Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080506

Authors: Robert Lekganyane Sipho Sibanda

The right to privacy is one of the fundamental human rights recognised by many countries. Privacy extends to the protection of one’s personal information, including when such information is shared for the purpose of receiving professional services. Despite the significance of protecting personal information across international communities, there is scant literature to guide compliance among social work practitioners who deal with the most vulnerable population groups. This integrative literature review sought to explore the applicability of South African privacy legislation (the Protection of Personal Information Act of 2013 (POPIA)) to social work intervention processes and practices. Data were analysed deductively following Five and Gossner’s framework. The findings revealed that POPIA relates to the indispensable social work principle of confidentiality and that it applies to social work interventions whenever personal information is involved. POPIA is central to social work practice in South Africa. It is therefore essential to develop guidelines for compliance in social work practice and for training social workers on the protection of personal information of their clients. This study contributes to knowledge by shedding some light on the importance of POPIA in social work interventions.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080505

Authors: Solvita Lodiņa Pāvels Jurs

This article systematically analyzes the problems of various social groups at many levels, studying the importance of culture in education and the social environment, and identifying research trends among world scientists over the past 5 years (2022–2026). A systematic literature review was conducted in January 2026 using the PRISMA 2020 methodology, as a result of which 109 peer-reviewed, indexed publications from Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIH+ were selected and analyzed. As a result, the most current research trend was identified to use cultural intelligence theory, measurement tools, scales, and concepts in the analysis of multi-level problems of various social groups. The main conclusion: culture in education and its social environment in the context of social groups has not been studied systematically enough; therefore, cultural intelligence measurements can contribute to the understanding of the causes of problems of various social groups involved in the educational process in four dimensions: (1) metacognitive, (2) cognitive, (3) motivational, and (4) behavioral. The development of cultural intelligence in an individual person promotes a dialogue between different social groups that is constructive, open, and based on mutual empathy. Originality of the study: a systemic analysis of multi-level problems of social groups in the context of education, culture, and social environment was carried out, determining theoretical and empirical aspects and their contradictions.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080504

Authors: Nikolett Gyurián Nagy Iveta Szencziová Sarolta Darvay Eva Tóthová Tarová

This study examines environmental orientation and environmental knowledge among the Baby Boomer generation in a Central European comparative context. The study investigates whether Baby Boomer respondents in Hungary and Slovakia differ in environmental orientation and environmental knowledge. The research is based on a quantitative questionnaire survey, including 374 Baby Boomer respondents: 188 from Hungary and 186 from Slovakia. Environmental orientation was measured using items adapted from the New Ecological Paradigm tradition. In contrast, environmental knowledge was assessed as an exploratory composite knowledge index based on selected items adapted from previously published measurement scales, covering product-related environmental knowledge and familiarity with sustainability-related terminology. Descriptive statistics, country-level comparisons, K-means cluster analysis, ANOVA, and effect-size measures were applied. The results show that Baby Boomer respondents in both countries reported relatively high levels of environmental orientation, with no statistically significant difference between countries. By contrast, environmental knowledge differed significantly, although with a small effect size, in favor of the Slovak sample. The cluster analysis further showed that Baby Boomers should not be treated as a homogeneous consumer group, as lower-, moderate-, and higher-orientation–knowledge segments were identified in both countries. The study contributes to generational sustainability research by showing that older consumers should not be evaluated solely by general pro-environmental attitudes, as positive environmental orientation may not be accompanied by the same level of sustainability-related knowledge. The findings suggest that future research and practice should not assume that positive environmental orientation among older consumers is automatically accompanied by detailed sustainability-related knowledge.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080503

Authors: Miriam Potocky

In a policy context characterized by both supportive initiatives (e.g., school-based mental health services) and enforcement-oriented approaches that may contribute to student stress, schools are increasingly tasked with addressing trauma-related needs. A rapid umbrella review was conducted on existing systematic reviews of trauma-informed school practices. The umbrella review synthesized findings from multiple systematic reviews to provide a comprehensive assessment of the evidence, identify areas of consensus or inconsistency, and explain discrepancies across studies. Fifteen reviews met the inclusion criteria of a systematic or scoping review of mental health and academic outcomes associated with trauma-informed school practices. Nine of these included studies with newcomer students. Overall, most reviews reported positive associations between trauma-informed practices and student outcomes, including reductions in trauma symptoms and behavioral problems, as well as improvements in resilience, engagement, and academic performance. Evidence was strongest for targeted clinical interventions delivered by trained mental health professionals, while classroom and schoolwide approaches showed promising but less conclusive results due to methodological limitations. Findings suggest that while trauma-informed approaches are beneficial, their implementation remains fragmented and often incremental. Greater attention to cultural, linguistic, and relational dimensions of displacement, along with improved cross-system coordination and rigorous evaluation, is needed. Trauma-informed school practices represent a promising but underdeveloped strategy for supporting newcomer students within complex and evolving policy environments.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080502

Authors: Ana Paula Feldmann Estefânia Silva

The intensification of armed conflicts has forced thousands of women to seek refuge in other countries, exposing them to conditions of heightened vulnerability, characterized by inequality, violence, and mental health challenges. Despite these adversities, refugee women demonstrate resilience through diverse coping strategies. However, qualitative research centring women’s experiences within gender-sensitive and intersectional frameworks remains limited. This study aims to characterize the experiences of forced migration among refugee women in Portugal and to explore the coping strategies they have developed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six refugee women residing in Portugal. Based on thematic analysis, the data revealed a trajectory marked by material and symbolic losses, disruption of social bonds, and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress. Motherhood emerged both as motivation and as an obstacle to social and professional integration. Participants reported various coping strategies, including social support, self-efficacy, optimism, emotional regulation, religious coping, and contemplative practices. These findings indicate that coping strategies among refugee women are shaped not only by trauma exposure, but also by gendered structural conditions in the host context. These results highlight the need for gender-sensitive and trauma-informed public policies, as well as community-based interventions to promote social integration and well-being.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080501

Authors: Mavis Sanders Sarah Klevan Summer Hopper

School systems across the United States are increasingly adopting the community school strategy to strengthen connections between schools and their surrounding communities and to better address students’ academic and nonacademic needs. This nested case study examines implementation in Hamilton County, Tennessee, using the Community Schools Forward: Essentials for Community Schools Transformation Framework to describe both district-level strategy and school-level practice. Focusing on Brainerd High School, a historically significant institution in Chattanooga, the case illustrates how coordinated supports, shared leadership, and community partnerships contribute to school improvement. Findings highlight the potential of the community school strategy to advance educational equity and strengthen school–community collaboration.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080500

Authors: Sofia Antera Simon Asplund Magnus Svartengren Therese Hellman

With activation driving labour market policy, job-seekers are often offered subsidised employment on the condition that they fulfill certain obligations, such as job searching and participating in training. Nevertheless, such initiatives often receive criticism for their ineffectiveness, and little is known about how these policies can achieve their desired results in practice. This study explores how active labour market programme participants, caseworkers and workplace supervisors perceive the feasibility, acceptability, and value of a structured development plan within an active labour market programme (ALMP). The development plan was piloted for one month in a Swedish municipality and was followed by focus group or individual interviews. The findings indicate that the development plan was perceived as strengthening structured communication among the actors, increasing awareness and reflection on development progress through the use of concrete goals; enabling the combination of long- and short-term goals, and finally, clarifying the responsibilities of various actors involved in the ALMP process. In conclusion, this study contributes to knowledge on how individualised support can be provided in a feasible and structured way, and identifies mechanisms that may support future implementation and evaluation of individualised support within ALMPs.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080499

Authors: Alessia Evans Lucy Fishleigh Dan Bowers Alexis Jones Klara Price Holly Driscoll Philip Tyson

Social activity is considered a primary factor in prolonging health and independence in later life, alongside physical activity. While population ageing reflects increasing life expectancy, the risk of living longer in poor health remains. In response to this risk, the United Kingdom developed extra-care schemes, introducing a housing and care model that combines social activities with flexible support to promote healthy and independent living in later life. Despite these potential benefits, observations that male tenants engage less with social opportunities than female tenants highlight a gap in understanding the social needs of men in care environments. This study explores how male social engagement is understood and influenced in extra-care schemes through a dual-perspective approach, combining service–user and service–provider viewpoints. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six male tenants (mean age = 84 years) and five scheme managers across four extra-care schemes. Reflexive Thematic Analysis revealed barriers to male social engagement related to gender imbalanced environments, poor health, social identity disruption, and widowhood. Conversely, group membership and reliable family involvement function as protective resources that sustain identity roles and support networks for men living in a care environment. Developing male-oriented community links and peer support initiatives within extra-care, alongside appropriate training and psychoeducation for staff and tenants, may be effective when supporting men in care settings. Future research would benefit from broader multi-stakeholder samples to address the limitations of this study.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080498

Authors: Kelly Jordan Louise Wallace Dean Fido

Despite intimate partner violence (IPV) being a global issue, research on societal attitudes focuses on victim-survivor over and above perpetrator characteristics. Across two studies, we investigated whether judgements (measured across victim blame, perceived criminality, and anticipated harm) differed as a function of perpetrator sex (male, female) and whether the perpetrator reported a general (Study 1: n = 183) or specific (physical, mental) disability (Study 2: n = 237). After controlling for variation in personality, beliefs, and demographics, we consistently observed punitive judgements (i.e., less victim blame, and higher perceived criminality and anticipated harm) for vignettes depicting the perpetrator as male and not disabled. Findings are discussed within frameworks that examine the intersection of disability and violence, and how typical depictions of perpetrators of IPV mitigate the recognition of IPV and the minimisation thereof. We call for an international, qualitative exploration into the role of disability in IPV through the experiences of victim-survivors and perpetrators, and further interrogation into how disability in this context impacts victim-blame reduction interventions, support provision, and legal system responses.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080497

Authors: Rudy S. Younes Charbel Ziade Clara Moukarzel Mirna Abboud Mzawak

Population aging is increasing across Arab countries. As a result, loneliness and social isolation among older adults have become important public health concerns due to their impact on well-being. This review aimed to examine research trends on loneliness, isolation, and well-being among older adults in Arab countries; synthesize evidence on their associations with well-being; and identify gaps and priorities for future research. A combined bibliometric analysis and systematic review was conducted. The findings indicate that research on this topic has grown substantially since 2020 but remains limited and concentrated in a small number of countries. Research on the mental health consequences of loneliness dominates the literature. Across studies, loneliness and social isolation were consistently associated with poorer mental health, lower quality of life, greater psychological distress, and adverse physical and nutritional outcomes. However, the literature largely appears to conceptualize loneliness and social isolation as individual or clinical problems, with limited attention paid to their broader social and structural determinants. Research also remains predominantly descriptive, with comparatively little focus on interventions, prevention strategies, or solution-oriented responses. This review makes suggestions for future research, including attention to social and structural factors, protective factors, and intervention-oriented approaches to loneliness and isolation in later life.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080496

Authors: Dan Valeriu Voinea

Digital gatekeeping is increasingly performed by adaptive systems that rank, sequence, package, moderate, and sometimes generate news across repeated interactions. This conceptual analysis asks two questions: how should researchers analyze these systems, and who should be responsible for their effects over time? It brings together gatekeeping theory, research on recommender systems and performative prediction, and scholarship on algorithmic accountability, and it makes three contributions. First, it describes curation through six decision functions (source eligibility, agenda and candidate formation, content generation, packaging, exposure allocation, and moderation) connected by a feedback and optimization layer. Agentic curation is treated as a high-autonomy form of adaptive curation, defined by planning ability, authority to act, reach across functions, and delay before human review, rather than as a separate technology class. Second, it defines cumulative exposure allocation as the normalized distribution of weighted exposure across sources, topics, and population groups over time, and it proposes measures of concentration, breadth, repetition, persistence, and disparity. Third, it links each curation function to the actors who control it, the bodies that oversee it, the evidence they need, the standards they apply, and the remedies they can impose. European Union and United States law illustrate the framework. The analysis shifts evaluation away from isolated outputs and short-term engagement toward patterns of visibility produced by a policy over time, and it proposes testable claims about traceability, concentration, disparity, and constrained multi-objective ranking.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080495

Authors: Sergio Mena Muñoz

The Spanish democratic transition inaugurated in 1977 an uninterrupted electoral cycle in which the campaign poster became the foremost propagandistic medium and the most immediate expression of the political culture of each moment. No longitudinal analysis has yet covered the full arc from the first democratic elections of 15 June 1977 to the general elections of 23 July 2023, nor has the transition from ideological propaganda to personalised political marketing and multiplatform communication been systematically examined across all sixteen electoral contests. This study analyses campaign posters from the Spanish general elections available in the Dipòsit Digital de Documents of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) through a mixed-methods longitudinal design that is explicitly framed as a qualitative historical–comparative interpretation supported by descriptive quantitative evidence, combining critical visual discourse analysis, semiotic image analysis, quantitative content analysis, and the historical–comparative method, applied to a representative corpus of posters from the main political parties in each contest. The findings reveal three major evolutionary stages characterised by shifts in partisan identity construction, leadership personalisation, and the progressive integration of poster imagery into multiplatform communication ecosystems. These results indicate that electoral poster design both reflects and actively shapes transformations in Spanish political culture, and that the poster retains significant strategic and symbolic relevance within contemporary digital campaign environments.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080494

Authors: Fernando Riveros-Munévar Lina María Acuña-Arango María del Carmen Docal-Millán Paola María Akl Moanack Victoria Eugenia Cabrera-García

