice. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study combines analysis of national policy documents and parliamentary debates in Portugal (2014–2024) with interviews with key actors (n = 13) and an exploratory national survey of women (n = 268). Across policy and political arenas, women’s health is widely recognised within gender equality and rights-based discourse, yet remains weakly consolidated within mainstream health governance. Reproductive framings dominate, while life-course dimensions such as menopause, women’s mental health and health literacy are under-articulated and weakly operationalised. Actor perspectives emphasise prevention, health literacy, communication and continuity of care, pointing to diffuse ownership and limited accountability. Survey respondents’ accounts both reproduce and extend dominant framings, highlighting mental health, information needs, access barriers and the importance of accessible and trustworthy health information. Reported care experiences reveal a pattern of “respect without responsiveness”, where positive interpersonal treatment coexists with organisational and communicative shortcomings. The article conceptualises this as a governance paradox of recognition without consolidation and shows how policy silences shape not only what becomes actionable within gendered health systems but also the informational conditions that support informed engagement with health and care. The findings have implications for designing life-course-oriented, communication-sensitive and accountability-anchored approaches to women’s health governance.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080260

Authors: Blanka Čop

Maternal guilt has become an increasingly prominent topic in sociological research on motherhood and work, particularly in the context of the expansion of dual-earner families, changing labor markets, and persistent gendered expectations surrounding care and family responsibilities. This study examines how self-employed mothers experience and negotiate maternal guilt and how these experiences contribute to the reproduction and renegotiation of norms of “good motherhood.” The study is based on twenty-four interviews with self-employed mothers in Croatia. The findings demonstrate that maternal guilt emerges at the intersection of intensive motherhood ideals, neoliberal expectations of productivity and availability, and the unequal distribution of household and emotional labor. Guilt is particularly pronounced in everyday situations involving perceived absence from one’s children and feelings of inadequacy in fulfilling maternal responsibilities. Although self-employment is often represented as a form of work that enables greater work–family balance through flexibility and autonomy, the findings show that it does not necessarily reduce time pressure or emotional burden. Instead, flexibility is often achieved through extended working hours, blurred boundaries between work and family life, and expectations of continuous availability. Mothers respond to these tensions through strategies of time reorganization, reliance on informal support networks, and the redefinition of “good motherhood” through a narrative of quality time and meaningful presence. The study concludes that self-employment increases mothers’ control over the organization of work but does not substantially transform the emotional dynamics of motherhood or the gendered distribution of care. Rather, it shifts the responsibility for managing work–family tensions onto individual mothers, thereby reproducing broader gendered expectations surrounding maternal responsibility.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080259

Authors: Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau

Migrant workers have become a structural feature of agriculture across the global core, yet whether this dependence is deepening has not been established over a long time series or tested against a major shock. This article revisits the question through a longitudinal comparative case study of seven core states—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Spain and Italy—selected on a most-dissimilar-systems logic and read through the world-ecology framework, in which cheap food rests on cheap labour. Drawing on primary statistical portals and administrative registers, it reconstructs the legal channels of entry into agricultural work and traces their evolution across roughly a decade and into the post-pandemic period, correcting and completing the evidentiary base of earlier studies. In every case, the dependence has persisted or intensified: where it has not continued to rise, it has settled at a historically high plateau, and nowhere has it reverted to its earlier level. It held, moreover, under conditions designed to curtail it—anti-immigrant administrations and COVID-19 border closures—as states reconfigured their migration channels to preserve the supply. The findings confirm that the migrantisation of agricultural labour is a structural and expanding condition of accumulation in the global core.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080258

Authors: Azi Lev-On

Social media has become a central arena for civic activism, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the specific claims activists make to justify their actions and legitimize their public role. This study distinguishes between two complementary forms of claim-making in digital activism: advocacy claims, which seek to persuade and mobilize support for a cause, and representation claims, through which activists position themselves as speaking or acting on behalf of others. Using the Justice for Roman Zadorov movement as a case study, the article examines how these claims are constructed through both textual and visual communication. The study employs a netnographic approach based on seven years of online observation (2015–2022), systematic content analysis of posts published in fifteen Facebook groups dedicated to the campaign, and ongoing interactions with group administrators and leading activists. The analysis focuses on recurring rhetorical and visual patterns used to construct legitimacy, mobilize participation, and challenge institutional narratives. The findings demonstrate that activists simultaneously advanced multiple advocacy claims, including support for Roman Zadorov, justice for Tair Rada and her family, and broader criticism of the Israeli criminal justice system. At the same time, representation claims emerged from a diverse range of actors, including family members, legal professionals, experts, acquaintances, and ordinary citizens, each claiming authority to speak on behalf of different individuals, communities, or principles of justice. By distinguishing analytically between advocacy and representation claims, the study contributes to scholarship on digital activism and social movement communication, offering a framework for understanding how activists construct legitimacy, authority, and collective identity through multimodal communication in social media campaigns.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080257

Authors: Elvis Nshom Ilkhom Khalimzoda Mukhammadyusuf Shaymardanov

This study investigates the role of meta prejudice (majority group members’ perception that they are disliked by immigrants) in shaping Finnish acculturation preferences toward immigrants, specifically support for assimilation and integration. Drawing on Intergroup Threat Theory and the emerging literature on intergroup meta perceptions, we explore whether symbolic and realistic threats mediate the relationship between meta prejudice and acculturation attitudes. Using a sample of 604 native Finns, results from hierarchical regression analyses indicate that meta prejudice positively predicts support for assimilation and negatively predicts support for integration. Parallel mediation analyses reveal that both symbolic and realistic threats partially mediate the relationship between meta prejudice and support for assimilation. However, only realistic threat significantly mediates the relationship between meta prejudice and support for integration. These findings underscore the importance of meta perceptions and perceived intergroup threat in shaping public attitudes toward immigrant acculturation. The study offers theoretical and practical insights for improving intergroup relations and fostering more inclusive integration policies in increasingly diverse societies.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080256

Authors: Fari Aftab Juliane Scheffel David Spencer

This paper examines social and economic disparities between immigrants and natives in the UK using the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study. The analysis compares foreign-born and UK-born respondents across multiple indicators of integration rather than relying on a single labour market or social measure. Social integration is captured through social networks within the UK, community involvement and a composite measure of neighbourhood embeddedness based on respondents’ sense of belonging, trust, reciprocity and local attachment. Economic integration is examined through unemployment, homeownership, job security and work autonomy. Using correlated random-effect models, the paper shows that immigrants report lower neighbourhood embeddedness, weaker UK-based social networks and lower levels of community involvement than natives. Immigrants also have a higher likelihood of unemployment and lower homeownership, job security and work autonomy. Additional subgroup analysis indicates that several disparities are larger for non-white immigrants, although non-white immigrants appear more similar to natives in neighbourhood embeddedness. The findings underline the importance of treating integration as a multidimensional process in which relative advantage in one domain may coexist with disadvantage in another.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080255

Authors: Tahilin Sanchez Karver Maria Camila Restrepo Diana R. Hernandez Payano Bernardita Hetreau Letelier Angela Suarez Walter Saba Kathleen R. Page

Objective: Latines in the United States (US) experience disproportionate HIV-related inequities, exacerbated by immigration-related legal precarity and exclusionary policies. This study explores how racialized legal status (RLS), a mechanism by which race-neutral legal classifications disproportionately burden minorities, impacts the lived experiences of Latines with HIV (LWH) across the HIV care continuum. Methods: We conducted a secondary qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 21 LWH, 15 healthcare providers, and 10 key informants in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Drawing on RLS framework, data was analyzed thematically, focusing on emergent themes related to immigration, politics, and legal status and their impact on LWH. Results: Policies linking access to health and social services to legal status intensified economic instability and social exclusion, thus leading to suboptimal disease management. Fear of deportation, institutional mistrust, discrimination, and intersectional stigma contribute to healthcare avoidance, disrupting continuity and engagement across the HIV care continuum. Institutions providing services to LWH struggle to circumvent barriers caused by RLS, straining local and community-based resources. Conclusions: RLS erodes whole-person care by creating barriers for healthcare and social services access. Addressing inequities among Latines requires multilevel responses that reduce exclusionary policies and support the well-being of individuals at the intersection of immigration status and chronic disease management.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080254

Authors: Salman Alavi Christine Dallaire

This study investigates how athletes describe relational experiences at and beyond the Arctic Winter Games (AWG). Utilizing a qualitative approach, we analyzed interviews and open-ended survey responses from young athletes at the 2023 AWG, as well as interviews with former athletes returning to the 2023 Games in a supportive or leadership role. Our analysis shows that the AWG offers a range of social and cultural opportunities that make the event especially conducive to cultivating relational experiences. We highlight athletes’ accounts of friendship and network formation, feelings of enchantment, and resonance encounters, alongside collective encounters characterized by a sense of communitas. We also highlight post-liminoid legacies in former athletes’ accounts, including enduring memories, sustained social ties, and an ongoing sense of belonging and community. Taken together, the findings suggest that the AWG’s liminoid, festive, and community-oriented character helps suspend ordinary routines and soften everyday distinctions in ways that make meaningful relational encounters more likely.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080253

Authors: Bernd Reiter

Democracy is commonly equated with elections, representation, and procedures for authorizing rulers. This article challenges that assumption by defining democracy as collective authorship: the shared capacity of those who live under laws to participate in making them in complex modern polities. Representation, even when electorally authorized, separates citizens from lawmaking power and institutionalizes heteronomy rather than self-rule. I develop an authorship principle grounding legitimacy in shared exposure to the consequences of law and a complementary exclusion rule—the reversed ideal speech situation—according to which those not affected by a law must not exercise binding authority over it. Drawing on historical cases and contemporary policy domains, the article shows that modern systems concentrate authority in actors insulated from the effects of their decisions. Democracy, it argues, is representation constrained or displaced whenever authority migrates away from consequence-bearing agents.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080252

Authors: Amaliyah Amaliyah Utaberta Nangkula Aminatus Zakhra Erindah Dimisyqiyani Siti Intan Nurdiana Wong Abdullah Muhammad Iqbal Ar Rasyid

Women’s empowerment through social entrepreneurship has become an important strategy for promoting social inclusion and sustainable rural development, particularly in culturally distinctive communities. However, limited evidence explains how individual and environmental factors encourage women to transform social entrepreneurial intentions into concrete actions. This study aims to investigate the determinants of social entrepreneurial behaviour among entrepreneurs committed to empowering Madurese women. It examines the moderating role of environmental munificence in the relationship between social entrepreneurial intention and behaviour. A quantitative approach was employed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to analyse survey data collected from 143 entrepreneurs on Madura Island, Indonesia. The findings indicate that empathy and self-efficacy positively influence social entrepreneurial intention, whereas moral obligation has no significant effect. Social entrepreneurial intention significantly predicts social entrepreneurial behaviour, and environmental munificence strengthens this relationship by providing supportive conditions for entrepreneurial action. These findings highlight the importance of combining individual capabilities with enabling social environments to foster women’s empowerment. The study contributes to research on gender, rural development, and social entrepreneurship by providing evidence from an underexplored cultural context and offering practical implications for policymakers and community development initiatives.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080251

Authors: Hanna C. Dingel Chandra Jennings Kacia Vines Mysha Wynn Tab Battle Wanda Cox-Bailey Wanda Fearrington Latasha Little Gwendolyn Parmley-McCloud Jalynn Woods Margaret E. Petersen Alexandra F. Lightfoot Anissa I. Vines

Black women faced disproportionate social, emotional, and structural burdens during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, yet their mental health experiences remain underexamined. This study explores how Black women understood, navigated, and coped with these intersecting crises. Seven Black women in North Carolina participated in a seven-session virtual photovoice study, including four photo discussion sessions. Participants generated four photo assignments, took photos, and discussed them using the SHOWeD framework. Recorded discussions were analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Sort and Sift, Think and Shift, with participants supporting theme development. Narratives revealed multi-level mental health impacts: at the individual level, caregiving overload, compounded grief, and constant vigilance; at the interpersonal level, invisibility, racial misreading, and everyday racism that intensified distress and made help-seeking itself a labor of confronting providers’ biases; at the community level, trauma from witnessing racial violence and pandemic loss; and structural factors such as inequity, food insecurity, and policing as primary drivers of mental health strain. Participants employed healing as resistance through faith, nature, sister circles, and culturally concordant care. Black women’s mental health during the dual pandemics is inseparable from structural racism and gendered labor; healing is individual and collective, and crisis preparedness requires system-level change driven by Black communities.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080250