Intimate partner violence is a public health and human rights issue that must be addressed and measured to inform care and prevention efforts. The Violence Scale (EV) is used to assess different types of violence; however, there is no evidence of its validity and reliability in Colombia, nor are there specific studies on men. Objective: To evaluate the metric properties of the Partner Violence Scale (EV, by its Spanish acronym) in men within the Colombian community context. Methodology: Content validation was carried out with expert judges and victims of partner violence. Subsequently, the EV was tested on a sample of 1293 Colombian men who had not reported/denounced partner violence. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed using rival models to evaluate the best-fitting factor structure, along with mean variance extracted analysis as an indicator of convergent validity and reliability analysis. Results: Every tested structure for organizing intimate partner violence showed adequate fit indicators (CFI > 0.95; TLI > 0.95). However, the lowest level of error was evident in the five-factor structure (psychological, physical, severe physical, economic, and sexual violence; RMSEA = 0.009; SRMR = 0.080). All items were loaded by the factor to which they belong, and all loadings were significant (p < 0.005). The extracted mean variances exceeded 40%, and there were high reliability indicators for the total test (>0.94) and for each factor (>0.70). Conclusion: The Violence Scale(EV) provides adequate evidence of validity and reliability to be used as a tool for assessing violent behaviors experienced by Colombian men. Its use is recommended as an instrument for highlighting violence that has been normalized due to the socio-cultural barriers that men face.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15080493

Authors: Carla Liliana Muñoz Reyes

This systematic review examines how students and teachers acquire, reproduce, and transform essentialist beliefs about social categories such as gender, race, class, and disability. These beliefs attribute fixed and natural characteristics to social groups, thereby contributing to the legitimization of social hierarchies from an early age. Unlike studies that focus on measuring these beliefs or analyzing their effects, this review examines the processes through which they emerge, circulate, and stabilize, especially in educational contexts. I analyzed 29 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024, identified through a systematic search in Web of Science and Scopus and reported according to PRISMA guidelines. The corpus includes experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, descriptive-comparative, and non-experimental studies, most of which use cross-sectional data. The findings were organized into three analytical dimensions: trajectories in the production of essentialist beliefs; sociocultural–institutional mechanisms of circulation and stabilization; and categorical approaches across social groups. The review shows that essentialist beliefs are not only individual cognitive dispositions, but are also shaped by educational practices, family narratives, media representations, scientific explanations, and broader sociocultural contexts. Overcoming essentialism requires not only new educational content, but also critical attention to the classificatory and epistemic frameworks through which social differences are made to appear natural, stable, and teachable.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070492

Authors: Edna Castro Wonho Jang Woon-taek Lim Stefano Tomelleri Silvia Cataldi Paulo Henrique Martins Angelica De Sena

Dominant rationalist and neoliberal frameworks have often privatized love by treating it as an intimate emotion detached from institutions, power, and collective life. This article examines when love becomes publicly consequential as a sociological force. Using an interpretive, cross-cultural, and dialogical approach, it brings into conversation three situated sociological traditions developed in Brazil, Italy, and South Korea. Rather than comparing nation-states as fixed units, the article analyses how different sociological traditions interpret shared public problems through distinct moral vocabularies and institutional contexts. Three public grammars of love emerge: struggles over inequality and ecological justice in Brazil; tensions between expertise and democratic mediation in Italy; and questions of social empathy, hyper-competition, and post-growth transformation in South Korea. Love also appears as an ambivalent force that may generate cohesion or conflict, inclusion or exclusion. The article concludes that de-privatizing love broadens sociological understanding of how emotions shape collective life and demonstrates the analytical value of dialogical engagement between sociological traditions for reconstructing the public meanings of love across different socio-political contexts.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070491

Authors: Lisa Pescara Kovach

Adolescence is marked by a heightened need for belonging, peer acceptance, and emotional validation, with disruptions linked to loneliness and psychological distress. This perspective integrates belongingness theory with emerging research on companion artificial intelligence (AI), reconceptualizing these systems as relational substitutes that simulate, but do not provide, genuine interpersonal connection. Designed to offer continuous, emotionally responsive interactions, companion AI may be particularly appealing to socially isolated youth. However, these features can foster perceived intimacy, emotional dependence, and misinterpretations of programmed responses as authentic care. Drawing on developmental research and recent case evidence, this manuscript examines how AI-mediated interactions may reinforce social withdrawal, shape expectations of relationships, and contribute to mental health risk. These findings stress the importance of understanding the developmental implications of artificial forms of connection during adolescence and describe potential policies to mitigate the likelihood of negative outcomes.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070490

Authors: Salha Mohamed Almazrouei William Charles Frick

Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in higher education institutions (HEIs) across the Gulf region despite sustained policy efforts to advance gender equity. This study examined how stakeholders perceive the relationship between gender diversity and inclusion policies and women’s leadership advancement at the University of Sharjah, UAE. Specifically, it investigated the association between perceived policy adequacy and leadership opportunities, explored how policies supported or hindered progression, and identified persistent barriers. A concurrent mixed-method cross-sectional design was employed. The study population comprised academic and administrative staff at the University of Sharjah, from whom 40 survey participants (29 women, 72.5%; 11 men, 27.5%) were invited, with all 40 completing the form, and eight were purposively selected for qualitative interviews (seven women and one man, spanning administrative, faculty, and leadership roles). Quantitative findings revealed a very strong positive correlation between perceived gender diversity policies and women’s leadership (r = 0.95, p < 0.001), with policies explaining 89.8% of the variance in leadership perceptions. However, qualitative data highlighted gaps between formal policy commitments and practice, linked to structural, managerial, and cultural constraints. The study recommends adopting gender-responsive, enforceable policies supported by accountability mechanisms, transparent promotion systems, and targeted leadership development initiatives to achieve sustainable and substantive progress.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070489

Authors: Tal Laor

Many politicians heavily leverage social media platforms to further their interests and professional goals. TikTok, the widely popular social network established in 2016, has amassed a vast user following, especially among the younger demographic known as Generation Z. This study conceptualizes it as part of a platformized political communication environment that enables direct-to-audience communication beyond traditional journalistic gatekeeping. The current study aims to analyze high-visibility TikTok content produced by active Israeli politicians by scrutinizing the best-performing videos created by politicians representing diverse political ideologies. High-visibility content refers to videos that generated relatively high engagement, exposure, and platform presence, and therefore had greater potential to influence or impact audiences compared with less visible posts. The goal is to characterize and understand the content patterns and visibility dynamics of these successful TikTok videos posted by politicians. The findings suggest that the popularity of TikTok videos posted by politicians is associated with gender, age, and political affiliation. Men, older individuals, and those with right-wing affiliations tend to create content that garners the highest levels of popularity. Moreover, a considerable proportion of the sampled high-visibility videos do not engage directly with political subject matters. This suggests that, among best-performing political TikTok posts, visibility and engagement may sometimes outweigh explicit political or ideological discourse. This implies that politicians feel compelled to participate on the platform, even when their most visible content does not specifically revolve around promoting political messages. Consequently, the findings lend cautious support to the view that platform logic shapes political visibility and communication practices, even in politicians’ use of TikTok. In doing so, this study contributes to understanding how commercial social media platforms such as TikTok shape political visibility, engagement, and direct-to-audience communication.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070488

Authors: Celeste Pang Ellie Maclennan

As shelter costs in Canada continue to rise, housing affordability and questions about what housing will be available and accessible in older age are a concern for many marginalized groups, including among LGBTQ+ older adults. This paper shares housing-related findings from a national study on aging and living well among LGBTQ+ older adults across the country, in which we conducted semi-structured interviews with 48 LGBTQ+ older adults between the ages of 64–81. In it, we elaborate four key themes: (1) housing (in)security and cost; (2) housing safety; (3) how to age in place; and (4) mixed perspectives on shared housing models, and discuss systemic and social changes needed to support access to housing that is affordable, accessible, predictable, and safe for LGBTQ+ older adults that will enable them to age in the “right place”.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070487

Authors: Hung Sy Ho Hien Van Pham

Early childhood education (ECE) in Vietnam remains a heavily feminized profession, deeply influenced by traditional gender stereotypes. This study employs an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, involving a survey of 256 male teachers and 12 in-depth interviews, to examine their career motivations and professional commitment. Regression analysis reveals that gender stereotypes (β = 0.585, p < 0.001) and professional experiences (β = 0.249, p < 0.001) are the primary predictors of commitment. Findings highlight a significant paradox: despite high intrinsic motivation and positive perceptions of institutional equity, long-term commitment remains low due to persistent societal prejudice and “hyper-visibility” pressure. The study concludes that while schools provide a supportive institutional environment, sustainable workforce diversification requires both institutional and societal efforts to address persistent gender stereotypes. The findings suggest that strengthening the recruitment and retention of male preschool teachers depends on promoting inclusive professional cultures, reducing gender-based stigma, and ensuring that professional recognition and career development opportunities are grounded in demonstrated competencies rather than gendered assumptions. These findings contribute to contemporary debates on gender, professional identity, and workforce diversity in early childhood education.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070486

Authors: Cristina Ruiz-Camacho Margarita Gozalo

Academic stress is a major concern in higher education, but less is known about whether coping strategies mediate the links between specific academic stressors and stress responses in male and female students. This cross-sectional study examined, by gender, whether planning, positive reappraisal, and support seeking mediated three associations: exams with sleep disturbances, beliefs about performance with negative thoughts, and academic overload with physical exhaustion. Participants were 1014 undergraduates from a Spanish public university (35.5% men, 64.5% women; Mage = 20.56, SD = 3.50), who completed the Academic Stress Questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations were computed by gender, and three parallel mediation models were tested separately for men and women using PROCESS with 5000 bootstrap samples. Academic stressors were positively associated with their corresponding stress responses in both gender groups, and direct effects remained significant in all models. Indirect effects showed differentiated patterns: positive reappraisal mediated the exams–sleep disturbances and overload–physical exhaustion associations in men, and the beliefs about performance–negative thoughts association in both groups. Support seeking mediated all three associations in women, whereas planning showed no significant indirect effects. These findings support a gender-stratified understanding of academic stress and suggest that interventions should avoid assuming uniform coping pathways, instead strengthening positive reappraisal and social support resources according to the academic demands and stress responses involved.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070485

Authors: Michela Martini

This paper examines how sequenced cross-border health initiatives may contribute to confidence-building and, ultimately, serve as catalyst toward more coherent cross-border migration-related governance in North Africa. Using a practice-based case study approach, it analyzes a series of regional processes implemented in 2024 and 2025 by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (WHO EMRO) and Africa CDC, including two technical workshops in Tunis, a sub-regional simulation exercise in Cairo, and a Mediterranean Forum. The analysis draws on process documentation, institutional outputs, and the authors’ direct involvement in these initiatives to trace how repeated technical engagement supported procedural alignment and the gradual building of confidence for cross-border collaboration. Key outputs included a draft operational plan, a technical white paper, and regional policy recommendations. The paper argues that, in politically sensitive migration settings, cross-border health cooperation—jointly engaging ministries of health, interior, and foreign affairs—can provide an entry point for dialogue, joint problem-solving, and confidence-building across countries and sectors, thereby enhancing collaborative governance. While such collaboration does not directly determine migration policy, it may contribute to health diplomacy efforts that foster a more coherent governance environment capable of supporting safer, more orderly, and better-coordinated migration processes. Although several operational questions remain unresolved and more studies are need it, this paper seeks to open further dialogue and encourage new evidence and reflection on the potential role of health as a catalyst for collaborative governance and confidence-building between countries.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070484

Authors: Massimo Arnone Angelo Leogrande Carlo Drago Alberto Costantiello Fabio Anobile

This paper empirically examines the impact of various variables on Perceived Risk of Crime (PRC) for Italian regions in the period of 2004–2022 using data collected in the framework of the Benessere Equo e Sostenibile (BES, Equitable and Sustainable Well-being) questionnaire conducted by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). The econometric analysis of the relationship is based on panel regressions (including fixed-, random-, and dynamic-effects estimations). Moreover, weighted least squares regression and machine learning algorithms are used as robustness checks. The results of the empirical estimation reveal the importance of both objective and subjective factors as drivers of PRC. The main positive influences on PRC are provided by pickpocketing cases and fear of crime, while generalized and judicial systems’ trust is negatively related to PRC. Additionally, future pessimism and dissatisfaction with the local environment contribute to higher levels of perceived risk. The analysis of the machine learning model confirms the reliability of the principal outcomes and shows the high accuracy of regularized linear regression as a forecasting tool. The clusters identified through the cluster analysis reflect region-specific differences in crime exposure, institutional trust, well-being, and perceptions of security. In summary, perceived insecurity depends not only on actual crimes but also on the combination of crime exposure, emotions and feelings, institutional trust, and the environment. Therefore, a multidimensional approach should be applied for developing an effective strategy aimed at preventing the risks associated with crimes.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070483

Authors: Joaquín Castillo de Mesa Paula Méndez-Domínguez Tania Pérez García

Community social services play a crucial role as the main gateway to welfare systems. However, increasing demand, organizational complexity, and limited adaptive capacity have generated growing difficulties in ensuring timely and equitable access to support. This study examines the organizational barriers affecting access to community social services and explores the role of triage as an organizational innovation. A qualitative case study was conducted at the Community Social Services Centre of Benalmádena City Council (Spain). Data were collected through focus groups, Customer Journey Mapping exercises, and Design Thinking workshops involving social workers, administrative staff, managers, and external experts, and were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that access barriers arise from a systemic configuration of organizational dysfunctions rather than from resource scarcity alone. Six interconnected themes were identified: fragmented access pathways, the absence of prioritization mechanisms, demand duplication and appointment absenteeism, organizational bottlenecks related to professional role distribution, fragmented information systems, and the emergence of triage as an organizational innovation. These factors generate cumulative effects that reduce organizational responsiveness and hinder access to services. The study concludes that triage should be understood as part of a broader process of organizational redesign aimed at improving demand management, prioritization, and coordination, highlighting the need for systemic organizational transformation to enhance access to social services.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070482

Authors: Aemro Tazeze Terefe Steven Henry Dunga

South Africa has implemented an extensive social grant system to improve the wellbeing of vulnerable households. However, evidence remains limited regarding the pathways through which social grants are associated with household food insecurity and whether these relationships vary across geographical contexts of South Africa. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for designing more effective and spatially targeted social protection policies. This study examined the relationship between social grant receipt and household food insecurity, hypothesizing that household income serves as the principal pathway linking social grants to food insecurity. This study used nationally representative data from the 2024 General Household Survey. A latent food insecurity index was constructed using a two-parameter logistic Item Response Theory model, and a moderated-mediation structural equation model was employed to decompose the association between social grant receipt and food insecurity into direct and indirect components while accounting for geographic heterogeneity. The results indicate that social grants are strongly targeted toward households with higher levels of food insecurity and lower incomes, confirming that grant recipients are among the most vulnerable households in South Africa. Household income was negatively associated with food insecurity and mediated 55.4% of the total association between social grant receipt and household food insecurity. This underscores income as the main transmission pathway. High geographic heterogeneity was observed. The indirect income-mediated association was strongest in commercial farming areas, followed by urban and rural areas administered by local leaders. The direct association was significant in urban and rural areas administered by local leaders. These results show that the effectiveness of income transfers depends on the household’s demographic and socioeconomic conditions. The findings suggest that although social grants play an important role in reducing household vulnerability, cash support alone is insufficient to address household food insecurity among disadvantaged households in South Africa. Therefore, strengthening income support provided through social grants should be complemented by location-specific interventions that expand employment opportunities, improve market access, promote productive asset accumulation, and strengthen local food systems, particularly in rural areas where constraints continue to limit household food security.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070481

Authors: Mohammed Saleh Alkathiri Ismail Mohammed Ali Alnabrawi

This study examines alignment between higher education graduate output and observed labor market demand in Saudi Arabia using aggregated quantitative data. Drawing on graduate supply data from Saudi universities for the period 2021–2023 and job advertisement data from the first quarter of 2025 (Q1 2025), the study employs descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and exploratory regression analysis to document quantitative surpluses and shortages across fields of study. The findings indicate a positive but not significant association between graduate output and advertised job demand across matched fields of study (r = 0.486, p = 0.155), while also revealing noticeable quantitative imbalances, including oversupply in some non-technical disciplines and shortages in health-, engineering-, and service-related fields. The analysis further highlights sectoral and geographic concentration of job demand, suggesting structural patterns in how labor market opportunities are distributed across regions and sectors. Rather than implying causal relationships, the results provide a descriptive empirical basis to inform discussions on higher education planning, workforce alignment, and curriculum responsiveness within the context of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing education and labor market reforms under Vision 2030.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070480

Authors: Anna Alajbeg

The contemporary educational system places complex demands on educators, emphasizing the importance of pedagogical-didactical competencies and teacher self-efficacy alongside subject-matter expertise. The purpose of this study was to examine how future STEM educators assess their own perceived pedagogical-didactical capabilities for direct teaching and classroom management through the construct of teacher self-efficacy, examining variations by gender, student cohort, and academic major. The research was conducted in autumn 2025 using a near-census sample of graduate teaching track students at the Faculty of Science in Split, utilizing the Norwegian Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale. The descriptive and non-parametric results indicate that future teachers express higher baseline scores in the domains of instruction and coping with changes, whereas the lowest self-assessment was recorded regarding the adaptation of teaching to individual student needs. While gender and student cohort demonstrated no statistically significant impact on overall self-efficacy, a significant difference was determined in the domain of maintaining discipline with respect to the study major, with Informatics and Technology students exhibiting the greatest sense of confidence. In conclusion, the findings highlight that while students are well-prepared for content delivery, there remains a critical need to enhance initial teacher education programs by introducing practical tools for managing challenging student behaviors and working within heterogeneous classrooms.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070479

Authors: Mary Elizabeth Kennedy

Global migration and labour market pressures have increased transnational mobility in social work, as practitioners move across borders to meet workforce demand. This paper examines how professional regulation interacts with workforce shortages and transnational mobility, using Ireland as a case study. A regulatory dilemma arises from the absence of standardised international reference points for comparing social work education, training, roles, and regulation. Where applicants’ qualifications and practice experience do not align with national standards, additional requirements may be imposed, delaying entry into practice. Focusing on applicants from the U.K., U.S., Zimbabwe, and India, identified as principal countries of origin among internationally qualified social workers in Ireland, analysis shows how differences in regulatory structure, education, and role definition shape the assessment of equivalence and extend pathways to registration. The paper determines that this dilemma cannot be resolved by regulators and must be addressed at the level of the profession. It proposes identifying shared core content within existing social work education, using patterns in recognition decisions to inform targeted curriculum development, and creating standardised country profiles describing social work roles to support more consistent interpretation of international experience.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070478

Authors: Jenni Putz

This paper evaluates the impact of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP), a federal classroom-based nutrition program, on elementary schools in Illinois. Using a staggered difference-in-differences framework that accounts for schools moving in and out of funding status, I examine how classroom-based school nutrition programs influence school-level behavioral and academic outcomes. I find that FFVP funding increases school attendance rates, but there are no changes to standardized test scores or disciplinary referrals. These findings suggest that fresh food incentives successfully improve school attendance but are limited in their ability to change trajectories in standardized testing or student conduct.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070477

Authors: Xing Wang Sue Lyn Ong Nurafiq Inani Man

Despite increasing scholarly attention to short-video platforms as tourism communication tools, the mechanism through which sustainability-oriented persuasive cues shape Sustainable Tourism Intention remains insufficiently theorized. This article integrates the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework to explain how short-video persuasive cues may influence Sustainable Tourism Intention through Environmental Attitude. Methodologically, the paper adopts a theory synthesis and conceptual integration approach to connect insights from short-video persuasion, sustainability communication, environmental attitude research, and tourism intention studies. The framework treats short-video sustainability communication as a cue-dense persuasive environment, identifies key cue families, organizes selected cues according to likely central/peripheral processing tendencies, and positions Environmental Attitude as the sustainability-specific organismic evaluative state through which cue exposure translates into intention. It proposes that both central route-oriented and peripheral route-oriented cues may strengthen Environmental Attitude and may thereby shape Sustainable Tourism Intention, although they do so through different processing tendencies. The article concludes that integrating ELM and SOR provides a clearer and more bounded explanation of short-video sustainability persuasion and offers a structured basis for future empirical research.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070476

Authors: Kris Gledhill

Case law illustrates both the complexity of the regimes in England and Wales whereby children may be deprived of their liberty for welfare reasons and the inadequacy of provision to meet complex needs, which has led to a significant use of the power of the High Court to order a Deprivation of Liberty in unsuitable places. Calls have been made for legislative reform and less use of detention. Assuming human rights compliance will be a feature of a new framework, this article examines how the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), as illuminated by the comments of its expert Treaty Body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee), provides useful material as to the contents of a suitable legislative framework. Also outlined is how the CRPD has value under the rights framework most often referenced in the UK, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070475

Authors: Ana Nestorovic Marie-Therese Antoinette Claes

This article examines how institutional arrangements shape exploitative labour conditions among highly skilled international professionals, challenging prevailing assumptions that labour exploitation primarily affects low-skilled or irregular workers. Focusing on international professionals living and working in Vienna, the study addresses a central paradox of contemporary migration governance: while states and cities actively compete for global talent, they simultaneously reproduce exploitative conditions: legal, organisational, and identity-based constraints that limit labour mobility, weaken bargaining power, and suppress rights mobilisation. The analysis draws on Social Identity Theory, the Skill Paradox, and the concept of Legal consciousness to examine how highly skilled migrants experience labour market entry, wage-setting, and workplace inequality under conditions of legal dependency and institutional regulation. Empirically, the study is based on 42 semi-structured interviews with highly skilled international professionals and 17 expert interviews with representatives of Austrian labour market institutions and non-governmental organisations, complemented by secondary institutional data. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies three interrelated mechanisms sustaining exploitative conditions: (1) conditional labour market entry through the systematic downgrading of foreign qualifications; (2) legal and institutional dependency that discourages rights awareness and rights mobilisation; and (3) intersectional wage penalties disproportionately affecting women and non-national professionals. The findings demonstrate labour market conditions that exhibit several characteristics associated with labour exploitation. Labour conditions among highly skilled international professionals are not primarily the result of overt coercion or illegality but are structurally produced through migration regimes, credential recognition practices, and uneven access to legal protection. These mechanisms position skilled migrants along a continuum of labour exploitation characterised by restricted mobility, economic compulsion, and suppressed labour market conflict. By conceptualizing what can be reasonably interpreted as exploitative labour arrangements as an institutional outcome rather than an individual failure, the article contributes to debates on skilled migration, labour market inequality, and migration governance, highlighting the need for policy reforms that better align talent attraction strategies with labour rights, legal empowerment, and social justice.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070474

Authors: Elizabeth Such Mollie Gordon Phuong Thanh Nguyen Lila Pavey Jenna Hopson Alys McAlpine Habiba Aminu Frances Recknor

Human trafficking is a complex global problem maintained by a web of interacting individual, community, national and international factors. Its complexity is not always robustly addressed in policy, practice and research, with issues commonly approached in silos. This commentary creates the case for more intentional application of systems thinking in the counter-trafficking field. We do this by describing some of the origins of a more systemic focus in counter-trafficking work including the emergence of public health approaches, survivor- or lived-experience leadership and developments in the research domain. We then provide three case examples of how a systems lens has been applied in research, in policy and in practice across three countries, the UK, Canada and the US. We conclude with reflections on the promise of and challenges for systems thinking and a call to action for more systems-informed counter-trafficking work.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070473

Authors: Buuma Maisha

Sexual violence is one of the most traumatic forms of interpersonal violence [...]

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070472

Authors: Kar Hoong Chan Kah Boon Lim Siew Kim Tan Tuan Hock Ng Tze Wei Liew Vincent Boon Seng Lim

This study examines the moderating role of environmental connectedness in the relationship between environmental attitude and environmental protection intention among Generation Z polytechnic students in Singapore. A cross-sectional survey across five polytechnics yielded 709 valid responses, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to assess both direct and moderating effects. Findings confirm that environmental attitude significantly and positively influences environmental protection intention. However, environmental connectedness did not moderate this relationship, suggesting that in dense urban environments, cognitive attitudes may have a stronger impact than affective ties to nature. This study offers novel insights by extending the Theory of Planned Behaviour to include emotional constructs within an Asian urban setting, highlighting how limited nature exposure may weaken the role of affective factors. While the cross-sectional design and convenience sampling limit causal inference and generalisability, the findings align with national trends, as government agencies and educational institutions have intensified efforts to cultivate environmental awareness through green curricula and co-curricular programmes. These findings indicate that interventions such as curriculum redesign and gamification aimed at shaping environmental attitudes may be more effective than strategies relying solely on emotional engagement with nature, thereby supporting Singapore’s climate goals and fostering responsible urban citizenship.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070471

Authors: Plata S. Diesen

This article examines how single parents in Norway approach dating apps as they re-enter romantic life, by asking: How do single parents in midlife approach and anticipate intimacy on dating apps in Norway? The analysis draws on interviews with 10 mothers and 12 fathers, aged 32–51, and applies a reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that entering dating apps was experienced as an affective hurdle, tied to recovery from family breakup and ambivalence about visibility. Dating apps offered a feasible route to intimacy, as offline encounters were otherwise constrained by time scarcity, limited social networks, and social entanglements through overlapping parental and friendship ties. The concept of parental filtering is introduced to describe how participants screened through dating apps for compatibility in custody schedules and parental empathy, using bios and chats as communicative shortcuts. The findings highlight a central paradox of post-separation intimacy: while romantic relationships may be reversible, parenthood is not. Intimate life as a single parent, therefore, requires a particular form of elasticity, as romantic opportunities must continuously adjust to the solid bonds to their children—a commitment that no swipe can dissolve.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070470

Authors: Fitri Mutia Alf Arira Ananta Aysya Faisal Fahmi Ragil Tri Atmi

Large language models (LLMs) have become central to how people access and interact with information, yet their potential to reproduce ableist bias remains underexamined, especially in non-English-language settings. This study examines disability representation in LLM-generated outputs across English and Bahasa Indonesia using a hybrid analytical framework. A total of 360 responses were generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot through a factorial prompt design varying disability type, socioeconomic class, and language. The proposed analysis combined lexicon-based sentiment analysis, topic modeling, qualitative thematic analysis (three analysts), and consensus-based human ableism scoring. The results show that positive sentiment dominated across both languages but did not reliably indicate non-ableist representation. Ableist classifications were most concentrated in lower socioeconomic class condition, with schizophrenia-related prompts and Gemini-generated outputs showing the highest proportions of ableist classifications across disability types and LLMs, respectively. Theme-level analysis showed that ableism was most prevalent in responses framing disability through sensory overload, mobility barriers, and uneven professional access in negative sentiment outputs, and through life trajectories, aspirations, and participation shaped by socioeconomic access in positive sentiment outputs. Overall, ableist bias appeared intersectionally across socioeconomic class and disability type, with the proposed hybrid framework providing a more sensitive approach for identifying ableist representation in AI-generated text.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070469