Authors: Norberto Albano Sandro Brignone

Digital technologies and data-based approaches do not only increase the amount of information available to institutions and the public, they also transform the conditions through which social reality is classified, made visible, ordered, interpreted and governed. This article examines this transformation through AI4Alfieri, a project developed in Italy, at the Luciano Gallino Laboratory of the University of Turin in collaboration with the Fondazione Centro di Studi Alfieriani in Asti, and devoted to generative AI for the mediation of Vittorio Alfieri’s life and work. Specifically, it presents a virtual conversational agent and one embodied in a social robot (Pepper or NAO). The project is analysed as a reflexive case study of a technology in the making, with autoethnographic elements. The empirical corpus comprises a development diary, code and design artefacts, prompts, logs, architectural diagrams and laboratory tests; the study does not evaluate effects on museum visitors. From analysis of the design process, the article advances the interpretive thesis that embodied generative AI makes cultural mediation a problem of distributed accountability: knowledge is governed by the corpus, speech by prompts and retrieval, action by deterministic policy, presence by the body, legitimacy by the institution, and auditability by infrastructures. The paper proposes an exploratory S0–S4 governance stack for embodied generative agents and formulates hypotheses for future research on how data-based cultural mediation may reallocate epistemic authority, institutional legitimacy and design responsibility.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080249

Authors: Najib Bou Zakhem

Lebanon is currently going through a multi-faceted crisis with what appears to be an unrelenting cycle of economic and banking defaults, unstable infrastructure, market uncertainty, and difficult working conditions for employees who are trying to support the economy. This study examines whether opportunities for human capital development in SMEs are associated with less work–family conflict and higher employee productivity and well-being in turbulent times. Furthermore, the study investigates whether technostress and coping mechanisms moderate the association between work–family conflict and employee outcomes. Data were collected through a quantitative cross-sectional survey targeting 207 employees working for SMEs in Lebanon and analyzed using PLS-SEM. Results indicated that human capital development opportunities were negatively associated with work–family conflict and that work–family conflict was, in turn, negatively associated with employee productivity and well-being. Further, technostress and coping mechanisms moderated the negative association between work–family conflict and employee outcomes. From a theoretical perspective, this research offers an integrated framework that synthesizes organizational, technological, and psychological dimensions within the SME context during times of crisis. From a practical standpoint, these associations may help inform how Lebanese SMEs approach workforce development, digital-work management, and coping-support practices.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080248

Authors: Giuseppe Maiello Ondřej Roubal

This paper examines mainstream platform moderation as it encounters contemporary pagan religious practice in Europe and reads what it finds as a symptom of a wider condition: the algorithm functions less as a neutral tool than as a productive instrument of an extractive political economy whose characteristic operation is the appropriation, classification, and revenue-conditioned filtering of human expression. Minority religious traditions are structurally exposed within it: too small to constitute an accommodated market, too polysemic for classifiers trained on majority devotional and Anglo-American extremism corpora, and too fragmented to extract policy concessions. Empirically, the paper draws on netnography of pagan online communities across Europe, informal conversations with 97 practitioners across nine European jurisdictions, and a corpus of 247 takedown notices and appeal exchanges (2019–2025). Three recurrent rationale-clusters—devotional content classified as occult, as extremism-adjacent, and as unsafe activity—are read as predictable outputs of the system’s cost structure rather than as ordinary classifier errors. Two concepts are proposed. Algorithmic sacredness names the transfer of gate-keeping functions previously held by ecclesiastical, state, and editorial actors, routed through Bourdieu’s meta-capital as extended to platforms. Algorithmic pluralism names a programmatic direction toward infrastructures whose governance is not capital’s.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080247

Authors: Luis Miguel Ortiz Solla Raquel Lozano Blasco José Luis Roca González

This study comparatively analyzes the effectiveness of social reintegration in the Spanish civilian and military prison systems, using re-imprisonment recidivism as an inverse proxy indicator. Official administrative data for the 2009–2019 period were analyzed for the civilian system (n = 19,909) and the military system (n = 644), the latter comprising 539 released individuals with complete outcome data and 105 transferred to the civilian system whose post-release outcomes were unavailable. To address this missing information, a sensitivity analysis was implemented under three transparent, a priori scenarios (conservative, intermediate, and optimal). The civilian reintegration rate was 80.02%, whereas the military rate ranged from 95.19% to 98.14% across scenarios. The military advantage was substantial and consistent (absolute risk difference +15.17 to +18.13 percentage points; all p < 0.001; large effect sizes). However, the two populations differ markedly in prior criminal history, offense type, and risk/protective factor profiles; the observed gap therefore reflects the combined effect of population selection and institutional factors and should be interpreted as descriptive rather than causal. These findings establish a robust empirical phenomenon and generate testable hypotheses for future comparative and quasi-experimental research on penitentiary effectiveness.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080246

Authors: Jessica Paola Mantilla Rosa Carolina Guzmán Ana Larrea-Ayala Armando Fabricio Rosero

Social media have become central tools for government communication; however, they also present significant accessibility challenges for people with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments. This study analyzes inclusive communication and digital accessibility practices in the official Facebook accounts of six Ecuadorian public institutions. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining documentary analysis, a focus group with visually impaired users, and content analysis of 2429 Facebook posts published between 2023 and 2025. The analysis was conducted using four dimensions: propositional communication, copywriting, images, and videos. The results show that most publications only partially comply with accessibility criteria. While progress was identified in the use of clear and accessible language in textual content, significant deficiencies persist in multimedia content, particularly in the lack of alternative text, subtitles, and audio descriptions. The study concludes that inclusive communication in Ecuadorian public institutions remains fragmented and is not yet implemented as a cross-cutting public communication policy.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080245

Authors: Ahmed Mohamed Hasanein Hazem Ahmed Khairy

Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, this study investigates how digital technologies shape employees’ work experiences and social life in digitally transforming hotel organizations. Specifically, it examines the role of digital empowering leadership in fostering digital work engagement through the mediating mechanisms of digital self-efficacy and digital thriving at work within five-star hotels in Egypt. As digital technologies increasingly redefine how employees interact, collaborate, and derive meaning from their work, understanding the human and social consequences of digital transformation has become a critical research priority. Data were collected from 394 full-time employees working in five-star hotels in Egypt and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with WarpPLS software. The findings reveal that digital empowering leadership significantly enhances employees’ digital work engagement, digital self-efficacy, and digital thriving at work. Furthermore, digital self-efficacy and digital thriving at work positively influence digital work engagement and partially mediate the relationship between digital empowering leadership and digital work engagement. By highlighting how digitally enabled leadership shapes employees’ psychological capabilities and flourishing in technology-rich workplaces, this study contributes to the growing literature on the social implications of digital technologies in organizational settings. The findings underscore that successful digital transformation extends beyond technological adoption to encompass employees’ empowerment, well-being, and meaningful engagement in digital work environments. Practical implications are provided for hotel managers seeking to cultivate human-centered digital workplaces that support employees’ social and psychological flourishing amid ongoing technological change.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080244

Authors: Ahmed Mohamed Hasanein Bassam Samir Al-Romeedy

This study examines organizational hypocrisy (OH) in relation to counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and investigates the indirect roles of organizational silence (OS) and job withdrawal behaviors (JOW). Drawing on Social Exchange Theory, the study proposes that perceived inconsistencies between organizational values and actual practices are associated with employee silence, withdrawal, and counterproductive work behavior. Data were collected from 437 employees working in Saudi Arabian five-star hotels and Class-A travel agencies and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results revealed that organizational hypocrisy was positively associated with organizational silence, job withdrawal behaviors, and counterproductive work behavior. Organizational silence showed significant positive relationships with both job withdrawal behaviors and counterproductive work behaviors, while job withdrawal behaviors were also positively associated with counterproductive work behavior. Furthermore, statistically significant individual indirect associations through organizational silence and job withdrawal behaviors, as well as a sequential indirect association through both variables, were identified within the proposed model. The findings extend Social Exchange Theory by providing support for an interconnected pattern of associations between perceived organizational hypocrisy, organizational silence, job withdrawal behaviors, and counterproductive work behavior. Rather than establishing a progressive temporal sequence, the results are consistent with the theoretically proposed ordering of these constructs within the model. This integrated perspective contributes to the literature by documenting individual and sequential indirect associations within a unified theoretical framework in the tourism and hospitality context. Given the cross-sectional design, however, the findings do not establish causality or confirm the temporal ordering of the examined variables. The findings also offer practical insights for managers seeking to strengthen organizational authenticity, encourage employee voice, and address employee disengagement and counterproductive work behavior.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080243

Authors: Monica Lynn Miles Eh Shee Wah Rafey Shahid

Environmental injustices in the United States are rooted in structural racism, particularly policies of racial segregation and disinvestment such as redlining that have produced enduring inequalities in the built environment and population health. This concept paper examines extreme heat as a racialized environmental exposure in Buffalo, New York—a post-industrial Great Lakes city increasingly framed as a “climate haven”. While such designations suggest relative protection from climate risk, they obscure the socio-spatial inequalities that shape uneven vulnerability on the ground. Drawing on a structural racism framework and insights from urban political economy, this study argues that extreme heat vulnerability in Buffalo is not incidental but produced through historically embedded patterns of disinvestment in housing, infrastructure, and environmental resources. Neighborhoods such as the East Side, Black Rock, and the West Side exhibit heightened exposure due to concentrations of thermally inefficient housing, limited tree canopy and green space, and unequal access to cooling resources. These conditions reflect the material legacy of segregation and uneven urban development, which continue to structure differential capacity to adapt to rising temperatures. Although extreme heat is widely recognized as a major public health threat, it remains underexamined in mid-sized northern and Rust Belt cities, where risk is often perceived as episodic rather than structurally produced. This paper addresses this gap by advancing a conceptual critique of the “climate haven” narrative, demonstrating that relative geographic advantage does not equate to equitable resilience. By theorizing extreme heat as a mechanism through which structural racism is reproduced, this study highlights the need for place-based, justice-oriented climate adaptation strategies that confront the historical and institutional drivers of vulnerability in Great Lakes cities.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080242

Authors: Luís Felipe Souza Isabel Miguel

The workforce in Portugal, as in other European countries, is ageing, posing challenges for human resource management. Although older workers are frequently subject to stereotypes concerning lower motivation and productivity, previous research has reported associations between chronological age, emotional intelligence, and work engagement. However, limited evidence is available on whether specific dimensions of emotional intelligence account for the association between age and work engagement. Addressing this gap, the present study examined the distinct mediating roles of four emotional intelligence dimensions in the relationship between age and work engagement. A multiple mediation model was tested using cross-sectional self-report data from 377 workers aged 18 to 63 (M = 39.42, SD = 11.62) working in different sectors in Portugal. The analyses included descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and estimates of direct and indirect associations. Chronological age showed a modest positive association with work engagement. Among the four emotional intelligence dimensions, only regulation of emotions was positively associated with work engagement after accounting for chronological age. None of the indirect effects through emotional intelligence were statistically significant. These findings do not support the proposed mediating role of emotional intelligence but indicate that chronological age and regulation of emotions were independently associated with work engagement in the present sample. By examining the four dimensions of emotional intelligence separately, the study provides a more differentiated account of their associations with work engagement and offers a rationale for future longitudinal and experimental research.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080241

Authors: Juli Antoni Aguado Hernández Enric Sigalat Signes Ricard Calvo Palomares