Authors: Charlotte Feather

There is a growing body of research examining the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) teachers in schools. However, limited empirical attention has been given to those in the early stages of their careers, particularly within the UK context, where historical and legislative dynamics continue to shape school cultures. This article addresses this gap by exploring how queer early-career teachers (QECTs) construct and navigate their personal and professional identities within heteronormative and cisnormative school environments. Drawing on a qualitative narrative inquiry with three UK-based QECTs, the study analyses written biographical narratives and semi-structured interviews using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings identify three interconnected processes shaping identity navigation: preventative barriers (including anticipated judgement, self-surveillance, and performative regulation), community as a site of affirmation and restoration, and a negotiated sense of freedom understood as context-dependent agency rather than full disclosure. The study argues that identity formation for QECTs is not a linear progression towards authenticity, but an ongoing negotiation shaped by power, precarity, and relational safety. In doing so, it extends existing research by foregrounding early-career status as a critical factor in queer teacher identity work and contributes a conceptual framing of “negotiated authenticity” within professional contexts. The article concludes by considering implications for professional sustainability, belonging, and inclusive school cultures.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070468

Authors: Javier Pacheco-Mangas Irene Soledad Estrada-Moreno Ana Laura López-Carlassare María de las Olas Palma-García

This article analyses the documentary institutional architecture of community social services in Spain through a comparative study of 15 autonomous communities, with particular attention to the formal conditions of institutional sustainability. Its aim is to examine how multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience are articulated in the regional configuration of the system. To this end, a documentary corpus was constructed from three official primary sources: regional social services laws, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, and current strategic plans or equivalent instruments. The findings suggest that, at the documentary level, territorial variation is not explained solely by the age of the framework law, but rather by the degree of institutional closure achieved among regulation, the specification of benefits and services, and strategic planning. Autonomous communities with a more complete law–catalogue–plan sequence display more consistent institutional architectures, whereas deficits in any of these links increase documentary and strategic fragmentation. Likewise, digitalisation appears uneven across territories, and its institutional usefulness depends on whether digital tools are integrated into shared information systems and accessible to both professionals and citizens. Institutional resilience is examined through documentary markers such as planning, evaluation, coordination, organisational learning and adaptation mechanisms. The article concludes that, from a documentary institutional perspective, community social services appear more robust when regulation, planning, digital tools and multilevel coordination are articulated in a coherent and stable way.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070467

Authors: Huey Shyh Tan Heidi Yeen Ju Tan Soon Hin Hew

The rapid growth of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) has intensified information disorder, highlighting the need for comprehensive Media and Information Literacy (MIL) education. While game-based approaches are increasingly explored in MIL, research has largely focused on student outcomes, with limited attention to teachers’ and facilitators’ experiences of implementing non-digital experiential learning interventions, despite the critical role of facilitation and reflection helping learners navigate information environments. This study adopts a qualitative exploratory design to explore teachers’ and facilitators’ perspectives on a board game-based experiential learning intervention for MIL in Malaysian educational settings. Grounded in Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and social constructivist principles, the board game was designed to simulate real-world media dynamics, such as information circulation, audience influence, and ethical decision-making. Data were collected through four open-ended teacher feedback forms and one face-to-face semi-structured reflective group interview involving eight facilitators, and analysed using thematic analysis. Four themes emerged: (1) perceived pedagogical value for supporting learner engagement, critical discussion, and applied understanding of MIL concepts; (2) observed experiential and social learning processes characterised by peer interaction, negotiation, and reflection; and (3) implementation challenges related to facilitation demands, time constraints, and balancing competition with learning objectives and (4) recommendations for enhancing implementation. Findings highlight the importance of teacher facilitation and reflective debriefing in transforming gameplay into meaningful MIL learning experiences and reveal key implementation challenges.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070466

Authors: Adeline Otto Saskia De Bruyn Birgit Goris

Climate change risks deepening social inequalities and poses new challenges for social policy. Drawing on climate justice, this article examines how climate impacts and policies are experienced by people living in poverty situations and by social workers, how their knowledge by experience and professional practice circulates in local climate policy-making, and how social workers understand their role in promoting climate justice. Based on qualitative interviews with people experiencing poverty, social workers, and local policy officials in three Flemish municipalities, the study shows that vulnerable groups experience climate injustice as a combination of disadvantages, misrecognition, and limited influence over policy agendas. While experiential knowledge is widely acknowledged as valuable, it remains weakly integrated in policy processes and is often channelled indirectly or introduced only after key decisions, reflecting persistent epistemic marginalisation. These patterns can be explained by the interaction of dominant policy framings, unequal power relations, and institutional arrangements that privilege technical expertise. Together, these dynamics highlight both the strategic importance and structural constraints of social work as a mediating actor and point to the need for institutional arrangements that enable earlier, more substantive, and more direct integration of experiential or practice-based knowledge.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070465

Authors: Mary Mendenhall Kemigisha Richardson Sarah Etzel Tiffany Tryon Whitney Hough

In forced displacement contexts, refugee education is often governed through hybrid arrangements that blend national education systems with humanitarian financing and bordering regimes. While scholarship typically focuses on student enrollment and learning outcomes, less attention has been paid to how education is governed through teachers’ work and compensation. This study integrates and compares data from three interrelated research studies, including a multi-country mixed-methods study, a global donor mapping, and a focused case study of South Sudan. Drawing on teacher interviews and focus groups, along with key informant interviews with donors, UN agencies, and stakeholders, we examine how compensation policies affect teachers’ lives. The findings reveal that differentiated systems produce profound inequities. Refugee teachers are largely excluded from national payrolls and are governed through humanitarian “incentive” schemes that normalize precarity and mask long-term state responsibility. We argue that teacher compensation operates as a mechanism of “policying and policing” within the broader architecture of refugee education governance.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070464

Authors: Victor Andres Ayma Quirita Walter Aliaga Victor Hugo Ayma Quirita Juan David Cárdenas

In this study, we conduct an exploratory and econometric assessment of the multidimensional impact of recent immigration, predominantly Venezuelan, on Peru (2000–2022). Utilizing 4565 time-series indicators, we apply a two-stage methodology: Pearson correlations to identify baseline exploratory associations, followed by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) with temporal controls and First Differences models to isolate genuine structural effects from time-trend artifacts and spurious correlations. Econometric validation refines oversimplified public narratives. Socially, immigration robustly correlates with increased food insecurity, localized detainments, and a reduced youth demographic, while aggregate crime complaints are identified as a time-trend artifact. Economically, migration structurally stimulates income for the poorest 40% and broadens financial inclusion, despite negatively impacting aggregate macroeconomic consumption. Educationally, the influx of skilled migrants robustly drives scientific publications and increases average formal education years, though it introduces challenges like delayed primary school attendance and a negative shift in educational gender parity. Finally, perceived impacts on central government expenditures and consumption tax revenues are econometrically isolated as either time-trend artifacts or spurious correlations rather than direct migratory consequences. This approach separates true structural responses from historical inertia, providing a balanced, quantitative perspective on migration in Peru.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070463

Authors: Mónica María Cortés Gallego Alejandro Pérez y Soto Domínguez Débora Elizabeth Hernández Pérez

Colombian public policy directed at women as mothers and workers between 1960 and 2025 does not constitute a cumulative expansion of rights but a dialectic of recognition that operates against effective emancipation. This article develops a phenomenological reading of that trajectory from Hegel, Honneth, and Han. Four figures of state consciousness are identified: the tutelary mother (1960–1974), the abstract worker (1974–1991), the differentiated rights-bearing subject (1991–2010), and the administered contradiction (2010–2025). Drawing on legislative reconstruction (12 laws, 11 Constitutional Court rulings), official statistical series (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística [DANE], Profamilia, International Labour Organization [ILO]), and phenomenological interpretation, the analysis demonstrates that each figure emerges from the negation of the previous one without suppressing it, reproducing the split between Honnethian spheres of recognition as the operative mode of the peripheral capitalist state. The fourth figure is analyzed through Han’s burnout society: the mother–worker who has internalized the demand to reconcile productive and reproductive roles embodies the achievement-subject who self-exploits in the name of freedom. Colombia’s fertility collapse to 1.2 children per woman in 2023 may be read as an indication that the dialectic has reached a demographic threshold. The central thesis holds that state mediation without synthesis is not institutional deficiency but a mode of governance that reveals a structural limit of recognition theory.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070462

Authors: Crystal Kwan Xiqing Huang

By 2030, older workers (55–64) will comprise a quarter of the global labour force, making their retirement a critical policy concern. Yet, a gap remains regarding how informal caregiving shapes early retirement for economically vulnerable “ALICE” (Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed) populations. This qualitative descriptive study explores this intersection in Hong Kong through a theoretical framework integrating linked lives to highlight relational drivers of workforce exit, cumulative disadvantage to contextualize lifelong financial precarity, and the resource-based dynamic perspective to explain how fluctuating resources impact adjustment. A purposive subset of eight primary caregivers was selected for separate analysis from a broader study of 51 working-poor early retirees to specifically examine the intense physical and economic strains unique to full-time eldercare. We identified five themes through reflexive thematic analysis of interview data: (1) caregiving as a primary driver of early retirement; (2) adjusting to the loss of work and value; (3) life on standby; (4) anxiety over the future; and (5) multi-layered resources for adjustment. These findings illustrate how deeply caregiving can complicate the retirement transition for this demographic. Moving forward, a multilevel approach—integrating individual and environmental resources—can help address these complex challenges and inform practice and policy, such as strengthening community-level supports and statutory leave.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070461

Authors: Federica Floridi Rosario Aprile Marco Palmieri

In what ways can social love be characterized within both micro and macro contexts? This study addresses this question by exploring social love using the World Love Index (WLI) as an analytical tool. The index is articulated into two levels, the Citizens’ WLI and the Institutions’ WLI, corresponding respectively to the micro and macro levels of analysis. Both indices are based on a stipulative definition of social love that comprises four constituent dimensions and are constructed from secondary data from approximately 90 countries worldwide. The WLI indices are analyzed using regression models incorporating contextual variables to identify the main factors that promote or hinder social love. A cluster analysis is also conducted to identify and characterize groups of countries with similar configurations of social love, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070460

Authors: Elena Macchioni Isabella Crespi

This article examines the persistent gap between the formal recognition of work–life balance (WLB) policies and their effective implementation in Italy, within the broader European framework of gender equality. It adopts a multi-level approach that integrates the analysis of EU policy developments—particularly Directive (EU) 2019/1158—with pandemic-related dynamics and organizational practices The study is based on a combined methodology, including policy analysis, recent statistical evidence, and an original empirical dataset on corporate initiatives, focusing on the Code of Corporate Self-Regulation on Maternity. The findings indicate that, despite significant regulatory advances, structural, cultural, and institutional constraints continue to limit the accessibility and uptake of WLB measures in Italy. These shortcomings were further exacerbated during the pandemic, which intensified unpaid care burdens and reinforced traditional gender roles. Company initiatives show uneven levels of engagement and are often driven by organizational capacity rather than a substantive commitment to gender equality. Overall, the study highlights that the effectiveness of WLB policies depends on the interaction between institutional capacity, cultural norms, and governance arrangements. It concludes that bridging the gap between formal rights and everyday practices requires a shift toward integrated strategies based on social investment, coordinated governance, and shared responsibility.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070459

Authors: Catur Nugroho Kavitha Balakrishnan Astri Wulandari Muhamad Nastain Ruth Mei Ulina Malau Chandra Satya Bintara

This study examines how Indonesian university students negotiate the meanings of extremism and tolerance across digital and campus environments. Using phenomenology, the research examines the lived experiences of 35 students from Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, and Bandung to understand how digital platforms, everyday interactions, and symbolic practices mediate their religious identity work. The analysis applies Castells’ concept of communication power and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and symbolic power to explore how digital platforms shape ideological narratives and emotional framing. Key Findings reveal that extremism is experienced not merely as ideological deviation but as a communicative rupture—manifested through coercive discourse, exclusionary framing, and digitally amplified moral authority—while tolerance emerges as a socially cultivated practice embedded in relational norms, affective positioning, and strategic self-presentation in mediated environments. Social media functions simultaneously as a site of exposure, contestation, and subtle resistance, enabling students to reframe, soften, or oppose dominant narratives through micro-activism and selective curation. This study offers a novel contribution by integrating data-driven phenomenological insights with a theory-driven account of mediated power, demonstrating how symbolic power circulates through digital infrastructures and shapes the cultural politics of religious pluralism among youth in contemporary Indonesia.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070458

Authors: Altea Lenarduzzi Vaccaro

Men’s incarceration disrupts their intimate relationships by destabilising their masculine identity built on autonomy, virility, and the role of the provider. This article examines how incarcerated men respond to this destabilisation within their intimate relationships and how penal policies shape these responses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in prisons in France and Spain, this article combines participant observation with semi-structured interviews involving incarcerated men and prison professionals. The analysis shows that incarceration initially produces jealousy among incarcerated individuals and drives attempts to control female partners, as men seek to reassert their threatened masculine position within the relationship—a trend observed across both countries. However, these dynamics develop differently in each country over time. In France, the state’s limited and inconsistent implementation of policies addressing gender and violence against women allows control-oriented practices within couples to persist, often taking the form of coercive control. In Spain, by contrast, gender-focused prison policies and rehabilitation programs aim to foster emotional reflexivity and self-regulation, leading to incarcerated individuals seeking to gain control over their self rather than their romantic partners. These findings suggest that prison policies shape men’s intimate relationships and may contribute to reducing violent behaviours and fostering more respectful forms of intimacy.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070457

Authors: Samer Bakkour

The refugee rentier state seeks to manipulate mass population movements to obtain economic and political/strategic ‘rents’, asserting itself in a way that challenges the premises of Global South marginality, disempowerment and exclusion within the international system. This article develops the concept of the refugee rentier state, which it understands as a political economy framework for analysing how host states transform refugee populations into sources of bargaining power within asymmetric systems of global governance, while showing how this “trading” feeds into economic vulnerabilities and exclusions associated with forced labour arrangements. It shows how refugee hosting can function as a strategic asset through which states extract economic and political/strategic rents from wealthier counterparts. Drawing on Turkey’s engagement with the European Union in the European refugee “crisis”, the article examines how refugee rentier strategies operate within, rather than outside, established migration governance regimes, giving rise to economic informality and partial labour market integration. In applying the rentier state model to EU–Turkey interactions, it situates refugee rentierism within the structural logic of EU migration externalisation and the institutional weaknesses of international refugee protection, while considering how they feed into the vulnerability of displaced populations, and specifically exposure to economic exclusion and marginalisation within transit countries.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070456

Authors: Andreas B. J. Metzner-Szigeth

This article develops a conceptual framework for applied social-scientific research and advisory practice on safety culture in complex socio-technical systems. It starts with the observation that contemporary safety problems increasingly require forms of analysis that go beyond technical reliability and managerial control. Existing approaches to safety remain fragmented across engineering, management, and social science, often treating safety either as a technical design problem, a compliance issue, or a measurable organizational attitude. Against this background, the article argues that a practice-theoretical perspective can help integrate these approaches by understanding safety culture as an emergent configuration of meanings, routines, communication patterns, responsibilities, and situated professional practices. Particular attention is given to the risk paradox as it unfolds in critical infrastructures and safety-related organizations, where communication about possible failure is necessary for safety but may also generate anxiety, resistance, or mistrust. The central claim is that professional practice mediates between safety culture and organizational reliability: safety cultures become effective only insofar as they are enacted through communication, coordination, judgment, reporting, learning, and responsibility. On this basis, the article derives analytical dimensions for empirical research, organizational diagnosis, and advisory work aimed at cultivating reliable performance under conditions of uncertainty.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070455

Authors: Bruna Fonseca Macarena Valenzuela

Latin America has experienced rapid evangelical growth, yet this expansion has not produced a stable religious cleavage comparable to those observed in Europe or the United States. This article examines Jair Bolsonaro’s relationship with evangelical electoral support in Brazil, asking how an evangelical voter base emerged around him during his seventh campaign for federal deputy and whether this support endured in the presidential election that brought him to office. It argues that Bolsonaro’s evangelical support should be understood not as the product of a unilateral electoral strategy, but as an adaptive alignment with a broader reconfiguration of Brazil’s political and religious environment. Combining quantitative and qualitative evidence, the study analyzes the territorial distribution of evangelicals and Bolsonaro’s legislative vote in Rio de Janeiro, identifies a shift in support in evangelical-rich municipalities beginning in 2014, examines individual-level voting-intention surveys from the 2018 presidential election, and analyzes Bolsonaro’s parliamentary speeches and social media discourse. The findings show that evangelical support developed through discursive repositioning, ties to religious leaders, moral appeals, and opportunities created by party-system crisis and religious brokerage. The article contributes to debates on cleavages, political incorporation, and conservative representation.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070454

Authors: Feyissa Israel Fisseha

This article examines how media discourse in South Korea constructed Filipino caregivers as a legitimate yet conditional solution to the country’s care crisis. Moving beyond approaches that treat media coverage as a neutral reflection of policy debate, it analyzes news discourse as part of the broader politics of immigrant integration, showing how narratives of care, foreignness, affordability, and utility helped define the terms under which migrant caregivers could be welcomed. Drawing on a qualitative discourse analysis of English- and Korean-language newspaper coverage, the article traces how Filipino caregivers were alternately represented as desirable care providers, disciplined service workers, classed household resources, and ultimately precarious migrants whose social legitimacy remained revocable. The findings show that media and policy languages worked together to normalize a form of conditional belonging in which migrant caregivers were incorporated as useful labor but not recognized as fully deserving social subjects. Across the coverage, affordability emerged as a key discursive filter through which rights, value, and inclusion were negotiated, while competing narratives pushed the care regime toward more selective, informalized, and stratified forms. The article argues that secondary citizenship in this case was not only a legal or labor-market condition but also a discursive accomplishment produced through the intertwined narration of care needs, migrant labor, and unequal integration.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070453

Authors: Ricardo Ramos Maria José Rodrigues

Despite the broad scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, the rejection or contestation of this consensus remains socially relevant. This study adopts a qualitative approach to understand climate denial as a process by analyzing individual trajectories of adherence to climate misinformation. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals who expressed positions of denial, minimization, or contestation of the dominant scientific explanation of climate change. The findings indicate that questioning of the climate consensus most often emerges from informal exposure to digital content, particularly on social media and online platforms. These initial exposures are subsequently reinforced by closed informational ecosystems, often organized around private groups, where alternative criteria of credibility are consolidated, and dissenting figures are valued as legitimate authorities. A systematic delegitimization of institutional science was also observed, frequently associated with perceived political or economic agendas. A central finding of the study is the emergence of selective trust in science, in which scientific knowledge is accepted in domains such as medicine, biology, and technology but rejected in climatology. Additionally, the analyzed discourses reveal strong resistance to refutation and the absence of clear criteria for revising previously held positions. The study contributes to research in Environmental Education and Climate Literacy by demonstrating that climate denial should be understood as a socio-epistemic phenomenon rather than merely as a deficit of scientific knowledge.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070452

Authors: Michael Pier Evans Kira J. Baker-Doyle

This study examines how community-based organizations (CBOs) engaged in education organizing develop and sustain strategic alliances within complex education policy environments. It explores how alliances are deliberately constructed, maintained, and adapted in response to shifting political contexts. Using a QUAN–QUAL mixed-methods design, the study combines ego-centric social network survey data from 12 CBOs in mid-sized U.S. cities (N = 84 stakeholder ties) with follow-up interviews conducted with CBO leaders. Quantitative analyses revealed positive relationships among trust, communication, perceived importance, and collaboration intensity, with trust and communication as highly interconnected dimensions of alliance building. Qualitative findings provided insight into how CBO leaders strategically evaluate potential relationships, highlighting the importance of power, accessibility, responsiveness, shared interests, and accountability. While stakeholder groups were viewed similarly across many dimensions, leaders described alliance formation as an ongoing process of negotiation rather than a straightforward accumulation of social capital. Findings suggest that effective alliances depend not only on relationship strength but also on how organizations navigate competing interests, unequal power dynamics, and shifting political landscapes.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070451

Authors: Patrick J. Oefelein Julie M. Hall Ishara Jean-Francois Steven L. Berman

Political identity permeates people’s everyday experiences and begins to develop early in adolescence. Understanding which variables may influence this development, and in what direction, can provide valuable insight into underlying differences between political groups in the face of increasing polarization. To that end, this study aimed to investigate the political differences between those with each of the identity styles and elucidate the differential roles of parental and news media influences on attitudes concerning welfare and traditional gender roles in those with each identity style. University students (N = 395) answered questions about their identity style as well as their own and their parents’ political identities and media consumption. Those with a normative style were found to hold more conservative political attitudes than those with an informational style, and parental and media influence were predictive of one’s own political identity only among those with the normative style. Political attitudes of those with the diffuse-avoidant style differed from the normative but not informational style, and their political identity was only predicted by media influence. These differences demonstrate the usefulness of considering identity and developmental factors when researching intergroup political phenomena.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070450

Authors: David Alonso-González Juan Brea-Iglesias Adrián Jesús Ricoy-Cano Inmaculada Herranz-Aguayo Raquel Ávila-Muñoz Andrés Arias-Astray

This study examines the processes of technology adoption and appropriation among older adults participating in two community-based digital inclusion workshops (LAB65+) in Madrid, exploring how digital technologies are appropriated within community learning environments and identifying the social, relational, and pedagogical factors that shape this process, with particular attention to the role of mutual support, warm experts, and community learning dynamics. Drawing on a series of workshops and group interaction recordings conducted with regular attendees, the research identifies a set of factors that consistently shape participants’ engagement with digital tools. Particular attention is given to socio-educational background, previous work experience, and prior exposure to technology, as well as to the everyday motivations associated with the use of mobile phones for communication through WhatsApp, online purchasing, access to health services, and routine banking procedures. Across both labs, the findings reveal that successful and sustained engagement with technology among older adults depends less on technical training per se than on elements related to motivation, self-efficacy, meaningful instruction, and the creation or reinforcement of social ties in familiar environments. Although minor differences emerge between the two settings, the evidence consistently underscores the centrality of these relational and contextual factors over purely operational or skill-based considerations. The study highlights the need for community-oriented approaches that recognize and build upon the social dimensions of learning and using technology in later life.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070449

Authors: Manuel Reina-Parrado Pedro Román-Graván Carlos Hervás-Gómez

This study analyses the professional development provision in artificial intelligence (AI) offered to non-university teachers in Andalusia during the 2023–2024 academic year. The research follows a descriptive documentary design based on the systematic review of training activities provided by the Teacher Training Centres (CEPs) in the eight Andalusian provinces. The initial corpus comprised 1832 training activities. After screening course titles and, when available, objectives, descriptions, metadata and content lists, 26 AI-related activities were identified; after excluding repeated editions and activities whose information was not accessible, the final analysable corpus consisted of 15 distinct and visible courses. The analysis combined quantitative description of distribution by province with qualitative content analysis supported by Atlas.ti. The results show that AI-related training represented only 1.42% of the overall offer and that the final analysable corpus represented 0.82% of all training activities. The provision was also unevenly distributed across provinces and tended to privilege specific tools, generative AI applications and productivity-oriented uses, with comparatively limited attention to ethical, pedagogical, assessment-related and interdisciplinary dimensions. The findings suggest the need for a more coherent regional strategy based on common minimum AI literacy modules, differentiated pathways by educational stage, blended and mentored formats, classroom-based projects and systematic evaluation of training impact.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070448

Authors: Bernd Reiter

This article uses Jacob Gorender’s theory of colonial slavery to challenge a core premise of modern social theory—that labor inherently generates freedom. In Hegel and Marx, productive activity enables recognition, consciousness, and ultimately emancipation. The article argues that this mechanism depended on a historically specific condition: the worker’s juridical possession of labor-power. Plantation slavery abolished that condition. The enslaved laborer did not sell labor but was owned as labor, making alienation, recognition, and class formation structurally impossible. Building on Gorender’s claim that colonial slavery constituted a distinct mode of production integrated into global markets, this article shows that plantation economies produced accumulation without proletarianization, commercialization without citizenship, and economic modernization without social emancipation. Drawing on institutional theory, it further argues that the legal and political arrangements created to manage coerced labor persisted after abolition and continue to structure inequality and coercive governance across the Americas. American modernity therefore followed a trajectory different from the European one: rather than emerging from the emancipation of labor, it developed from its permanent subordination, indicating the existence of multiple modernities.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070447

Authors: David Edmund Allen

The paper features a textual analysis of the UN speeches made by the US President Donald Trump and by France’s President Macron. President Trump’s speech was made in the absence of a teleprompter and lasted almost an hour. President Macron’s speech was representative of a more standard diplomatic speech. Both speeches are analyzed using a variety of models and techniques. The analysis incorporates an exploration of Manin’s link of Zipf’s law to concepts from information theory and algorithmic complexity, Tao’s concepts applied to power laws, ‘E pluribus unum’, out of many, one, plus a completely new application of Villermaux’s universal law of fragmentation, applied in a lexical context. All theories are found to be supported. The comparative study shows that a ‘rhetorical physics’ approach can capture the “universality” of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law while simultaneously identifying “speaker-specific” rhetorical fingerprints. Macron uses “high-complexity” signaling for elite diplomatic audiences, while Trump uses “low-complexity” fragmentation for broader impact.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070446

Authors: Peter George Kreysa

There was an error in the original publication (Kreysa 2026) [...]