This paper presents the continuation of a previous investigation into climate mobilization in Spain, extending the time period covered to 2019–2025, incorporating new databases and including protest control analysis. The aim is to analyze diachronically the repertoires of action used in order to understand their evolution, intensity, participating organizations and how social control of protest influences them. Through documentary compilation and systematic coding of protest events (N = 1502) and the analysis of social control over protest, through reports on repression of social movements and data on human rights violations in the context of protest, the main findings can be highlighted as follows: disruption increased after the pandemic, in 2021; from 2023 onwards, there is a shift in trend towards a decrease in confrontational mobilization and an increase in contained forms, with collective action evolving towards a diversity and complementarity of noninstitutional and nonviolent strategies and tactics, forging alliances with other movements to maintain the social base and support. This shift is temporally associated with an intensification of protest control and criminalization. Moreover, a significant presence of either pre-existing or newly formed organizations is maintained, with a relationship existing between the variation in collective protagonism and the typology–intensity of repertoires. Thus, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the aim is to contribute to the international debate on the tactics of social movements, with the most important contribution being the integration of repertoire analysis with the study of protest control in that movement.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080240

Authors: Gabriele Aroni

This paper explores the role of media literacy in enhancing the educational potential of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games, particularly in the context of cultural heritage education within technology-enhanced learning environments. Rather than presenting new empirical data, the study draws on existing media literacy, game studies, and cultural heritage scholarship to propose a comprehensive media literacy framework that addresses the needs and competencies of five key stakeholders: (1) players; (2) game developers; (3) educators and researchers; (4) represented communities; and (5) cultural institutions. Video game spaces are mainly designed to create entertaining products, but even COTS games have potential educational and cultural features, such as the promotion of real-life locations and tangible and intangible heritage. This paper argues that fostering media literacy among developers and players can not only support the creation of more culturally aware game worlds but also strengthen the educational use of games within technology-enhanced learning environments. In synthesising and reconfiguring existing theoretical models, the framework offers new insight into the relationship between media literacy and cultural heritage in games, and identifies directions for future empirical research.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080239

Authors: Costanza Baviera Nicla Cucinella Francesco Preiti Francesca Liga Cristiano Inguglia Sonia Ingoglia

This study explores students’ attitudes towards technology for learning, their cellphone use in class, and their digital distraction during educational activities, also considering the potential role of some sociodemographic characteristics. Participants were 803 Italian middle school students (Mage = 12.2 years, SD = 0.9; 53% female). Using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified five profiles: Low-engagement users, Highly distracted, Disengaged distracted users, Self-regulated users, and Moderate users. Results highlighted small differences between profiles associated with age and maternal educational level. These findings underscore the dual nature of technology as both a valuable tool and a source of distraction from school activities, highlighting the importance of tailored strategies to promote balanced and mindful technology use. Future research should further explore how these profiles interact with broader psychosocial and developmental factors.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080238

Authors: Thi Kim Phung Dang

This study examines how the ideal woman is discursively constructed and negotiated in contemporary Vietnamese online media amid globalisation and rapid social transformation. Using framing analysis, it examines recurring metaphors, catchphrases, depictions, exemplars, slogans and visual representations across a corpus of Vietnamese online texts concerning accomplished women, femininity, marriage and identity. The findings delineate three competing interpretive frames: (1) modernized traditional femininity, which reinterprets Confucian gender ideals through contemporary narratives of female empowerment; (2) relational negotiation, which situates women’s achievements by their impacts on heterosexual relations, emotional balance, and familial responsibilities; and (3) critical challenges to gender inequality, which questions restrictive gender norms, idealized femininity, and unequal relational expectations. Collectively, these frames demonstrate that contemporary media frequently portray women’s empowerment alongside persistent expectations of caregiving, emotional labor, and relational responsibilities. Building on these findings, functional persistence and relational negotiation are proposed as complementary analytical concepts for explaining how contemporary empowerment narratives accommodate and transform, rather than simply displace, traditional gender norms. The study contributes to sociological scholarship on gender discourse, media framing, and globalisation by demonstrating how competing representations of the ideal woman collectively shape a hybrid configuration of femininities in contemporary Vietnam.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080237

Authors: Olebogeng Tladi-Mapefane Sipho Sibanda Linda Harms-Smith

Foster care placements involve various role players from the child’s entry into the system through the child’s exit. Positive role fulfilment implies acting in accordance with the respective role expectations while also being dynamic in nature. Key participants in the foster care system include social workers, foster parents, and foster children. These role players all have roles necessary for the foster care placement to be positive. Using role and identity theory, with an underlying Africentric philosophy, as a theoretical framework, this qualitative study sought to describe social workers’ perspectives on positive role fulfilment among role players within the foster child’s care circle in supporting well-being. Data were collected from twelve participants, comprising ten foster care social workers and two social work supervisors, through a focus group discussion and one-on-one interviews. In addition, two foster care policy developers were consulted as key stakeholders to provide contextual insight into the legislative and policy environment. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings showed that social workers face structural challenges, including high caseloads, a shortage of social workers and uncertainty regarding roles, which sometimes make it difficult to fulfil their roles as expected. With that said, they believed that positive role fulfilment influenced the positive nature of foster care placements. When roles are known and met, the care circle enhances the well-being of the foster child. The study concludes that social workers know what they are required to do for the child’s well-being. The recommendation is that an Africentric foster care supervision and monitoring framework be developed to sensitise the role players of their roles and responsibilities in the foster care system.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080236

Authors: Célia Tavares Luciana Oliveira Rosalinda Neves

The growing presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life has generated debate regarding its impact on language services, where tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated. Framed as an exploratory and preliminary study, this article examines how a self-selected sample of 60 language-service professionals working in European contexts perceive the adoption of AI, particularly LLMs, in relation to professional practices, quality, ethical concerns, and emerging competence requirements. An embedded mixed-methods design was adopted, combining descriptive quantitative analysis with the thematic analysis of open-ended responses. The findings suggest a cautious and selective adoption of LLMs. While respondents recognise potential advantages related to speed, productivity, and support for specific tasks, they also identify persistent limitations concerning quality, terminology, contextual adequacy, cultural sensitivity, and the need for human revision. Respondents also report concerns about professional devaluation, changing work conditions, and the need for reskilling, particularly in relation to general translation and AI-assisted workflows. At the same time, some participants identify opportunities for innovation, enhanced human oversight, and the revaluation of specialised expertise. Overall, the study suggests that, from the perspective of the surveyed professionals, AI is contributing to the reconfiguration of language-service practices, while reinforcing the continued importance of human judgement, linguistic expertise, ethical responsibility, and critical engagement with AI-generated outputs.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080235

Authors: Yuki Komura Kenji Matsuura

Declining fertility and the shift away from three-generation co-residence have weakened traditional family-based child-rearing support in Japan, drawing attention to the role of networks in local communities. Using data from a citizens’ attitude survey in a regional Japanese city (Ube City; n = 1293), this study examines how residents’ perceptions of community networks—specifically mutual support and community vitality—are associated with satisfaction with the local child-rearing environment. Conventional mean-based approaches risk overlooking qualitative heterogeneity in such evaluations. Using cross-sectional secondary data, we combined multiple regression with latent class analysis (LCA) to explore this heterogeneity. Findings show that perceptions of community networks were positively associated with satisfaction across all models (composite index b = 0.412, p < 0.001). The strongest associations were with “learning opportunities” and “community-wide education” (b = 0.477–0.478). Three-generation households did not uniformly report higher satisfaction compared with nuclear-family households. The exploratory LCA identified three qualitatively distinct patterns, with an “evaluation-pending” group (intermediate scores, frequent “don’t know” responses) comprising over 40% of respondents. This heterogeneity suggests that average scores may obscure the experiences of those directly engaged in child-rearing and that municipal surveys could include items identifying respondents’ basis for evaluation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080234

Authors: Lauren Robinson Levitt

Through textual analysis of 15 English-language articles by seven predominantly U.S.-based sex worker journalists published between 2014 and 2025 across 11 online platforms, this article examines how sex worker journalists aim to influence public opinion around anti-porn policy. Sex workers report on legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), age-verification laws, the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act (SISEA), and the Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act, maintaining that these laws cause harm to sex workers. In the process, they challenge sex work stigma perpetuated by the mainstream media and stake alternative validity claims. They also construct sex worker expertise based on their lived experience in the sex trades through new modes of address and by citing sex workers alongside other progressive organizers. This, furthermore, supports coalition building between the sex workers’ rights movement and other movements for social justice.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080233

Authors: Rahima A. Aissani Rania Abdallah Abdoulaye Kaba Ghaleb A. El Refae

Social media has become a central arena for informal learning and civic participation, yet its capacity to convert exposure into meaningful sustainability engagement remains uncertain. This study examines the role of social media in enhancing awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among Arab youth and explores how digital platforms function as spaces for informal learning. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was administered to 370 respondents aged 17–45 across several Arab countries (primarily the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria—countries selected because they are among the region’s most digitally connected societies and jointly represent the Gulf, Levantine, and North African sub-regions), measuring social media usage patterns, levels of SDG awareness, and forms of digital engagement; the data were analysed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics (Pearson correlations, t-tests, and one-way ANOVA) that tested four hypotheses derived from an integrated research model. The findings show that visually oriented platforms, particularly Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, dominate youth media consumption, and that social media is the leading source of SDG-related information for the majority of respondents. However, engagement remains largely passive, confined to viewing, liking, and resharing content, revealing a persistent gap between awareness and active participation. The hypothesis tests confirm this pattern: SDG awareness is strongly associated with digital engagement (r = 0.71, p < 0.001), whereas breadth of platform use plays only a marginal role (r = 0.11, p = 0.044) and membership in sustainability-focused online groups confers no significant awareness advantage. Drawing on Uses and Gratifications Theory and Knowledge Management Theory, the study introduces the Digital Awareness–Engagement Conversion Model (DAECM), which conceptualizes the staged transition from digital exposure to engagement and advocacy. The results underline the need for interactive, localised, and youth-centred digital strategies that can translate passive awareness into sustained sustainability action. Given the non-probability sampling design, the findings are interpreted as exploratory.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080232

Authors: Sipho Sibanda Tobias Penno Francis Lynch Daniel Doh

Placing children in alternative care serves to safeguard their well-being while social workers work to resolve the issues that necessitated their removal from the home. Despite this intention, social workers face numerous difficulties when implementing family reunification services. This article explores the challenges encountered by social workers in South Africa in delivering these services. The study adopted an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design and involved social workers employed at five child protection organisations across the country. Data were gathered through 15 qualitative interviews and 127 completed questionnaires. Thematic analysis, guided by Creswell’s framework, was used to interpret the qualitative data, while quantitative data were processed using a statistical software package for social sciences (SPSS) version 23. The findings reveal a range of institutional, infrastructural, and human resource constraints that hinder effective service delivery. Social workers also reported difficulties arising from uncooperative biological parents and strained relationships between biological and foster parents, often marked by mistrust, suspicion, and hostility. At times, tensions also emerged between biological parents and social workers themselves. The study concludes that recognising these challenges creates an opportunity to address them more effectively. It recommends the development of a rights-based family reunification service model to guide and support social workers in providing timely and effective reunification interventions.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080231

Authors: Luis Diego Conejo Bolaños Pablo Chaverri Chaves

Cyberbullying has emerged as a significant concern for the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents, yet evidence from nationally representative surveys in Latin America remains limited. This study examined correlates of cyberbullying victimization among Costa Rican youth using data from the 2023 Kids Online survey. The initial sample consisted of 1200 participants aged 9–17 years; however, analyses were restricted to the 264 respondents who reported having experienced offensive or unpleasant treatment by a peer during the previous year and therefore completed the cyberbullying follow-up items. Descriptive analyses and nonparametric tests were conducted to examine demographic differences, followed by an ordinal logistic regression model evaluating individual, family, and school-related correlates, including age, caregiver supervision of internet use, teacher support, negative emotional experiences associated with online activities, and engagement in online aggressive behaviors toward peers. Among respondents reporting peer victimization, 13.2% met the study criterion for cyberbullying victimization, defined as online victimization occurring at least once per month. Older age was associated with higher levels of cyberbullying victimization, whereas sex was not a significant predictor after adjustment for other variables. The regression model revealed nonlinear associations between cyberbullying victimization and both caregiver supervision and teacher support, suggesting patterns consistent with reactive supervision. In addition, negative emotional online experiences emerged as one of the correlates of victimization, while online aggressive behavior showed a marginal positive association. These findings suggest that, among victimized youth, cyberbullying victimization reflects a complex interaction of individual characteristics, emotional experiences, and the quality and timing of adult guardianship. Prevention efforts should therefore emphasize proactive, trust-based support from families and schools, alongside strategies that strengthen adolescents’ emotional resilience and digital citizenship.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080230

Authors: A. Rui Gomes Marco Teixeira Ana Peixoto Liliana Fontes Clara Simães Catarina Morais

Life skills are essential to human functioning, particularly during the transition into adulthood. This study analyzed the validity of two related measures of life skills (Life Skills Acquisition Questionnaire—LSAQ; and Life Skills Questionnaire—LSQ), which may serve as useful tools for understanding which life skills are learned and how their acquisition progresses. A quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted with a final sample of 1148 high school students who completed LSAQ, LSQ, and a measure of academic achievement expectations (AAEs). Factorial structure, reliability, convergent, discriminant and predictive validity, as well as temporal stability was assessed for both measures. LSAQ results endorsed either a four-factor model or a second-order latent factor, both encompassing key stages of life skills development (i.e., motivation, learning, automatization, and transference). LSQ results supported validity for six life skills (motivation, time management, stress management, communication, teamwork, and leadership). Both instruments showed the predictive validity of AAEs and good temporal stability. Both measures can help practitioners and researchers evaluate whether opportunities such as intervention programs affect the acquisition and diversity of life skills that students gain. They are also useful for testing theoretical models of life skills and for providing insights into how these skills are developed.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080229

Authors: Kiara Geoconda Peralta Jaramillo Gina Sandy Tapia Montero

Introduction: The educational promotion of inclusive recreational spaces remains a key challenge for public policies, particularly in contexts where gaps persist between regulation and implementation. Objective: This study analyzed the impact of public policies on the promotion of inclusive recreational spaces in the canton of Milagro, focusing on accessibility, pedagogical use, and social inclusion. Methodology: A mixed-methods approach was applied, with a non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive–correlational design and an explanatory component. The sample included teachers, administrators, technical staff, and community members. Data were collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Results: Findings showed a favorable regulatory framework but only partial local implementation. Significant positive relationships were identified between policy implementation and accessibility (r = 0.62, p < 0.01), educational use of recreational spaces (r = 0.58, p < 0.01), and perceived inclusion (r = 0.65, p < 0.01). Although the existence of inclusive public policies was highly recognized (M = 3.98, SD = 0.71), lower scores were observed for their effective application (M = 3.14, SD = 0.92) and monitoring mechanisms (M = 2.89, SD = 0.95). Gaps were also identified in teacher training for inclusive recreation (M = 2.97) and in the adaptation of recreational spaces to functional diversity (M = 3.02). Discussion: Results align with previous studies emphasizing the need to integrate public policies, education, and territorial planning. Conclusions: Strengthening policy implementation and coordination is essential to consolidate inclusive recreational spaces with sustainable educational impact.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080228

Authors: Sipho Sibanda Doreen Maigurira Sanjeev Dahal Mahesh Chougule Daniel Doh

South Africa attracts thousands of refugees and is regarded as a key destination for migrants on the African continent. Although the country has ratified international and regional conventions on refugees, many refugee women face enormous challenges to attain basic civil, social and economic rights. Employing a qualitative research approach, the study explored the challenges that refugee women encounter in shifting from survival to sustainable livelihood strategies. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 23 refugee women participants for the study. Data was collected through one-on-one interviews and analysed using thematic data analysis. The findings show that most refugee women find it extremely difficult to find an adequate job despite being educated or having stayed in the country for a considerable period. If they do get a job, it is mostly part-time. Due to a lack of decent work, their income remains low, which in turn influences their access to health services, further education, education for their children, adequate shelter, and food security. The study concludes that the socio-economic challenges that refugee women face keep them trapped in poverty and expose them to discrimination, violence, exclusion, and humiliation. The study recommends that strategies be developed to increase the provision of social protection and promote basic civil, social and economic rights for refugee women.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16080227

Authors: Alan C. Logan Rangajeeva Wimalasena Susan L. Prescott

Across societies, judges are entrusted with extraordinary authority to shape legal norms, public policy, and individual rights, with decisions that can influence communities and future generations. This social contract rests on expectations of competence, impartiality, and ethical self-regulation. Popular representations often portray judges as detached, stoic, and immune to typical human emotional reactivity and outside influence. However, judges remain subject to the same biological, psychological, and social realities that affect all humans, including stress physiology, neurocognitive load, emotional strain, and the cumulative effects of allostatic burden. Emerging research suggests that these factors may have important implications for judicial well-being, decision-making, and the effective functioning of justice systems. The recent Nauru Declaration, recognizing that the well-being of judges is essential for a properly functioning judiciary, has led to the 2025 United Nations General Assembly proclamation that the 25th July be recognized as an annual International Day for Judicial Well-being. Drawing on literature identified through scholarly databases, this concept article examines evidence relating to stress, burnout, resilience, and well-being within justice systems, with particular emphasis on judges and judicial well-being. We explore the relevance of lifestyle medicine and whole-person approaches to health in supporting judicial functioning and vitality. Framed through the lens of the judiciary’s societal responsibilities and the broader social contract, we contend that judicial well-being is not merely an individual concern, but one with institutional and societal significance. The article argues that well-being within systems of justice matters to society; it examines evidence relating to judicial stress and self-control fatigue, and concludes with solutions-oriented approaches and future directions for promoting judicial well-being and sustainable justice systems.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070226

Authors: Carlos Alberto Echeverría Mayorga Marta Irene Flores Polanco José Miguel Esperanza Amaya

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance has converged around transparency, accountability, safety, privacy, fairness, human rights, human oversight and risk management. However, this vocabulary remains limited when AI is understood as a sociotechnical force shaping agency, work, truth, democratic trust, meaning and long-term human futures. This article is a critical conceptual review, with a structured Scopus-based mapping of 48 peer-reviewed articles, a critical documentary analysis of six international AI governance frameworks and a supplementary interpretive engagement with Magnifica Humanitas. Using a PRISMA-informed flow diagram for transparent reporting and abductive thematic synthesis, the study identifies four fragmented literatures: AI ethics and governance; anthropological accounts of dignity, autonomy, agency and vulnerability; spiritual and theological approaches to meaning and moral formation; and civilizational analyses of democracy, war, transhumanism and existential risk. The findings do not suggest that these concerns are absent from AI ethics; rather, they show that they remain dispersed and are not consistently translated into governance criteria. This article proposes the Anthropological, Spiritual and Civilizational (ASC) Framework as a diagnostic heuristic for extending trustworthy AI toward dignity, truth, social justice and humane futures. The framework is conceptual and requires future empirical and expert validation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070225

Authors: María Montilla Carmona José Antonio López Castro Isabel Rodríguez Domenech Manuela Domínguez-Orta

Research on the informal economy has traditionally emphasized its measurement and macroeconomic effects, focusing on structural and institutional determinants. Individual psychological factors that may help explain social tolerance toward informal practices have received far less attention. This exploratory study addresses this gap by examining how Big Five personality traits and dimensions of competitiveness are associated with two components of tolerance: the acceptance of informal behaviors, and justificatory beliefs. To this end, an ad hoc questionnaire was developed, and a cross-sectional design was implemented using a stratified sample of 339 students enrolled in Business Administration programs at a Spanish university. Multivariable models estimated these associations while adjusting for gender. The results indicate that conscientiousness and extraversion are negatively associated with both acceptance and justificatory beliefs, whereas competitive affectivity exhibits a positive and consistent association with both dimensions. Within the study sample, tolerance scores were higher among male respondents. These findings raise a hypothesis for future research: awareness campaigns may achieve greater precision when they account for psychological heterogeneity. This implication should be tested in broader and more diverse populations. Drawing on this exploratory evidence, we propose a preliminary analytical model that articulates the relationships between dispositional traits and competitiveness dimensions in relation to the two components of tolerance, providing a basis for future research. From a theoretical perspective, the proposed model offers a structured basis for longitudinal testing and future experimental designs aimed at deepening the understanding of the microfoundational mechanisms underlying the informal economy.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070224

Authors: Celia Galve-González Antonio Cervero Lucía Álvarez-Blanco Adrian Castro-Lopez

This study examined how two key dimensions of family functioning—cohesion and adaptability—relate to young adults’ definitions of family. A questionnaire measuring family cohesion, adaptability, and criteria for including someone as family was administered to 309 young adults. Higher cohesion and adaptability were significantly associated with defining family based on emotional bonds rather than biological or legal ties. These findings highlight the pivotal role of family functioning in shaping inclusive family boundaries and suggest that strengthening cohesion and adaptability may foster acceptance of diverse family forms.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070223

Authors: Vedaste Niyonsaba Nowella Anyango-van Zwieten

Global restoration frameworks, such as the Bonn Challenge and Forest Landscape Restoration, have endorsed multistakeholder engagement in agroforestry as key to reversing land degradation at scale. This paper follows shifts in how stakeholders have been organised, coordinated and steered since 2010 when Rwanda’s National Forestry Policy came into force, a year ahead of Rwanda’s pledge to the Bonn Challenge. The specific focus is on Bugesera District, representing a national policy shift from focusing on restoration in highland areas only. Bugesera is a lowland area facing complex socio-ecological and livelihood challenges including high rates of deforestation, recurrent drought and rapid population fluctuations. This paper analyses these changes by investigating which stakeholders were involved, how they were engaged (modes of participation) and why they participated (drivers of participation). Conceptually, this follows stakeholder mapping, Reed’s theory of participation and multi-level governance theory. Through thematic analysis, we triangulated data from 15 policy-related documents with semi-structured interviews with representatives from 24 organisations. Our findings show that both before and after 2010, stakeholder engagement has remained top-down. However, since 2010 this has been qualified by an asymmetrical form of collaboration that increasingly takes the form of top-down deliberation. Changes were observed in participation patterns, engagement approaches, and governance arrangements, driven by contextual conditions, power relations, process design, and spatial–temporal dynamics. Within a centrally coordinated government system, shaped by the post-genocide political context and culturally embedded structures such as Umuganda and Ubudehe, multistakeholder restoration initiatives have largely remained state-led, with structured approaches to coordination and implementation that have varied in the extent of local stakeholder engagement. Trust emerged as an important factor influencing stakeholder interactions. Despite more diverse and expanded institutional arrangements over time, variations in levels of participation and influence among stakeholders persist, with differences in how engagement and decision-making power are distributed. We conclude that effective stakeholder engagement is contingent on existing governance structures, the political will to engage with a diversity of actors at different levels, contextual conditions including spatial-temporal dynamics, and opportunities provided by global and regional restoration frameworks.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070222

Authors: Sandra-Milena Carrillo-Sierra Francesca Munda Magill Diego Rivera-Porras

Objective: To compare disability-inclusion strategies and programmes in higher education institutions in Mexico and Colombia and identify organisational conditions associated with gaps between policy intentions and implementation. Methods: A qualitative comparative multi-case design used a documentary corpus of 15 materials and eight semi-structured interviews with adult professional key informants, one per case university. A criterion-based purposive sample of eight universities (four per country) balanced public and private institutions and prioritised cases with disability-support units or inclusive education programmes. Data were analysed through grounded theory-informed axial and selective coding, with triangulation across documents and interviews; informed consent was obtained. Results: Five categories structured the findings: inclusive cultures, inclusive policies, inclusive practices, educational trajectories and progress/challenges. Within this case set, Mexican universities showed stronger institutionalisation through protocols, structured support routes and more visible technological accessibility. Colombian universities showed more fragmented implementation, often dependent on local initiatives, with persistent attitudinal barriers and weaker systematisation. In both contexts, misalignment between normative discourse and implementation capacity constrained staff training and impact evaluation. Conclusions: Sustainable inclusion was most evident where institutional culture, policy and practice were aligned. Monitoring mechanisms, stable resourcing and longitudinal support pathways are needed to secure equitable student trajectories from admission to graduation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070221