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070445

Authors: Walter Richard Schumm Stephan R. Bollman Anthony P. Jurich

Results from 17 studies published between 1929 and 1950 with 36 effect sizes for marital adjustment, happiness, or satisfaction were subjected to a meta-analysis to test Jessie Bernard’s thesis about “his” and “hers” marriage as it may have applied to early family research in the USA. While the meta-analysis did not support the hypotheses that wives would report lower levels of or greater variation in marital adjustment, it was found that wives accounted for a much larger percentage of low satisfaction scores at the lowest levels of marital adjustment or when there were large differences in marital adjustment, using paired data between them and their husbands. Thus, this research, despite being derived from much older data, provides partial support for Bernard’s thesis, largely in agreement with more recent research and meta-analyses concerning the same hypotheses. However, even though some recent meta-analyses have found stronger support for all three of Bernard’s hypotheses, most meta-analyses on this topic did not control for marital social desirability, nor did they consider research published between 1951 and 1969, leaving room for future research to further verify or reject Bernard’s thesis.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070444

Authors: Deena Abul-Fottouh Nadia Caidi Hong Shi

Social media platforms play a central role in shaping whose voices gain visibility during moments of crisis. This study examines how platform-mediated dynamics influence the distribution of voice in online discourse, focusing on racialized and migrant communities in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a large-scale computational analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data, we analyze participation patterns, dominant narratives, and how attention is distributed across actors. We identify four established forms of Othering—hostile, cultural, sympathetic, and silencing—and introduce a fifth: algorithmic Othering. We define algorithmic Othering as the platform-mediated structuring of visibility through which institutional and elite actors disproportionately shape discourse, while marginalized users remain comparatively under-amplified. Our findings show that even when racialized and migrant users actively participate in online discussions, their visibility is systematically constrained by engagement-driven amplification systems. As a result, marginalized communities are more often spoken about than heard directly. These findings suggest that social media platforms do not simply reflect existing inequalities but actively organize them through the distribution of attention and visibility. By identifying a structural mechanism through which voice is unevenly amplified, this study contributes to broader understandings of inequality, representation, and participation in digital environments.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070443

Authors: Rashmi Gangamma John Segui Erica Hartwell Chichun Lin Benjamin Kukor

Background: LGBTQI+ refugees and asylees often face unique challenges of exclusion and the threat of persecution across multiple stages of migration and resettlement. In this study, we investigated the current refugee resettlement policies in the United States through a trauma-informed policy analysis lens and compared them with those of three, similar high-income resettlement countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Methods: We collected data from policy documents from government and resettlement agency websites, as well as peer-reviewed journal articles discussing resettlement policies specific to LGBTQI+ refugees and asylees. A document analysis method was used to examine these materials within a trauma-informed framework. Results: Findings indicated that current United States policies for LGBTQI+ refugees and asylees lack many considerations from a trauma-informed framework. In comparison, while policies in the United Kingdom reflected similar limitations, recent developments in Canada and Australia demonstrated greater recognition of the unique challenges faced by LGBTQI+ communities, along with multiple pathways to support safer spaces in resettlement. Conclusions: These findings highlight the need for substantial policy development in the United States to better support LGBTQI+ refugees and asylees from an inclusive, trauma-informed framework.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070442

Authors: Fabricio Miguel Moreno-Menéndez Nataly Gabriela Solis-Tapia José Antonio Cuadros-Espinoza Karina Rosario Olivera-Bordaes Isabel Liz Peña-Ricapa Vicente González-Prida Joseph Mendoza-Herrera Angela Maria Rivera-Paucarpura

Universities increasingly compete through value propositions, service processes, and communication ecosystems rather than through program supply alone. Yet evidence remains limited on how students’ perceptions of the educational marketing mix are associated with satisfaction in non-metropolitan higher education settings in Latin America. This study examines a private university branch campus in a Latin American emerging economy using a quantitative, cross-sectional, non-experimental design and a probabilistic stratified sample of 287 complete student responses. Educational marketing was operationalized as students’ perceived evaluation of the educational marketing mix—product, price, place, and promotion—whereas satisfaction was measured with SERVQUAL-informed, performance-oriented service-evaluation items. The findings show a strong positive association between the perceived educational marketing mix and student satisfaction, with promotional communication emerging as the most closely related dimension. Descriptively, both constructs were concentrated at intermediate levels, indicating an acceptable but non-distinctive institutional experience and pointing to service weaknesses in security, empathy, and responsiveness. The article contributes by problematizing the use of marketing-mix logic in higher education, clarifying that satisfaction is not a proxy for educational quality or belonging, and showing how perceived value communication and service delivery are connected with students’ satisfaction judgments in an emerging-economy context.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070441

Authors: Norainy Abdul Razak Mohamad Izani Zainal Abidin Aishah Abdul Razak Amr Assad Hanan Elgendi

This study examines university students’ perceptions of how artificial intelligence (AI) tools influence creativity in Digital Media coursework at an Egyptian university, addressing the underrepresentation of non-Western and non-STEM contexts in AI-in-education research. A convergent mixed-methods design was used with 103 undergraduate students enrolled in a Visual Communication course. Data were collected through an online questionnaire comprising a 24-item Likert-scale battery (Cronbach’s α = 0.94) and four open-ended prompts. Because creativity was measured through perception rather than objective performance, the findings are interpreted as students’ subjective appraisals rather than as evidence about the originality or quality of their creative products. A four-item Perceived Creative Support subscale (α = 0.82) was positively associated with overall learning satisfaction (r = 0.33, p < 0.001), while remaining independent of prior AI familiarity. However, it was significantly related to comfort with new technology (r = 0.35, p < 0.001) and moderate AI use intensity. Reflexive thematic analysis identified five themes: task efficiency, academic support, creative stimulation, information access, and concerns about overreliance and authenticity. Students mainly framed creativity in functional terms, including ideation structure, speed, and organization. The study positions AI as a perceived cognitive scaffold and discusses implications for pedagogy, assessment design, and academic integrity in creative disciplines.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070440

Authors: Lorna Brookes Fran Yeoman Thomas McCooey

Children of imprisoned parents, who are often described as ‘orphans of justice’, suffer a multitude of disadvantages when a parent is sent to prison. Whilst their experiences of loss, stigma, and social exclusion are well documented, one area that remains critically under-examined is how court reporting processes may further exacerbate these harms. This study explores the lived experience of children 11–17 years (n = 6) who had experienced parental imprisonment, and non-offending adults (parents, caregivers, and adult children of offenders/n = 6) in relation to their experiences of parental crime reported in the press. This study also integrates views from individual interviews conducted with journalists and press regulators (n = 5), as well as data from a content analysis of three regional and two national newspapers across a three-week period. Findings indicate that current court reporting practices can be, for some children and family members, a contributing factor to their difficulties. Participating children and family members assert that publishing partial home addresses and references to family relationships heightens their visibility in the community, which they say contributes to community backlash and negatively affects their physical and mental wellbeing. The content analysis (n = 186 custody related news reports) showed selective disclosure of offenders’ personal and family details. Interviewed journalists strongly defended the principle of open justice and felt legally unable to add the wider context families often wished to share. However, they expressed genuine sympathy for the children, and while resistant to new legal restrictions, were open to developing voluntary guidance to help reduce harm where possible. This study proposes an integrated framework to strengthen ethical journalism and better protect children impacted by parental imprisonment, calling for improved public information, trauma-informed education, participatory research and practitioner tools that centre children’s rights. It argues that open justice must be balanced with relational accountability, ensuring open justice does not come at the expense of children’s wellbeing.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070439

Authors: Ibrahim Halil Diken Derya Atik Kara Ramazan Akdogan Melike Kurtulus Uzlu Osman Yasar Gizem Turkoglu Boyvat Gozde Tomris Secil Celik Demirtas Ozlem Diken Ozlem Toper Ozcan Ozgur Dursun Cem Cuhadar

School counselors working in preschool special education institutions undertake multidimensional responsibilities involving support for children with developmental disabilities, family guidance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and participation in individualized education program (IEP) processes. Despite the complexity of these responsibilities, limited research has specifically examined the professional development needs of counselors employed in early childhood special education settings. This study aimed to determine the professional development needs of school counselors working in preschool special education institutions and to explore the professional challenges they experience in practice. The study was conducted using a qualitative research design. Participants consisted of 19 school counselors working in preschool special education institutions across different regions of Türkiye. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicated that school counselors experienced substantial professional development needs related to autism spectrum disorder, behavioral intervention strategies, family counseling, crisis intervention, interdisciplinary teamwork, assessment procedures, and individualized education planning. School counselors also emphasized inadequacies in preservice education and reported a strong need for applied, field-specific in-service training opportunities. Furthermore, role ambiguity, institutional limitations, and insufficient supervision emerged as significant factors negatively influencing professional competence perceptions. The findings suggest that counselor education curricula and professional development policies should be restructured to address the unique demands of preschool special education settings more effectively. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the necessity of specialized professional preparation for school counselors supporting young children with special needs and their families.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070438

Authors: Yoonjin Lee

This study examines cross-sectional relations among perceived gender fairness, perceived social mobility, and life satisfaction in 4381 South Korean wage workers from the 2024 Social Integration Survey. Drawing on equity theory, the prospect of upward mobility hypothesis, and relative deprivation theory, I estimate a moderated mediation model in which perceived social mobility mediates between perceived gender fairness and life satisfaction, with gender as a first-stage moderator. Three observations emerge. First, the indirect statistical association between perceived gender fairness and life satisfaction via perceived social mobility is reliable (ab = 0.051, 95% CI [0.038, 0.066]). Second, the slope of perceived social mobility on perceived gender fairness is descriptively steeper for women (B = 0.219) than for men (B = 0.131), with the moderated mediation index reliably non-zero (Index = 0.026, 95% CI [0.007, 0.048]). Third, exploratory subgroup analyses indicate that the gender-conditional pattern is statistically reliable in the 20–39 subgroup but not in the 40+ subgroup, although the formal three-way interaction is not statistically significant. Given the directional ambiguity of the single-item fairness measure, the present design cannot adjudicate among alternative readings of the gender-conditional pattern. I treat all findings as descriptive patterns of statistical association in this sample.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070437

Authors: Emilio Ricci

Social Innovation (SI) has emerged as a strategic paradigm for addressing systemic challenges in highly uncertain environments. However, its practice still reveals epistemological fragmentation that risks reducing SI to welfare-oriented approaches. This article presents a critical and constructive analysis aimed at mitigating the “methodological myopia” that persists in social impact assessment. Through a systematic literature review and a qualitative case study in the Antofagasta Region (Chile), the article argues that the scientific validity of SI depends on longitudinal, multidimensional, and territorially grounded evaluative frameworks. The study examines the relationship between SI and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a source of methodological rigor, improving traceability and auditability while supporting the scaling of interventions. In response to techno-utopian forms of determinism, the article proposes an ethical and participatory governance framework based on the Multi-Helix model, integrating academia, the public sector, private enterprise, and civil society in the co-creation of public value. The findings suggest that the institutionalization of SI through AI must move beyond procedural efficiency to foster structural transformation. In Antofagasta, this AI-supported certification architecture is already operational within the Regional Innovation Strategy (ERI) 2022–2028 through the executed FIC-R 2023 project on Social Innovation Certification. The Antofagasta experience is therefore presented as an illustrative case of territorial governance, offering transferable principles for other Global South contexts rather than a directly replicable model.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070436

Authors: Julia Evangelina Velisone Hugo Simkin Luis Donatello Luis Jaume

This article studies the relationship between social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, spirituality, religiosity, and economic system justification in the general population of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a sample of 843 participants (52% men and 48% women) aged 18 to 88 years (Mage = 46; SD = 15.78). The study contextualizes social psychological approaches to system justification through a review of sociological literature on domination, religion, and legitimacy. According to the results, system justification is positively associated with social dominance orientation (r = 0.40), right-wing authoritarianism (r = 0.56) and dimensions of religiosity, particularly extrinsic religious orientation (0.12 ≤ r ≤ 0.21). Regression analyses indicated that social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and extrinsic religious orientation were the variables most strongly associated with economic system justification.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070435

Authors: Ioannis Zisimopoulos Kostas Kappos

This study examines collective bargaining coverage in Greece in 2024, analyzing its distribution across economic sectors and enterprise size classes. The empirical analysis draws primarily on administrative data. Through a content analysis of 1118 enterprise and sectoral/occupational collective agreements, this study calculates the collective bargaining coverage rate at the national, sectoral, and enterprise levels. The findings indicate that the coverage rate in Greece is among the lowest in the European Union. The results further reveal a fragile predominance of sectoral bargaining over enterprise-level bargaining within a generally weak collective bargaining system, and an uneven distribution of coverage by collective agreements across different economic sectors and enterprise sizes.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070434

Authors: Monica Molino Alessandra Sacchi Francesco Vaccargiu Chiara Ghislieri Michela Vignoli

In recent decades, low birth rates, delayed parenthood, and a decline in the average number of children per couple have become prevalent issues, sparking growing scientific interest in understanding their causes. While cultural, social, and gender-related factors have been widely examined, work-related dimensions remain underexplored within work and organizational psychology. This qualitative study explores how individuals make sense of the interplay between perceived work-related factors (specifically, working conditions, organizational culture, the work-family interface, and career ambitions) and declared fertility intentions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 33 participants (22 women; 19 without children, 14 with one child; aged 24–45). A subtle realist positioning was adopted, and template analysis was employed to examine the data. The findings highlight how participants interpret multiple work-related dimensions as relevant to their fertility intentions, including high job demands, job insecurity, and family-unfriendly organizational cultures. Concerns about work-family conflict also emerged as central. At the personal level, career ambitions and self-efficacy were identified as key dimensions. Notably, the perception of career-parenthood interference is often associated with limited or postponed decisions about having children. This study contributes to a better understanding of the work-related dimensions that can contribute to shaping fertility intentions and offers practical recommendations for interventions.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070433

Authors: László Balázs

As generative AI increasingly mediates everyday information, users must judge not only whether a claim is true but whether the system conveying it is a legitimate source of belief. This article develops and validates the Trust in AI-Epistemic Scale (TAI-E), measuring epistemic trust in generative AI across three dimensions: attribution of epistemic authority, perceived epistemic reliability, and suspension of critical judgment. In a survey of part-time higher-education students (N = 412; ages 18–63), the three-factor structure was replicated across a calibration–validation split (CFI = 0.944; RMSEA = 0.085; subscale α = 0.84–0.87). Granting a system epistemic authority and suspending critical judgment toward it behaved as partly opposing stances, so the scale captures a configuration rather than a single trust score. Self-reported reflective processing accompanied higher authority and reliability attributions together with greater critical engagement. Most strikingly, self-reported reflectiveness barely tracked behavioural cognitive reflection (r = 0.14), and only the self-report predicted trust—suggesting it reflects epistemic self-image as much as reflective capacity. Relations among constructs are reported as construct-validity associations rather than causal effects. The TAI-E provides a psychometrically grounded tool for studying epistemic trust, AI literacy, and well-founded reliance on AI.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070432