Authors: Neelam Punjani

Background: Canada’s Prairie Provinces have become a focal point for contentious educational policy debates. Saskatchewan’s Bill 137 (2023) and Alberta’s Education Amendment Act, 2024 (Bill 27) enacted sweeping restrictions on sexual health education and 2SLGBTQ+ student identity recognition, framed as ‘parental rights’. Manitoba maintains a rights-affirming, inclusive framework grounded in the Public Schools Act. This policy divergence has direct implications for students’ mental health, sexual health literacy, and equity. We conducted a systematic document search of official government websites of three Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) and four major school boards, selected by size and demographic diversity: the Calgary Board of Education (CBE), Edmonton Public Schools (EPSB), Regina Public Schools (RPS), and the Winnipeg School Division (WSD). Searches were conducted in May 2026. The Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) framework guided structured content analysis across three categories: (1) 2SLGBTQ+ recognition and affirming policy; (2) sexual health accessibility provisions; and (3) culturally responsive and EDI-consistent care. Documents were coded as ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Not Reported’ for each sub-category. The search yielded 56 documents; 34 met the inclusion criteria (20 provincial, 16 school board). The Alberta (n = 5) and Saskatchewan (n = 6) provincial documents were dominated by restrictive legislation: Bill 27 shifts sexual health education to an opt-in model, with ministerial vetting of all SOGI materials; Bill 137 bans third-party sexual health educators entirely and mandates parental consent for pronoun use, pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause. Manitoba’s nine provincial documents (n = 8) reflect an affirmative legislative framework: 100% explicitly affirm 2SLGBTQ+ students, 100% cite human rights frameworks, and 78% maintain community health partnerships. At the school board level, EDI-consistent provisions were the strongest in the EPSB (n = 5) and WSD (n = 4), which have standalone SOGIE policies and active equity frameworks. The CBE (n = 3) retains affirming guidelines while implementing provincial opt-in requirements. The RPS (n = 3) maintains AP 353 on Gender and Sexual Diversity. Only two provincial documents (11%), both from Manitoba, explicitly referenced sexual health community partnerships; zero Alberta or Saskatchewan provincial documents did so post-2023. The structural divergence between provinces is stark. The Alberta and Saskatchewan policies render 2SLGBTQ+ students structurally vulnerable through opt-in exclusion, compel parental disclosure, and eliminate community health expertise from classrooms. Manitoba’s model demonstrates that EDI-consistent, rights-affirming sexual health policy is legislatively achievable. Urgent systemic reform is required to restore affirming care, reinstate community partnerships, and reverse opt-in models that deny students access to evidence-based sexual health education.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070220

Authors: Tamer Hamdy Ayad Abdullah Hamoud Ali Seraj Nadia A. Abdelmegeed Abdelwahed

Entrepreneurship education is a key driver of entrepreneurial activity. This study empirically examines the mixed evidence regarding how entrepreneurship education experiences motivate start-up intentions among female university students through the lenses of identity theory and the social support perspective. Specifically, it investigates whether entrepreneurial identity mediates the relationship between perceived entrepreneurship education experience and start-up motivation. Survey data were collected from 412 female students enrolled at public universities in Saudi Arabia. The findings revealed that a large proportion of participants had received some form of entrepreneurship-related instruction. The results further demonstrate that entrepreneurship education positively influences start-up motivation both directly and indirectly by fostering entrepreneurial identity (EI). Moreover, social support strengthens the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial identity, resulting in a significant conditional indirect effect on start-up motivation. These findings suggest that entrepreneurship education is most effective when it cultivates entrepreneurial identity within supportive social environments, thereby enhancing female students’ motivation to pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Understanding these relationships is particularly important for female university students, who often encounter greater social, institutional, and resource-related barriers to entrepreneurial participation and venture creation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070219

Authors: Georgi Petrunov

This article examines violence as a tool used within criminal enterprises of trafficking of women for sexual exploitation. Its use is not seen as an isolated or incidental phenomenon but is placed in the broader context of women’s vulnerability to violence linked to structural inequalities, socio-economic marginalization, and persistent culture norms. In this context, criminal enterprises involved in human trafficking exploit both individual vulnerability and broader socio-economic conditions, institutional dysfunctions, and specific cultural norms. In this article, data obtained from court decisions are combined with findings from a separate field study that employs qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Viewed through the prism of enterprise theory, it is shown that violence against women within this criminal activity has a functional role and serves an economic purpose. The findings reveal that various techniques of coercion and submission are used as control mechanisms to maintain victims’ compliance, reduce the risk of business interruption, and ensure the profitability of criminal enterprises. Additionally, parallels between the coercive techniques employed by traffickers and the methods used in general violence against women were identified. In conclusion, the article highlights the need for multidisciplinary responses that integrate criminal justice measures, victim protection, social support, and policies aimed at reducing structural inequalities. It underscores the importance of future research on the relationship between violence against women and vulnerability to coercive control and exploitation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070218

Authors: Yoshihiko Kadoya Yu Kuramoto Koji Kasanuki

Dementia is associated not only with clinical and caregiving challenges but also with concerns about future social connectedness, social participation, and resilience. This study examines anticipated social connectedness under dementia, defined as respondents’ self-assessed confidence that they could remain connected to society if they were to develop dementia in the future, and its association with demographic, socioeconomic, and psychological characteristics in Japan. Using data from the 2026 wave of the Survey on Life and Money conducted among Rakuten Securities account holders, we analyze 20,352 respondents aged 18 to 86. Ordered probit models are used as the main specification, with a binary specification employed as a robustness check. The results show that unemployment is negatively associated with anticipated social connectedness under dementia, whereas household income is positively associated with it across several specifications. Family-related variables, including marital status and number of children, also show positive associations in some models, although their relevance differs across gender and age groups. The associations for household financial assets and myopic views of the future are less stable. These findings suggest that anticipated social resilience under dementia may be socially patterned and related to broader socioeconomic circumstances. However, because the analysis is based on cross-sectional survey data from securities account holders and the dependent variable captures self-assessed confidence rather than realized social connectedness among people living with dementia, the results should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects and should not be generalized mechanically to the broader population.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070217

Authors: Yuji Kaneko

This study examines how the same disability-related experiences are narratively reconfigured across different communicative contexts. Narratives of illness and disability are often understood as expressions of personal experience, yet less attention has been paid to how such experiences are reorganized when they move across self-authored and media-mediated forms of narration. Using a comparative analytic autoethnographic narrative analysis, this article analyzes six self-authored blog posts and one television segment that refer to the same set of experiences. The findings show that the narratives are systematically reconfigured through clarification, simplification, linearization, structural silence, and the structuring of support relations. These transformations do not indicate discrepancies in the underlying experience; rather, they reveal how disability experience is made communicable under different social, institutional, and media conditions. The study argues that narratability is not simply inherent in experience itself but is shaped by the contexts in which experience is selected, organized, and presented. It also shows that certain aspects of disability experience may remain partially non-narratable when narratives are adapted to more publicly intelligible forms.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070216

Authors: Șerban-Laurențiu Panciuc Iustina-Gabriela Mihăianu Lucia Cintia Colibaba Magdalena Iorga

Background: In contemporary society, marked by rapid transformations in the sphere of communication and social interaction, social networks have gone beyond the role of simple communication platforms, becoming places where identities are formed, cultural norms are negotiated and self-perceptions are shaped. This reality has generated a growing interest in studying the relationship between the digital environment and health behaviors, especially among young people, a social category extremely receptive to visual and normative influences promoted online. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among students enrolled in different kinds of faculties and specialties. An online questionnaire was distributed to gather socio-demographic, academic and medical data along with lifestyle and health-related behaviors. Several psychometric instruments were used: Health Behaviour Scale (HBS) to measure various dimensions of health-related actions, Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS) to screen for addictive or problematic social media use, Social Media Disorder Scale (SMDS) to measure the problematic social media use among adolescents, Body Appreciation Scale–2 (BAS-2) to evaluate measure of one’s acceptance, favorable opinions and respect of their own body, and Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) to identify the psychological motives behind overeating. Results: More than 70% of students declared that they had their first smartphone before the age of 12 and 65% of students had screentime higher than 3 h per day during the weekdays, with a small increase during the weekends. Women scored higher than men in emotional eating (food consumption in response to negative emotions), and external eating (response to food stimuli in the environment, independent of hunger). Respondents from rural areas showed a significantly lower level of respect and acceptance of their own body and higher risk for Social Media Disorder compared to participants from urban areas. Important statistical correlation has been identified among the variables of the research. Social media addiction was associated with higher emotional eating both directly and indirectly, via lower body appreciation. The analysis also indicated that it does not show a direct relationship with restrictive eating behaviors; rather, its association with restrained eating is fully mediated by the individual’s body appreciation. Conclusions: The use of social platforms is a challenging process, with a great impact on psychological and emotional balance of young people. Even if the study identified a normative use among young people with a high education level, the risks factors should be taken into consideration when dealing with screentime, psychological and mental health and the risk for addiction.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070215

Authors: Raimondo Leone Angelo Rosa Walter Ricciardi Maria Rosaria Gualano

Background/Objectives: Contemporary healthcare systems face compound challenges (including technological acceleration, demographic aging, rising chronic disease burden, and growing patient expectations) that demand models that are simultaneously efficient, high-quality, and person-centered. Despite a substantial body of research addressing organizational design, human capital management, and clinical competencies, these dimensions have largely been theorized in isolation. This study aims to construct and justify an integrated theoretical framework explaining how organizational models, human capital, and transversal competencies may jointly shape care quality, patient safety, and institutional sustainability in healthcare organizations. Methods: A narrative literature review was conducted, integrating contributions from business economics, healthcare management, organizational psychology, and nursing sciences. This design was selected for its suitability in synthesizing heterogeneous, multidisciplinary knowledge into a coherent conceptual framework, a purpose for which systematic meta-analytic approaches are not appropriate. Sources encompassed 79 references: peer-reviewed journals (PubMed, JSTOR, Google Scholar), institutional reports (WHO, OECD, European Commission, Joint Commission), normative standards (ISO 30414:2018), and Italian regulatory frameworks, spanning foundational twentieth-century contributions through the most recent literature (2025). Results: Four principal findings emerged: (1) healthcare organizations are evolving from rigid hierarchical structures toward flexible, value-based configurations, with the Value-Based Healthcare (VBHC) paradigm redirecting institutional attention from service volume to patient-meaningful outcomes per unit of cost; (2) transversal competencies (communication, empathy, emotional intelligence, teamwork, and transformational leadership) are closely associated with care quality and patient safety, with 70–80% of sentinel events associated with communication failures; (3) human capital, encompassing technical expertise and relational capacity, constitutes the primary lever of competitive advantage in healthcare institutions; and (4) the trajectory from pyramidal toward participatory and self-managed models is supported by international evidence, including the Buurtzorg experience in the Netherlands. Conclusions: The integrated three-pillar framework (combining resource-based theory and dynamic capabilities, Value-Based Healthcare, and evolutionary organizational theory) provides a theoretically grounded basis for understanding how organizational structure, human capital, and transversal competencies are jointly associated with clinical performance. Healthcare institutions should systematically integrate soft-skills training into professional education and invest in participatory organizational structures. Health policy should revise financing mechanisms to incentivize patient-meaningful outcomes over service volumes and support the broader transition toward Value-Based Healthcare models. The Italian SSN is discussed as an illustrative national context rather than as the primary empirical focus of the review.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070214

Authors: Pelagia Soultatou Theodoros Fouskas Apostolos Veizis Agis Terzidis George Pleios Charalampos Economou

The governance of migrant and refugee health is increasingly shaped by political rationalities of risk, belonging, and control, yet critical analyses using Foucauldian notions remain fragmented across disciplines. This scoping review systematically maps how health interventions, services, and policies directed at migrant and refugee populations have been examined through the Foucauldian framework. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, MEDLINE (PubMed), Scopus, CINAHL (EBSCO), and APA PsycINFO were searched, identifying 270 records. After deduplication, 115 unique records were screened, and 56 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility. Thirty-seven studies (n = 37) met the inclusion criteria, spanning multiple countries across five continents and employing qualitative research methods. Thematic synthesis revealed four dominant analytic categories: (a) migration health as biopolitical strategy in neoliberal contexts; (b) health literacy as a technology of governmentality; (c) disciplinary and surveillance practices in migration health settings; and (d) resistance, counter-conduct, and emancipatory health practices. Findings indicate that while biopolitical and governmentality analyses predominate, later Foucauldian concepts—particularly care of the self and counter-conduct—remain underutilized. Health literacy is rarely theorized explicitly as governance, despite its frequent implicit deployment as a normalizing technology. This review advances theoretical application in migration health, identifies critical gaps in the literature, and offers a foundation for rethinking policies, professional practice, and advocacy with migrant populations.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070213