Authors: Anita Rusinné Fedor György Jóna Amr Sayed Ghanem

This study examined perceived inequalities in access to healthcare in Hungary using data from the 2021 International Social Survey Programme Health and Health Care II module (ISSP; N = 1008). The aim was to identify sociodemographic, behavioral, health-related, and attitudinal factors associated with perceived healthcare-access disparities and expectations of receiving the best available treatment if seriously ill. Cross-sectional analyses were performed using chi-squared tests, Fisher’s exact tests, multivariable ordinal logistic regression, and binary logistic regression. In adjusted ordinal models, urban residence was associated with the rich–poor healthcare-access comparison (OR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.04–2.83, p = 0.033), while daily fruit and vegetable consumption showed an inverse association in the same model (OR = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.22–0.75, p = 0.004). Neutral trust in doctors was associated with the citizens–non-citizens access comparison (OR = 1.86, 95% CI: 1.26–2.77, p = 0.002). Expectation of receiving This study examined perceived inequalities in access to healthcare in Hungary using data from the 2021 International Social Survey Programme Health and Health Care II module (ISSP; N = 1008). The aim was to identify sociodemographic, behavioral, health-related, and attitudinal factors associated with perceived healthcare-access disparities and expectations of receiving the best available treatment if seriously ill. Cross-sectional analyses were performed using chi-squared tests, Fisher’s exact tests, multivariable ordinal logistic regression, and binary logistic regression. In adjusted ordinal models, urban residence was associated with the rich–poor healthcare-access comparison (OR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.04–2.83, p = 0.033), while daily fruit and vegetable consumption showed an inverse association in the same model (OR = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.22–0.75, p = 0.004). Neutral trust in doctors was associated with the citizens–non-citizens access comparison (OR = 1.86, 95% CI: 1.26–2.77, p = 0.002). Expectation of receiving the best available treatment was positively associated with secondary education compared with primary education (OR = 2.47, 95% CI: 1.44–4.24, p = 0.001) and daily fruit and vegetable consumption (OR = 2.18, 95% CI: 1.10–4.31, p = 0.025), and negatively associated with low confidence in the healthcare system (OR = 0.11, 95% CI: 0.04–0.27, p < 0.001) and disagreement that doctors can be trusted (OR = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.04–0.66, p = 0.010). These findings suggest that perceived healthcare-access inequalities in Hungary are shaped not only by structural socioeconomic position but also by institutional trust and health-related behaviors.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070431

Authors: Nicole McKillop Lisa Stafford Samantha Abbato Isaac Tye Ana Pike

Background: The use of creative methods, including immersive digital media such as virtual reality (VR), has grown in popularity over the past decade. At the same time, the power of co-creation within transformative research has also strengthened. Together, co-creation and digital immersive methods offer the potential for the intended audience, including decision-makers, to deeply engage with the information communicated through focused immersion in people’s stories and familiar local settings. Method/Reflections: In this article, the process of co-creation through a digital VR storytelling approach is discussed and reflected upon from the perspectives of co-creators from regional cities and towns across Australia. Our team included three young adults with disabilities, an academic researcher with a disability, and an independent researcher. This includes 1. presenting an overview of co-creation itself as both an ethos and method; 2. describing our experiences of co-creation using online storyboarding and script-writing workshops to portray the reality of local community experiences, and re-imagining what an inclusive community would look like; 3. reflecting on our completed stories made into VR short films and their potential to impact decision-making to improve urban and regional planning and design; and 4. discussing reflections and insights into the challenges, benefits, and key considerations for applying co-creation and VR storytelling in research and public planning engagement.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070430

Authors: Alvaro Oleart Alejandro Flores Moleón

The emergence of digital technologies during the last two decades has placed strain on democracies globally. From disinformation to artificial intelligence (AI), policy-makers have struggled to address the authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies that Big Tech companies have been pushing. A dominant response from European Union (EU) policy-makers has been to promote ‘literacy’: media literacy to address disinformation, and ‘AI literacy’ to foster constructive uses of AI. We ask: what does it mean for the EU to use media literacy and AI literacy as a response to disinformation and the risks of AI? More broadly, what kind of policy and model of democracy is being constructed when the EU suggests that the solution to disinformation and AI depends on citizens becoming more “literate”? We empirically examine the usage of ‘literacy’ in EU policy documents in the context of disinformation and AI, and argue that it shifts responsibility from platforms to individual citizens. In doing so, it moves attention away from a structural approach into the political economy of Big Tech companies, hence empowering them and their ‘surveillance capitalist’ business model. This article argues instead that literacy needs to be rethought beyond individual skills, as a way of making visible the structural and infrastructural power of privately owned digital systems shaping contemporary public spheres. Therefore, reclaiming democracy requires moving beyond individual adaptation, and instead towards addressing the underlying systemic structures of Big Tech power.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070429

Authors: Fiona Sweeney Rahmanara Chowdhury Iram Shah Belinda Winder

Moral injury has been gaining increasing prominence as a means of understanding psychological suffering in response to moral transgressions. Despite repeated evidence of exposure to moral transgressions among those detained in forensic services, moral injury as a construct within this population has not been widely explored. This research aimed to explore the lived experience of moral injury in service users detained in a forensic healthcare setting. Interviews with six service users and eight practitioners were conducted. Three themes were identified using multi-perspective interpretive phenomenological analysis: the mutuality of moral injury, pathways to harm, and a road to healing. Findings identified a complex trajectory towards moral injury, which significantly affected service users’ cognitive and emotional processes. Results also highlighted the impact of moral injury on risk to self and others. Implications for practice and policy are considered. These include: the need for wider recognition of moral injury and its effects within formulations and assessments, collective responsibility to reduce feelings of shame, and greater opportunities to seek forgiveness and generate a sense of purpose.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070428

Authors: Meriem El-Yamri Miguel Ángel Violán Borja Manero

Audience reactions to oral communication are shaped by both communicative practices and broader social contexts. While elements such as message content, delivery style, and vocal expression can be developed through training, other factors—such as gender and ethnicity—reflect social identities that are often associated with how speakers are perceived and evaluated. This study examines how these contextual attributes are associated with audience engagement in digital public speaking environments. Drawing on an initial dataset of 977 TEDx talks, resulting in two high-confidence subsamples of 610 speakers for gender and 387 for ethnicity, curated through a combination of computational methods with a communication perspective. We analyzed the relationship between the two factors with engagement indicators—including likes, dislikes and interaction rates. The analysis explores whether patterns of audience response differ across demographic groups and at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. The findings reveal that neither gender nor ethnicity, considered on its own, was significantly associated with audience engagement; differences emerged only at the intersection of the two. Specifically, non-Hispanic Black speakers were associated with higher levels of negative feedback in both genders, Hispanic male speakers received more positive engagement than other male speakers, and Asian female speakers showed lower interaction levels—fewer views, likes, and comments—than non-Hispanic White female speakers. These patterns suggest that disparities in how audiences respond to speakers’ social identities in mediated contexts are intersectional, becoming visible only when gender and ethnicity are considered jointly. By providing empirical evidence from a diverse digital corpus, this study contributes to ongoing debates on digital inequalities, representation, and participation in contemporary media environments, highlighting the importance of considering social context in analyses of audience behavior.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070427

Authors: Lisa A. Keister

Homeownership is considered an important indicator of financial stability, but the economic security it provides varies substantially across households. In this paper, I examine housing fragility among U.S. homeowners and ask how vulnerability to housing- and credit-market disruptions is organized across wealth position, portfolio composition, and educational attainment. Drawing on perspectives emphasizing financialization and action under uncertainty, I conceptualize housing fragility as a multidimensional condition rooted in the organization of household balance sheets and in unequal capacities to navigate financial institutions and market risk. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the 1989–2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, I analyze six indicators capturing leverage, repayment strain, portfolio concentration, and housing cost burdens among homeowners. Findings show that housing fragility is systematically stratified across the wealth distribution, with lower-wealth homeowners consistently exhibiting higher leverage, greater repayment burdens, and more severe housing cost strain. Fragility is also more strongly associated with overall net worth than with housing values alone, indicating that broader balance-sheet resources shape households’ capacity to sustain ownership under changing market conditions. In addition, less-educated homeowners experience persistently higher levels of fragility, particularly in measures tied to repayment obligations and ongoing financial strain. The findings show that homeownership amplifies existing wealth inequalities by exposing lower-wealth households to disproportionate financial risk embedded in contemporary housing and credit markets.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070426

Authors: HaeJung Maria Kim Sua Jeon Christy Crutsinger

This study investigates digital leadership as a networked social process by analyzing how influential actors operating across professional and institutional domains construct leadership discourse and draw on transformational leadership (TFL) principles within Twitter (X) networks, with particular attention to the skill-transfer gaps that persist between formal academic preparation and workforce demands. Social Network Analysis (SNA) using the NodeXL program was used to examine the relational structure of that discourse across a dataset of 1186 Twitter accounts and 1362 relational ties. The analysis identified 27 prominent actors operating within a distinct community cluster whose discourse spanned politics, health, technology, media, and education, with thematically diverse but uneven engagement with leadership topics. Combining semantic cluster analyses, inductive thematic mapping, and a supplementary exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the study finds that the four TFL principles (individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence) are unevenly represented in this discourse. The EFA condensed the co-occurrence structure into three platform-shaped factors, with the strongest support for individualized consideration and no coherent factor for idealized influence, indicating partial rather than comprehensive alignment with the four-dimensional TFL model. The findings position digital leadership as a relational and iterative social process, sustained through repeated interactions, endorsements, and positional recognition within platform-based publics that extend across academic, industry, and socio-political boundaries. The study highlights social media as a networked yet uneven environment for leadership development and the broader social negotiation of skill-transfer challenges across digital professional contexts.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070425

Authors: Daniel Emeric-Méaulle Pablo A. Cantero-Garlito Ana A. Laborda-Soriano

Ethical conflicts are an inherent—yet often invisible—dimension of occupational therapy practice. Most available evidence remains qualitative or conceptual, and the empirical articulation of ethical conflicts in Spain is still limited. This study examines the nature, distribution, co-occurrence patterns, and meanings of ethical conflicts reported by occupational therapists in Spain. A concurrent convergent mixed-methods design was used. From a broader national sample of 596 valid responses, the analytical sample consisted of 160 practitioners (84.4% women, reflecting the gender composition of the profession in Spain) who reported having experienced ethical conflicts and provided open-text information. Data were collected via an online questionnaire combining closed items and open-ended narratives. Quantitative analyses included descriptive statistics and Jaccard-based co-occurrence estimates derived from a non-mutually exclusive thematic coding matrix. Narratives were analyzed inductively with a descriptive phenomenological orientation (Giorgi), using thematic procedures as an analytic scaffold (Braun and Clarke). Findings were integrated through joint displays and meta-inference. The most frequently selected primary conflict categories concerned professional competence and practice (19.4%), relationships with family members/caregivers (14.4%), and the user–therapist relationship (12.5%). Co-occurrence analysis indicated that conflicts rarely occurred in isolation and tended to cluster across relational, structural, and professional domains. Integration of quantitative patterns and narrative meanings supported a preliminary interpretive three-dimensional framework (relational, structural, professional) for understanding ethical tensions in practice. Across narratives, participants described experiences interpreted as consistent with moral distress, economic and workload pressures, limited professional recognition, and normative gaps. Ethical conflicts in occupational therapy practice in Spain are best understood as recurrent, situated tensions shaped by relational dynamics and organizational conditions, rather than isolated dilemmas. Supporting moral agency requires organizational supports, spaces for collective ethical deliberation, and context-sensitive ethics education.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070424

Authors: Ling Lin Ching-Teng Yao

Stimulating leisure activities have been increasingly recognized as meaningful strategies to maintain cognitive health and reduce psychosocial risks among older adults. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a structured board game intervention in enhancing cognitive function and reducing loneliness among older adults living in long-term care facilities in Taiwan. Using a quasi-experimental design, 67 residents were assigned to either an intervention group, which participated in a six-week board game program, or a comparison group that continued with their usual activities. Data were collected at baseline and immediately after the intervention. Generalized estimating equations were used to analyze changes over time. Results indicated that the intervention group showed significantly greater improvements in cognitive function (β = 3.86, p < 0.001) and reductions in loneliness (β = 2.31, p = 0.004) at week 6 compared with the comparison group. These findings provide preliminary evidence that structured board game activities may represent a feasible, low-cost, and socially engaging approach to support cognitive and psychosocial well-being among older adults living in long-term care facilities. Implications for gerontological social work practice and activity programming are discussed.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070423

Authors: Robert Florin Similea Cosima Rughiniș Răzvan Rughiniș Dinu Țurcanu

This article examines how professionals who use generative AI in their daily work reshape their temporal experience. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with experienced AI users and developers in Romania, and building on Flaherty’s concept of “time work”, it introduces the notion of delegated time work: a form of temporal agency in which individuals transfer part of the time-shaping effort to an AI tool while retaining judgment over the temporal structure of activity. The results show clear support for delegated time work in three dimensions of temporal experience: duration, sequence, and allocation. Evidence for frequency, timing, and taking time is limited: delegation succeeds in the dimensions professionals control individually and fails in those governed by shared institutional rhythms. Delegation also generates its own temporal costs through learning and verification overheads, unevenly distributed between developers and users. Drawing on the “time capital” framework of Matei and Preda, the analysis traces three outcomes of the freed time: accumulation as a personal resource, conversion into professional or economic capital, and absorption by rising expectations, leaving workers faster but not freer. In Romania’s dependent market economy, market exposure shapes who keeps the time that AI frees.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070422