Authors: Sharmila Rani Moganadas Gerald Guan Gan Goh Chew Sze Cheah Guruh Fajar Shidik

Digital transformation constantly changes the work practices and employee experiences of contemporary work environments. Studies have documented the adverse impact of cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic systems, and digital platforms on employees’ well-being. However, such findings remain fragmented across technologies, disciplines, and well-being constructs, limiting a coherent understanding of how digitally transformed work conditions affect employees. This study systematically reviews the literature on digital transformation and employee well-being to clarify the conditions, mechanisms, and outcomes that are most consistently identified in prior research. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, this study identified, screened, and selected 57 peer-reviewed articles (2014–2025) on digital transformation and employee well-being. The Gioia inductive analytical approach was used to synthesise the reviewed studies and to develop higher-order conceptual dimensions. Five interrelated aggregate dimensions were identified: digital transformation conditions, digital resources and demands, mediating processes, contextual factors, and employee well-being outcomes. The findings indicate that employee well-being depends significantly on how digitally intensified demands and available resources are configured, interpreted, and mediated within specific organisational contexts. This review highlights the need for more temporally sensitive, context-specific, and resource-oriented research, and proposes an integrative framework to guide future research and support the design of healthier and sustainable digital workplaces.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070212

Authors: Ke Cheng Kunlin Du

With the expansion of the digital economy, platform-based content creation has become a common route through which young people participate in flexible employment. However, the occupational identity of young we-media bloggers remains unstable because platform work combines low entry barriers, ambiguous labour relations, algorithmic governance and uncertain income. This qualitative study examines factors shaping occupational identity among young we-media bloggers in Hangzhou and Shaoxing, China. Data were collected through participatory observation and semi-structured interviews with 20 bloggers active on Xiaohongshu, TikTok and Bilibili. Fifteen interviews were used for open, axial and selective coding, and five additional interviews were used to assess theoretical saturation. The analysis identifies five key factors: perceived occupational competence, occupational development expectations, perceived occupational meaning, external environmental conditions and platform mechanisms. These factors operate through the interaction of internal cognition and external conditions: competence, future expectations and meaning provide internal support for occupational identity, whereas family attitudes, social evaluation, industry conditions, platform feedback and monetisation opportunities shape its stability. The findings suggest that young bloggers’ occupational identity is not a fixed status but a negotiated process formed through content production, platform feedback and social recognition.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070211

Authors: Haopeng Sun Yichun Chen Ronggeng Chen Tianfeng Li

As a crucial indicator for measuring regional social equity and equality of opportunity, intergenerational mobility exerts an important impact on the employment quality of the agricultural migrant population. However, despite extensive research on migrant employment, limited attention has been paid to how intergenerational mobility interacts with localized technological environments and fiscal resource constraints to shape the labor assimilation of rural-to-urban migrants. This study assesses this relationship by constructing an urban intergenerational educational mobility index and analyzing the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) data. The results indicate that intergenerational mobility significantly improves the employment quality of the migrant population. Mechanism analysis was used to reveal that the digital economy exerts a positive regulatory effect, acting as a form of technological empowerment that enhances the transition of structural opportunities into tangible employment prospects. Conversely, local fiscal pressure exerts a negative regulatory effect, imposing contractive resource constraints that attenuate the promotional dividends of social mobility. Heterogeneity analysis results further demonstrate that the positive impact of intergenerational mobility is more prominent in cities with higher public education expenditure, higher levels of marketization, and fewer traditional cultural constraints. These findings suggest that geographical mobility alone does not automatically guarantee high-quality employment; rather, enhancing institutional openness, expanding digital infrastructure, and optimizing the allocation of public resources are essential to translating equity of structural opportunity into decent work.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070210

Authors: Camila Jimenez-Sanchez Gerrit Loots Tuba Bircan

For rural adolescent girls in the Bolivian Andes, adolescence is not a “protected” transitional life stage but a gendered laboring condition. This article explores the lived experiences of adolescent girls in a rural Quechua community in Cochabamba, drawing on the initial phase of a longitudinal Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project (2023–2024). By integrating Silvia Federici’s theory of social reproduction with Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, the study conceptualizes a “laboring subjectivity” defined by a ch’ixi reality where two dimensions of labor exist in constant, dynamic interaction. The findings reveal these dimensions of labor: “Working to Do,” which encompasses the invisible, naturalized reproductive and agricultural work and unremunerated affective work required to sustain family life as a form of cultural pedagogy; and “Working to Be,” which refers to the subjective labor girls perform to negotiate recognition. Through this structural arrangement, Honneth’s spheres of love, rights, and social esteem are systematically compromised, creating a distinct recognition deficit as girls carry adult responsibilities without structural protection. Ultimately, this article argues that seasonal migration to regions such as El Trópico functions as an existential terrain where girls seek the symbolic and economic recognition denied within the local rural order. By centering adolescent girls as active laboring subjects, the research challenges Western developmental biases in youth studies and offers a nuanced reframing of the nexus between labor, mobility, and identity formation in the Global South.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070209

Authors: Balwant Singh Mehta Falendra Kumar Sudan

This paper examines the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of mountain communities in South and Central Asia, with specific reference to the Himalayas and the Central Asian highlands. Using a comparative framework, the study combines the Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI), LVI-IPCC, and the Livelihood Equity/Endowment Index (LEI) to measure multidimensional vulnerability. A mixed-methods approach combining household surveys and qualitative field evidence is used to analyze primary data from 600 households across four mountain regions: Leh (India), Sindhupalchok (Nepal), Batken (Kyrgyzstan), and Urgut (Uzbekistan). The results show that vulnerability is not explained only by climatic exposure; it is also associated with socio-economic conditions, institutional access, and livelihood assets. Leh and Sindhupalchok show higher vulnerability associated with water insecurity, food dependence, weak infrastructure, and climate variability, whereas Batken’s vulnerability is mainly linked to limited adaptive capacity. Urgut shows greater resilience associated with stronger adaptive capacity, despite persistent structural inequalities. The paper identifies financial access, social networks, and knowledge systems as important factors in strengthening resilience. It concludes that context-specific, inclusive, and asset-based policy interventions may help strengthen adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability in fragile mountain ecosystems.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070208

Authors: Andrea Palmioli Eugenio Mangi Yucong Zhang

Post-COVID rural revitalisation policies and digital platform economies have renewed attention to returning to the Chinese countryside, yet return rarely becomes durable residence, livelihood, or recognised membership. This concept paper addresses that problem through a scoping-oriented critical literature review and interpretive synthesis of scholarship on rural return in China. It develops internal rural re-bordering as an analytic for explaining how rural return is governed as a form of conditional inclusion within national territory. The synthesis identifies three interacting mechanisms: institutional bordering, which shapes eligibility and service portability; platform governance, which shapes visibility and monetisation; and aesthetic governance, which shapes admissible rural identities, livelihoods, and spaces. Across the literature, durable return depends on whether mobility can be converted into regularised entitlements, relatively stable income, and locally recognised legitimacy, often through local intermediaries and relational labour. Rural return is therefore better understood as a conditional pathway of incorporation than as a simple demographic reversal.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070207

Authors: Ali Saleh Alshebami

Side hustles have become an important means of empowering individuals, particularly potential entrepreneurs such as students. This research explores the interaction among the perceived benefits of side hustles, entrepreneurial identity, perceived autonomy, and the intention to start a small business among students. A total of 286 responses were collected from different universities in Saudi Arabia. The collected data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and revealed interesting findings. The results confirmed that the perceived benefits of side hustles have a positive and significant relationship with both entrepreneurial identity and perceived autonomy. However, there was no direct relationship between the perceived benefits of side hustles and the intention to start a small business. The results also confirmed that entrepreneurial identity and perceived autonomy mediate the relationship between the perceived benefits of side hustles and the intention to start a small business. Unlike previous studies focusing on actual side-hustle participation or general entrepreneurial intentions, this study examines the perceived benefits of side hustles and reveals that their association with students’ intention to start a small business operates entirely through entrepreneurial identity and perceived autonomy. This research offers meaningful insights, suggestions, and practical implications for policymakers and stakeholders in the context of the study.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070206

Authors: Niaz Ali Wu Yating Adekoya Oluwaseun Abiola Khalid Ahmed Hariharan N. Krishnasamy Muhammad Niqab Sameer Babu M

It is well-established that both teacher commitment and the quality of instruction positively influence student achievement. However, the evidence for such constructs and their connections in the context of a developing country such as Pakistan is scarce. This research addresses the interconnections of teachers’ organizational commitment, pedagogical effectiveness, and student performance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa secondary schools, aligned with the educational reform initiatives in developing nations. A quantitative approach was utilized involving a purposive sample of 348 secondary school educators in Bunir District for triangulation purposes. Based on a validated data collection instrument, the researchers measured the three latent constructs of organizational commitment (affective, normative, and continuance), effective teaching (practice, metacognitive strategy, feedback, and formative assessment), and student performance (cognitive and non-cognitive). Subsequently, the researchers utilized descriptive statistics, correlation, and structural equation modeling for the analyses. The most notable findings in the study were the moderate levels of teacher commitment and instructional effectiveness, and the particularly low levels of student achievement, especially in the non-cognitive dimensions. Teachers’ organizational commitment was positively related to effective teaching, as well as to student achievement. Furthermore, teaching practices served as a mediator of the relationship between teacher commitment and student outcomes, as the direct effect of commitment on outcomes was found to be non-significant. The findings highlight the importance of constructive pedagogical practices as a mediator between teacher commitment and student outcomes. In challenging educational contexts, reinforcing teacher commitment through initiatives such as professional recognition, mentoring within a defined framework, and distributed leadership, combined with ongoing pedagogical training, could amplify student engagement and achievement.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070205

Authors: Areej Al-Hamad Yasin M. Yasin Kateryna Metersky Maher Elmasri Riham Al-Saadi Sepali Guruge

Background: Private and community hosting have emerged as important community-based responses to forced displacement, through which host-country citizens provide accommodation, practical support, and relational care to refugees in domestic and community settings. These hosting arrangements extend hospitality beyond commercial and tourism contexts into everyday spaces of welcome, co-living, and social support. Existing literature has examined a range of hosting experiences, including reasons citizens choose to host, ways hospitality is practiced, challenges arising from hosting, and the impacts of hosting on hosts, refugees, and communities. However, the evidence remains fragmented across disciplines, including migration studies, social work, sociology, public health, and hospitality scholarship. Objective: This scoping review aims to map and synthesize the existing literature on why host-country residents and local hosting actors host refugees, with a focus on hosting motivations, hospitality practices, challenges, and impacts in private and community hosting. Methods: This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and be reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Guided by the Population–Concept–Context framework, the review will include studies involving host-country residents and local hosting actors, engaged in refugee hosting. Literature published in English from 2010 onward will be identified through searches in MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, and selected grey literature sources. Two reviewers will independently screen records and extract data, which will be analyzed descriptively and thematically to map motivations, hospitality practices, challenges, and impacts in private and community hosting. Results: The review will generate a comprehensive map of the literature on refugee hosting in private and community settings. It will identify how hosting is conceptualized and practiced, the motivations driving citizen involvement, the relational and structural challenges associated with hosting, and the reported impacts on hosts, refugees, and communities. It will also highlight system-level support, policy considerations, and gaps requiring further attention through research and practice. Conclusions: This scoping review will provide an interdisciplinary synthesis of evidence on refugee hosting as a form of social and domestic hospitality. The findings will inform future research, policy, and community-based hosting initiatives and will contribute to a deeper understanding of the ethical, relational, and structural dimensions of refugee hospitality and hosting in host countries.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070204

Authors: Renato Abou-Warda Peter Kiss Maria Fekete-Farkas Zoltán Bujdosó

This systematic literature review synthesises existing knowledge on volunteer sport tourism—the intersection of volunteering, sport, and tourism—in order to clarify its evolution, theoretical foundations, and practical implications, and to address the fragmentation of the field across disciplines. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and doctoral dissertations published in English between January 1974 and December 2025 were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, SportDiscus, and Google Scholar, complemented by citation tracking. Studies focused on volunteers travelling to sporting events were included; conference abstracts, editorials, and works addressing only local volunteering or general tourism were excluded. The methodological quality of 32 included studies was appraised narratively by two authors independently against three criteria, with disagreements resolved through discussion. Findings were integrated through a thematic narrative synthesis supported by analytical mapping tables. The review identifies five dominant themes: motivations, volunteer experiences and satisfaction, economic and social impacts, organisational and management perspectives, and destination and legacy dimensions. The synthesis contributes to theoretical development by proposing an integrated tripartite framework that connects volunteer antecedents, event experiences, and legacy outcomes, and offers practical recommendations for event organisers, policymakers, and destination stakeholders. The review was conducted without pre-registration.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070203

Authors: Aitor Yañez-Perea Naiara Bilbao-Quintana Arantzazu López De la Serna

The present article employs a mixed methodology to evaluate IkasLab’s innovative spaces, investigating how the reorganisation of educational spaces contributes to the development of 21st-century skills in the Basque educational context. The sample comprised 13 primary schools (ages 6–12), where quantitative data were collected using a validated instrument (rubric) (n = 13 spaces) and qualitative data through semi-structured interviews (n = 22 teachers). Reliability analyses (Alpha = 0.909; Omega = 0.907) confirmed the robustness of the assessment instrument. The quantitative findings indicated a high level of project implementation (x¯ = 3.26/4), with particular emphasis on the development of communication and relational skills. However, the indicators associated with metacognitive work showed less consolidation. Qualitative analysis yielded significant findings pertaining to student autonomy, methodological innovation, and educational inclusivity. Notable gaps were also identified in the integration of metacognitive practices and urgent needs for systematic teacher training and continuous pedagogical support. The results suggest that IkasLab constitutes a solid and promising framework for reimagining learning spaces and promoting educational practices in line with contemporary challenges. However, the full impact of the model depends on ensuring sufficient resources and strengthening professional training that enables teachers to effectively integrate the principles of the model into their teaching activities.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070201

Authors: Rachael Luck

This paper critically examines disability-inclusive design theory and practice through the lens of new materialism, tracing a shift from designing for users to designing with and ultimately from disability. It reveals a key paradox: while participatory and disability-led approaches foreground lived experience and plural voices, design outcomes must still function across shared, pluriversal contexts. Individual accounts of disability generate situated, partial knowledge that cannot be straightforwardly generalised, creating persistent tensions between singular experiences and collective design needs. By introducing a relational ontology, the paper reframes design knowledge as emergent from dynamic interactions between people, materials and contexts, destabilising binaries such as designer/user and disabled/non-disabled. The proposed praxeology advances disability leadership, positionality and embedded participation as core to design practice. These insights prompt new research questions around how plural, situated knowledges can inform scalable design decisions, how conflicting lived experiences can be ethically negotiated, and how relational, material perspectives can reshape methodologies for inclusive and socially just design.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070202

Authors: Zhihao Wei Nazirah Hassan Nur Saadah Mohamad Aun Ezarina Zakaria Sheng Chen Xiaojin Liu

Youth drug abuse is a persistent public health concern in China. Community-based drug rehabilitation (CBDR), the final three-year stage of China’s official rehabilitation system, aims to help people who use drugs (PWUD) reintegrate into society, but reintegration remains limited, particularly among young PWUD. This study explores the social reintegration challenges faced by young PWUD aged 18 to 35 during the CBDR stage in Guangzhou, China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 participants and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). Three themes were identified: stigma and relational struggles, socioeconomic marginalization and daily life disruption, and limitations of the CBDR service model. These challenges were not separate but reinforced one another, with difficulties in one domain spilling into others and narrowing the space in which reintegration could occur. These findings suggest that addressing the reinforcing linkages between stigma, economic hardship, and service limitations requires a more coordinated approach to CBDR service provision, one that integrates vocational support into relapse prevention, builds flexibility into surveillance procedures, and provides participants and their families with realistic, evidence-based information about the prospects of recovery.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070200

Authors: Mónica Gutiérrez

(1) Introduction: Transit-oriented development is often framed as a strategy to expand opportunity and advance equitable transportation. However, evidence suggests it can also contribute to rising housing costs and displacement in historically marginalized communities. This study examines how a light rail expansion reshaped displacement risk in a Latina/o community in the U.S. Southwest, identifying early mechanisms through residents’ interpretations of the expansion during construction. (2) Materials and Methods: Using a qualitative, community-engaged design, the study draws on ten in-depth pláticas with Latina/o residents conducted during construction of a major rail expansion. Data were analyzed abductively and guided by Critical Race Ecological Systems Theory (CrEST) to identify multilevel mechanisms linking infrastructure policy to lived social conditions. (3) Results: Findings identify three mechanisms through which transit investment generated displacement risk prior to relocation. First, historical and intergenerational memory shaping anticipatory displacement. Second, place-based belonging intensifying psychosocial stress and loss. Third, policy-mediated mobility constraining residents’ ability to remain or benefit from reinvestment. (4) Discussion: Transit infrastructure operates as a structural policy intervention that reorganizes risk, belonging, and stability when histories of racialized disinvestment are not incorporated into policy design. These findings position infrastructure planning as a critical site for social work policy analysis and prevention-oriented intervention.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16070199

Authors: André Ramalho Emmanuel Fernandes Pedro Duarte-Mendes Rui Miguel Duarte Paulo

Sedentary behavior is conventionally defined as waking time spent sitting, reclining, or lying at very low energy expenditure (≤1.5 METs), a definition that supports surveillance and guideline translation. For cognitive and mental-health outcomes in later life, however, total sedentary minutes may be too coarse: seated episodes differ in cognitive demand, social context, autonomy over pacing, and stopping cues. This perspective advances a falsifiable thesis: distinguishing cognitively active from cognitively passive sedentary domains should yield more coherent and interpretable associations with cognition and mental health than total sedentary time alone. Existing evidence suggests that passive, media-dominant patterns and cognitively engaging seated practices relate differently to cognitive decline, dementia risk, and depression-related outcomes, although confounding and reverse causality remain central concerns. We propose a minimal measurement agenda: domain reporting, key modifiers, reliability flags for mixed episodes, episode-linked ecological momentary assessment, and time-reallocation contrasts. If domain resolution does not improve stability, coherence, or substitution-based interpretability, the thesis should be rejected or revised.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060198

Authors: Rita Bencivenga Angela Celeste Taramasso Fernanda Campanini Vilhena Cinzia Leone

This paper explores the potential for aligning theoretical approaches and good practices for intersectional approaches to recruitment and career development in academia, focusing on a European university alliance comprising eight institutions. The study applies a participatory approach that includes comparative analysis and stakeholder engagement to assess how institutional practices can become more inclusive. The findings highlight structural barriers, including entrenched notions of meritocracy and inadequate legal and procedural frameworks. Current strategies often juxtapose inequalities rather than addressing their intersections, resulting in approaches remaining siloed. Based on a reflexive case study, the paper identifies critical factors such as the need for formalised procedures, training and financial investment to effectively operationalise intersectional frameworks. It emphasises the need for tailored approaches that take into account the diversity of institutional and legal contexts and enable more inclusive academic policies and services. Together, these efforts aim to address structural inequalities and create sustainable practises that support the professional development and mobility of marginalised groups in academia, responding to the persistent gaps between policy commitments to intersectionality and their practical implementation within higher education institutions.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060197

Authors: Aleksandra Krupa Ryszard Plinta

Sensory impairment affects over 1.3 billion people worldwide, yet the field still lacks a mechanistically specified theoretical framework explaining how communication inaccessibility contributes to stress-related health disparities in these populations. Existing models remain fragmented, addressing biological, psychological, and social factors in isolation rather than as interconnected systems. This concept paper presents the Communication-Endocrine-Stress Adaptive Regulation (CESAR) Model, an integrative biopsychosocial framework that integrates communication access, social support, stress regulation, and neuroendocrine function into a unified causal pathway. The CESAR model proposes that sensory impairment creates communication barriers may reduce social support, increase perceived stress, dysregulate the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, and ultimately impact reproductive health and psychological well-being. This integrative framework synthesizes evidence from disability studies, stress physiology, and communication sciences to provide a comprehensive theoretical foundation for understanding adaptation in sensory-impaired populations. The model incorporates feedback loops, moderating factors (sex, age, impairment type, duration), and environmental contexts (accessibility policies, healthcare access) that influence adaptive outcomes. By proposing specific causal pathways and testable hypotheses, the CESAR model provides a roadmap for future empirical research and targeted interventions that address the root causes of health disparities in sensory-impaired populations rather than merely treating symptoms.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060196

Authors: Leidy Ortiz-Araque Ingrid Quintana-Leal Sandra Montesino-Rincón Ana Salazar-Beleño Oscar Porras-Atencia

Female empowerment in post-conflict rural contexts is strategic for food security and socioeconomic resilience. This study analyzed the relationship between women’s productive empowerment and food security in 40 rural women involved in pig production in Santa Rosa del Sur, Bolívar, Colombia. A mixed approach with a descriptive–exploratory design and longitudinal scope was used. Data collection employed adapted versions of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAgI) and the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), alongside participant observation and reflective thematic analysis. Quantitative data were analyzed via descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation. The baseline revealed low empowerment regarding income, resources, technical capacities, and time. The global A-WEAgI reached 21%, while HFIAS showed moderate food insecurity in 52% of households. Spearman analysis (CS) indicated moderate negative correlations between food insecurity and income (CS = −0.56), access to resources (CS = −0.51), and technical capacities (CS = −0.49), suggesting that greater women´s empowerment was associates with lower food insecurity. Post-intervention, improvements occurred in technical skills, leadership, and organizational participation. Qualitative findings showed increased confidence in Agroindustry activities, though limitations in economic autonomy, commercialization, and domestic workloads persisted. Gender-focused rural strategies enhance productive capacities and food resilience; however, structural barriers related to economic autonomy and gender inequality persist.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060195

Authors: José Carlos Vázquez-Parra Chris Blakely Jenny Paola Lis-Gutiérrez Arantxa Lucero Ramos-Huerta Sergio Palomino-Gámez

This study examines complex thinking as a higher-order cognitive competence in international graduate education. Drawing on Edgar Morin’s theoretical perspective, it analyzes how master’s students perceive this competence through four interrelated dimensions: systemic, scientific, critical, and innovative thinking. A total of 491 international students from a graduate university in Japan participated in the study. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional design, data were collected with the validated eComplexity instrument and analyzed through PERMANOVA with 999 permutations. The analysis examined differences in self-perceived complex thinking by sex, academic field, nationality, and academic semester. Results showed moderately high levels of self-perceived complex thinking across the sample, with systemic and critical thinking emerging as the strongest dimensions. Significant differences were found by nationality and academic semester, while no significant differences were observed by sex or academic field. These findings suggest that students’ perceptions of complex thinking are associated with cultural and academic trajectories, although the cross-sectional and self-report design requires cautious interpretation. The study contributes to competence-based graduate education by showing that complex thinking can be examined as a multidimensional and context-sensitive form of perceived cognitive development. Educational implications are discussed in relation to curriculum design, intercultural learning, global citizenship, and inclusion in international master’s programs.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060194

Authors: Cecilia Peñacoba Patricia Catalá

Contemporary societies are characterized by increasing role multiplicity and accelerated social change, intensifying identity-related strain and inter-role conflict. Although role theory, narrative identity research, and psychological flexibility frameworks have independently advanced the understanding of psychological adaptation, an integrative structural model explaining how life domains are hierarchically organized and reorganized over time remains underdeveloped. This manuscript introduces Casa Vital (Vital House), a dynamic structural model that conceptualizes identity as a hierarchical architecture of interdependent life domains organized around a central integrative function. The model proposes three core constructs: structural coherence, structural modes (rigidity/flexibility) and self-directed agency, and argues that psychological adaptation depends not only on emotional regulation or narrative coherence but also on the capacity to reorganize domain hierarchies in alignment with personal values and contextual demands. By positioning identity at a meso-structural level of analysis, the framework integrates sociological, narrative, and contextual behavioral traditions while offering testable hypotheses and a falsifiable research agenda. Casa Vital expands the current models of adaptation by introducing hierarchical structural reorganization as a central component of identity functioning in complex contemporary contexts.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060193

Authors: Georgi Petrunov

Violence against women and intimate partner violence in particular are recognized as significant social issues. This article explores the dynamic interplay between intimate partner violence, public opinion, and legislative changes in Bulgaria. The data we used were collected through in-depth interviews and focus groups with professionals working on issues of domestic violence and violence against women in Bulgaria. Using a specific case of violence as an example, the study argues that public pressure is a catalyst for changes in the legal framework for protection against domestic violence. However, the findings suggest a propensity for certain measures to be influenced by penal populism, often taking on the characteristics of symbolic policymaking—declaring political commitment, but showing vulnerabilities in their practical application. In this context, the perspective of policy implementation and unintended consequences reveals how gaps in institutional capacity, coordination, and enforcement produced outcomes that differed from those declared publicly. The article concludes that an integrated approach going beyond penal populism and symbolic policy demonstrations is necessary. To effectively combat domestic and intimate partner violence in Bulgaria, there is a need for a long-term strategy that considers the intricate relationships between public attitudes, policymaking, and the actual implementation of legislation.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060192

Authors: Danilo Boriati

This contribution examines the role of artificial intelligence technologies in the co-construction of social reality, with specific attention to AI-generated data as emergent agents of knowledge production. Building on perspectives from science and technology studies and recent debates on algomorphic sociology, the contribution conceptualizes generative AI systems not as research instruments, but as active participants in epistemic processes. The analysis argues that AI-generated data exhibit a performative character: they do not simply represent social phenomena but actively contribute to their stabilization, classification, and circulation. This performativity fosters a shift from researcher-centered interpretation toward hybrid configurations in which meaning emerges through human–machine assemblages. Through a theoretical synthesis of recent methodological and epistemological reflections, the contribution highlights a transition from anthropocentric models of knowledge production to post-anthropocentric, relational frameworks in which agency, cognition, and sense-making are distributed across sociotechnical networks. The contribution concludes by outlining the implications of this shift for the future of digital social research and also for reflexivity, methodological design, and the ethics of social research, advocating a critical and adaptive stance toward AI as a co-producer of knowledge rather than a subordinate analytical tool.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060191

Authors: Xiao Li Jishu Zheng Jae Man Park Jordan Mitchell

Public land and water recreation opportunities may shape how older adults perceive the places where they live. This study examined whether satisfaction with available public land and water opportunities is associated with satisfaction with living in Nebraska among White adults aged 65 years and older. We analyzed cross-sectional data from 644 respondents in the 2023 Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey, linked with county-level contextual measures of material community conditions, health-care infrastructure, and civic or organizational context from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. Associations were examined using frequentist ordinal logistic regression with adjustment for demographic, socioeconomic, health, financial, and county-level characteristics. Bayesian ordered logistic regression was performed as a robustness check. More perception of public land and water opportunities was consistently associated with higher satisfaction with living in Nebraska. In the frequentist model, the odds ratio was 2.68 with strong statistical evidence. In the Bayesian model, the odds ratio was 2.61 with a 95% credible interval from 1.54 to 4.05. These findings indicate that perceived access to and quality of local recreation opportunities are relevant to place-based well-being among older adults. Incorporating such perceptions into recreation planning and age-friendly community development may improve residential satisfaction in aging populations.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060190

Authors: Karla-Lorena Andrade-Rubio José Moral-de-la-Rubia Simón-Pedro Izcara-Palacios

Mainstream migration theory has often explained irregular immigration as an autonomous process driven primarily by individuals, families, or communities. However, the recruitment of undocumented labor by U.S. employers through labor-brokerage smugglers plays an even more significant role. The age of migrants transported by these smugglers is crucial, as it represents one of the key criteria used to distinguish between human smuggling (a crime against the state) and human trafficking (a crime against individuals). This article, based on interviews conducted between 2008 and 2025 with 197 Mexican migrant smugglers, examines whether there are differences in the proportion of minors—as well as in the minimum and maximum average ages—between male and female migrants from Mexico and Central America who were recruited by smugglers operating in labor-recruitment networks (primarily men for labor purposes), sexual-trade networks (women for commercial sexual activities), or mixed networks (involving both types of activities). The data were analyzed by comparing proportions and means for independent groups (labor vs. sexual-trade networks) and paired data (mixed networks). The study concludes that women recruited for the sexual-trade by labor-brokerage smugglers are significantly younger than men transported by labor-brokerage smugglers hired by U.S. employers.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060189

Authors: Perri Campbell Andrew Joyce Erin Wilson Jenny Crosbie

Disability Enterprises have the potential to address employment barriers that people with an intellectual disability experience as they move into open employment. Disability Enterprises are able to facilitate this transition through strategic organisational design, but it is unknown the extent to which organisations are following what could be considered best practice. Utilising a survey and interview approach, we aimed to understand how well organisations align with the ‘WISE-Ability’ model and the ongoing challenges they face in supporting open employment pathways for people with a disability working at the enterprise. Staff (94) from Disability Enterprises completed a survey where they rated their own organisation against a number of criteria related to organisational design and operation related to transitioning supported employees to open employment. After completing the survey, organisational staff (19) participated in a semi-structured interview. Disability Enterprises provide training and life skills development options with the end goal of employment transition. Training is adapted to the needs of individuals and there is flexibility in the pace of learning and rostering of shifts. Disability Enterprises develop industry-specific work skills and independent life skills. Pathways to employment are offered in most cases; however, there is variation in the success and scale of employment pathways. Organisations continue to face challenges that exist in the disability service system and open labour market. Organisations are confident that they are able to offer a culture of support and respect, choice and variety of employment options, busy and quiet spaces, and areas for rest and accessible workspaces where individuals feel empowered and safe to try new tasks. Many organisations developed relationships with external stakeholders and employers to facilitate financial sustainability and employment pathways. However, organisations face challenges in the following areas: resourcing pathways to employment and offering certified training options for people working in a Disability Enterprise. Employment pathways were often carved out on a case-by-case basis relying on significant staff support and after-hour work.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060188

Authors: Dmitry Erokhin Nadejda Komendantova

Climate hazards increasingly unfold as information crises alongside physical impacts, producing rapid shifts in what people search for and discuss online. This case study demonstrates how AI-supported analysis of online data can complement conventional disaster intelligence by providing a scalable social sensing layer for climate hazard resilience in Galicia. It integrates Google Trends as a proxy for changing public attention and information demand, and YouTube videos and comment threads to capture public sensemaking and resilience-relevant signals. Monthly Google Trends series were used for eight hazards, with floods showing the highest mean interest, followed by wildfires and heatwaves. For the three highest-salience hazards, the study analyzed YouTube comments using gpt-5-mini to extract sentiment, emotions, topics, institutional trust cues, collective efficacy cues, calls to action, impacts, vulnerable groups, and coping actions. The corpus included 184 heatwave comments, 20,427 wildfire comments, and 4882 flood comments. Across hazards, discourse is predominantly negative but differs in structure. Heatwave threads skew toward mockery and normalization, wildfire threads center on anger, governance and low institutional trust, and flood threads combine solidarity with demands for localized warnings and guidance. The study translates comment-level signals into traceable policy recommendations emphasizing actionable risk communication, early warning and response capacity, and trust-building practices. The study concludes with an operational pipeline concept for continuous monitoring and dashboard-based decision support, while emphasizing limitations related to Google Trends sampling and normalization, platform and API biases, and model-mediated uncertainty.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060187

Authors: Sakawrat Boonwanno Kasetchai Laeheem Punya Tepsing Pongtach Chitwiboon Poranee Yeetin

This study aimed to systematically categorize and critically analyze the feasibility of developing a cultural resource-based tourism route in Betong District, Yala Province, the southernmost area of Thailand, which is called “the city in the mist.” Research and development techniques were employed using a simulated map from an information system and community forums to create and revise a cultural resource-based tourism map in these areas: the Aiyoeweng, Tano Maero, Betong, and Than Nam Thip Subdistricts. The participants from five communities, 10 people per community, totaling 50 participants, were selected through purposive sampling to join in drafting a cultural resource map by pinpointing important areas in each subdistrict. The fieldwork data collected in each subdistrict were categorized and the content was analyzed to examine the feasibility of the approach to creating a map based on cultural resources. The results found that the tourism patterns resulting from a strong resource base could be divided into tangible and intangible cultural resources. The selected resources include local food, learning centers, tourist attractions, interesting entertainment activities, and community service centers. These were then used to create a simulated map, which was analyzed to determine the feasibility of a tourism route based on resource capital, abundant forests, cultural capital in historical sites, and social capital that were covered in community tourism policies, plans, and guidelines for tourism management to achieve maximum benefits, resulting from the community process that had to jointly design the process. The results of this study are part of the restoration of tourism based on resources for income management and for local organizations to expand and upgrade tourism to the regional economic zones in the southern border provinces.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060186

Authors: Laura Arosio

This article critically examines the use of generative AI (specifically ChatGPT-4) as a tool for designing teaching materials in university courses on quantitative social research methods. It is conceived as a concept paper grounded in an illustrative, AI-assisted co-design session. The purpose is not to evaluate learning outcomes or produce generalizable empirical findings, but to develop a theory-informed analytical framework for examining AI-generated materials as epistemic artifacts. The analysis illustrates how seemingly neutral AI outputs embed specific assumptions and can actively shape the way social research is approached, intensifying constitutive methodological conventions. By critically unpacking the simulated outputs, the article proposes a framework for integrating AI-generated content into quantitative methods education as an object of critical inquiry.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060185

Authors: Vitor Gonçalves Elza Mesquita Paula Vaz Ilda Freire-Ribeiro

As part of the European Erasmus+ IM-PRO-IN-DE project, this article evaluates a qualification course in instructional design for digital learning, with particular attention to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), creative thinking and inclusive education. The study adopted a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative questionnaire data with qualitative open-ended responses and trainer observations. Twelve higher-education students participated in the course evaluation. The results show positive perceptions of the relevance of the training, especially regarding leadership, collaborative work, digital assessment and the pedagogical use of technologies. At the same time, several participants reported only partial gains in their understanding and application of UDL, indicating the need for more applied activities, structured case studies and sustained communities of practice. The article, therefore, contributes a project-based empirical evaluation of teacher preparation for inclusive digital learning, while acknowledging the limits of a small, single-course, self-report study.

Societies doi: 10.3390/soc16060184

Authors: Malcolm Richards Sarah Whitehouse Karan Vickers-Hulse Mandy Lee Jane Carter Hilary Dunford

This article describes the use of dialogue, through the format of critical conversations, as a creative and reflective anti-racist tool to develop understanding of departmental values of anti-racism, equity and social justice with colleagues across academic, technical, and leadership roles. The project focused on the development and facilitation of spaces for dialogue between staff members employed in an education department in a university in a city in the Southwest of England. Making use of concepts from Smith and Lander’s critical pedagogy and critical race theory as well as philosophy for children (P4C), we developed a framework used by adult participants to encourage the development of racial literacy through reflexive practice. More than seventy staff members were invited to attend five sessions over a six-month period. During each session, staff members were given pre-prepared stimuli designed to encourage ‘epistemological shudders’ that stimulate dialogue in relation to professional roles and responsibilities of anti-racism, equity and social justice within our working context. Each session was facilitated by two colleagues, given the agency to make use of the stimuli within the sessions in any way they chose, together with their participants. Feedback from each session was non-mandatory and informal. In this article, we capture our reflections on the processes of developing and adapting P4C within a university education department. We believe that this evolving model acts as a valuable tool for dialogues, particularly when attempting to encourage discussion of topics perceived as providing professional risk due to their sensitive and controversial status within education and more broadly.