Authors: Melissa Mariani Gabriel Lomas Carolyn Berger Stacy Butkus Hyuncheol Yoon

Lockdown drills have become standard practice in K-12 schools across the United States, but there are concerns about the psychological health impact, quality of implementation, and equity implications of current practices. This scoping review compiles the empirical literature on lockdown and active-threat drills to provide insight into how drills are defined and conducted, what outcomes are measured, and the remaining gaps. In accordance with well-researched scoping review methodologies, 27 peer-reviewed U.S.-based studies were aggregated from six primary areas: drill definitions and typologies, implementation practices, reported outcomes, trauma-informed and developmental considerations, equity and disability inclusion, and evidence gaps. Findings reveal wide variability among drill terminology and protocol categorization and most studies emphasize advance warning and low-realism practices. Psychological outcomes are measured much more often than objective measures of implementation fidelity or physical preparedness. Educator and staff experiences, caregiver perceptions, and longitudinal outcomes are underrepresented. Although a number of studies report developmental adaptations and disability accommodations, comprehensive equity analyses remain rare. Overall, potential psychological harms are more clearly documented than protective effects in the literature. This review emphasizes the importance of standardized drill taxonomies, fidelity measurement methods, trauma-informed mental health integration, and inclusive designs to inform school safety policy and practice.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070421

Authors: Syed Uzair Jaffri Ah-Choo Koo Salman Hussain Choo-Yee Ting

The implementation of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based system for monitoring, forecasting, and learner performance support has been intensified by the rapid expansion of online education systems. Existing online educational platforms completely rely on learning analytics and machine learning to customize content delivery. On the other hand, these platforms fundamentally focus on behavioral and cognitive indicators, whereas the integration of affective computing into learning analytics and adaptive decision-making processes is lacking. During the learning process, emotions like engagement, boredom, and confusion play a vital role. Nonetheless, the integration of adaptive online learning systems is still fragmented and underdeveloped. The latest progress in affective computing and multimodal sensing technologies allow for the inference of the affective state of learners in real-time, which creates a range of potential opportunities to create emotionally sensitive learning spaces. Despite technological innovations, the existing studies do not have a conceptual framework that is unified, design-oriented, and clearly incorporates affective computing with AI-based learning analytics to inform real-time pedagogical adaptation. To address this gap, this study introduces a design-oriented conceptual framework for AI-based online education systems that incorporate real-time affective computing. This conceptual framework combines the theoretical foundation of learning analytics, affective computing, and adaptive learning systems. The suggested framework offers a clear and scalable basis of online learning environments that are affective-aware by offering a clear framework of development, assessment, and consequent empirical validation.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070420

Authors: Olaniyi Joshua Olabiyi Nicolette Vanessa Roman

This study provides a systematic examination of global research trends and developments in the field of family and marriage over a twenty-five-year period (2000–2025). Employing a hybrid review design, the research integrates bibliometric analysis with PRISMA guidelines to ensure methodological rigor and transparency. Data were retrieved from the Web of Science, where an initial pool of 97,171 records was refined to 2974 eligible publications through a structured screening and inclusion process. The reduction to 2974 publications was the result of structure bibliometrics using CiteSpace, which employs algorithmic thresholds to identify the most structurally significant publications within a large corpus. Utilizing CiteSpace (version 6.4.R1), this analysis maps the intellectual structure and evolution of the field. By synthesizing co-citation, co-authorship, institutional, and keyword co-occurrence data, this study identifies critical collaboration networks, influential contributors, and dominant thematic domains. The findings reveal prominent research clusters, including premarital cohabitation, partner effects, family structure transitions, marital discord, systemic family functioning, and marriage education. Key contributors identified include influential scholars such as Catherine Walker O’Neal, Birditt, Kira S, Higginbotham Brian J, Beach Steven R. H., and Matthew D. Johnson. Leading institutions are the University System of Ohio, the University of California System, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE), Pennsylvania State University, and Pennsylvania State University–University Park. At the country level, the United States, Canada, England, Australia, the Netherlands, and Belgium emerge as the most significant contributors. The findings offer a comprehensive synthesis of authorship trends, institutional influence, and shifting research trajectories within the field of family and marriage studies.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070419

Authors: Ben Avital-Lev Arnon Hershkovitz

This study examines where socioeconomic differences in students’ computational thinking (CT) learning become visible by comparing a diagnostic assessment of conceptual CT knowledge with behavioral indicators derived from interaction data in a digital programming environment. The study involved 444 elementary school students who completed a structured sequence of programming tasks while their activity was recorded. Conceptual CT knowledge was assessed using a validated diagnostic instrument, and four behavioral indicators were derived from learning logs: average first-try stars, attempts per challenge, highest challenge reached, and average solution time. Analyses were conducted at two complementary levels: individual indicators and integrated digital behavioral types identified through clustering. The findings revealed no meaningful socioeconomic differences in diagnostic CT performance and no consistent differences across most individual behavioral indicators, with the exception of average first-try stars. However, socioeconomic differences became visible when students’ interaction patterns were examined as multidimensional configurations of engagement. These results suggest that socioeconomic variation is reflected primarily in students’ engagement with digital problem-solving processes rather than in conceptual knowledge alone. The study highlights the value of combining diagnostic and log-based measures for understanding how educational inequality may become observable in computational thinking development.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070418

Authors: Mahdis Azarmandi Maryam Sharifkhani

School peace, or Schulfrieden, is often portrayed in German education as a neutral condition enabling learning. Yet this study interrogates how peace itself becomes a tool of governance, selectively policing who can safely occupy the classroom. Examining the Berlin Senate’s October 2023 directive, which banned symbols showing solidarity with Palestine, we show that school peace is less about conflict resolution than about shaping affective hierarchies. Fear, anticipation, and symbolic association circulate to mark some bodies as threats while leaving others unexamined. Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s affective economies and Zembylas’s affective ideology, we argue that the directive transforms political expression into a site of emotional correction, preemptively disciplining marginalized students and rendering their solidarity politically suspect. Peace, in this framing, is primarily rule and order: it secures institutional comfort while curtailing engagement with global injustice. The classroom becomes a laboratory of anticipatory governance, where ethical awareness is unevenly distributed, and dissent is contained before it emerges. By tracing how school peace operates affectively, the study reveals the subtle mechanics by which liberal education reproduces racialized hierarchies under the guise of neutrality.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070417

Authors: Julie Andersson Lisa Stafford

Background: Knowledge of place-based communities and the lived experiences of diverse citizens such as disabled people are key to making more inclusive sustainable communities. Yet many voices in public planning and community engagement, such as people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, children and young people, are often not heard. Method: Bringing people together requires an artful approach that amplifies diverse voices and stories while enabling solutions through knowledge exchange. In this article we share the art of designing and doing community chats as an inclusive dialogical method. The community chats used The World Café’s principles and framework adapted with inclusive processes, enabling us to explore the concept of planning inclusive communities and, importantly, solutions for them with community members with and without disabilities. Findings: In this article we firstly critique the current tensions regarding community engagement in public planning and participatory research methods, before outlining our approach. This includes outlining in detail our design approach and applied processes for maximising the participation of diverse people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. We offer critical reflections on our key lessons learnt and the non-negotiables in undertaking community chats. Conclusions: By sharing our thinking, approach and lessons learnt, we offer an inclusive adaptive approach to a popular method—the world café—that can be useful to evoke meaningful and empowering knowledge exchanges with diverse people with disabilities to help progress actions towards making communities more inclusive.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070416

Authors: Naiara Ozamiz-Etxebarria Nahia Idoiaga-Mondragon Maitane Picaza Gorrotxategi Idoia Legorburu Fernandez Itziar Kerexeta Brazal

The ongoing Palestinian conflict, particularly the escalation in Gaza since October 2023, has raised pressing concerns regarding human rights and international justice. This study explores how university students in northern Spain perceive the situation in Palestine, analyzing their levels of knowledge, emotional responses, and critical positioning. Using a mixed-method approach based on an online questionnaire and the Grid Elaboration Method, data were gathered from 147 students enrolled in education-related programs. The findings reveal three core themes in students’ representations of the conflict: resistance as a form of national identity, humanitarian suffering of civilians, and structural injustice perpetuated by global power dynamics. Gender and academic background influenced discursive emphasis, with Social Education students showing more politicized perspectives and women focusing more on Palestinian dignity and resistance. These insights underscore the potential of higher education to foster critical thinking, empathy, and engagement with international conflicts, and highlight the role of universities in cultivating a culture of peace and human rights.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070415

Authors: Silvia Lourdes Vidal-Taboada Nilthon Pisfil-Benites Luis Tuñoque-Morante Yenny Anali Tenorio-Ortiz Tanya Gabriela Makita-Balcorta Diana Paola Diazgranados-Villa

Background: The transition toward sustainable development models has increased the relevance of the circular economy (CE) as a strategy for improving resource efficiency and reducing environmental impacts. In this context, higher education may contribute to strengthening sustainability-oriented competencies and environmental awareness among university students. Methods: This study aimed to assess differences in knowledge of the circular economy, perceptions regarding higher education in circular economy education, and sustainability dimensions among university students in Peru, Colombia, and Mexico. A quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional design was adopted using a structured questionnaire administered to 702 university students. The analysis included descriptive statistics, the Kruskal–Wallis test, and Dunn’s post hoc comparisons. Results: The results showed significant differences among countries regarding knowledge of CE principles, sustainability initiatives, and perceptions associated with higher education in circular economy education. Peruvian students generally reported higher levels of knowledge and more positive perceptions across several indicators, whereas Mexican students presented comparatively lower scores. Differences were also identified across the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, particularly in the economic dimension. Conclusions: Overall, the findings suggest that higher education may support the development of CE-related competencies and sustainability-oriented educational strategies within diverse Latin American contexts.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070414

Authors: Jia-Hui Tan Soon-Nyean Cheong Chee-Onn Wong Ahmad Hishamuddin Bin Mohamed

University orientation programmes are a primary mechanism through which new students become familiar with campus facilities, academic spaces, and institutional procedures. However, many orientation activities are delivered as single in-person sessions, limiting opportunities for students to revisit spatial and procedural information after the event. To help address this constraint, a digital twin-inspired metaverse orientation application, the Digital Twin Metaverse Orientation (DTMO), was designed in Unity and hosted on Spatial.io as a spatially faithful virtual replica of a faculty environment. An exploratory pilot evaluation was conducted with 30 university students from multiple faculties after a facilitator-guided orientation session. The System Usability Scale (SUS), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and two open-ended questions were used to examine perceived usability, recommendation intention, and the reasons underpinning recommendation decisions. The application obtained a mean SUS score of 86.83, corresponding to an excellent perceived-usability rating, and an NPS of 53.33, indicating positive immediate recommendation intention. Qualitative responses suggested that participants valued the DTMO for engagement, accessibility, ease of navigation, and support for spatial familiarisation, while some participants emphasised that it should complement rather than replace physical orientation. These pilot findings indicate promising user reception in a small, guided-session sample, but they do not establish orientation effectiveness, learning transfer, wayfinding performance, retention, belonging, institutional integration, or sustained use. Further research with broader samples and outcome-based measures is therefore needed.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070413

Authors: Sophie Sparks April Smith

This study examines the impact of imprisonment on the families of incarcerated men in England and Wales. Drawing on mixed-methods survey data collected in collaboration with the Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT), the research is based on responses from 42 participants. The sample comprised 21 partners/spouses, 11 parents, 5 adult children, 2 siblings, 1 other relative and 1 friend of an incarcerated individual, with 1 participant preferring not to disclose their relationship. The study explores the financial, social, emotional and relational consequences associated with imprisonment. Findings indicate that financial strain was a significant pressure for many participants, driven by loss of income alongside the costs associated with maintaining contact. Participants also described experiences of stigma, social withdrawal, emotional distress and changes to family responsibilities, highlighting the multiple challenges associated with imprisonment for family members. Consistent with emerging research highlighting the wider emotional and psychological consequences of imprisonment for family members, the findings suggest that these pressures were often experienced as interconnected aspects of participants’ experiences rather than in isolation. The study illustrates the value of the symbiotic harms framework for understanding the relational and interconnected dimensions of family members’ experiences of imprisonment in a UK context and highlights the practical and emotional labour involved in maintaining family relationships during imprisonment. The findings underscore the importance of recognising families as individuals directly affected by imprisonment and by the wider consequences of penal policy.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15070412

Authors: Bruce Moghtader Susan Grossman Shubhreet Kaur Dadrao

Over the past decade, educators and administrators in higher education have taken steps toward improving accessibility in teaching and learning. Yet research on supporting students with disabilities in experiential pedagogies, such as community-engaged learning, remains limited, particularly regarding best practices for inclusive instruction. The present study addresses this gap by exploring the perceptions and experiences of students with disabilities in community-engaged learning opportunities, as well as the support mechanisms that may contribute to their meaningful participation in these experiences. Forty-three students with disabilities participated in this qualitative study. Drawing on focus groups, individual interviews, and written responses, the study identifies themes for more inclusive design and delivery, including clearly outlining the physical and digital demands of engagement activities well in advance, designing courses with flexibility in mind, protecting students’ privacy, and including an accessibility statement in the syllabus. While the thematic analysis offers practical recommendations for educators and administrators, aimed at reducing barriers and fostering meaningful participation, the study also advocates for greater theoretical engagement with the personal and relational dimensions of experiential education.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15060411

Authors: Tabisa Verdejo Valenzuela Claudia Carrasco-Aguilar José Ignacio Rivas-Flores

This study examined the place of care in early childhood education and the role of the state in the social organization of care in Chile. Official policy documents were reviewed, including the Early Childhood Education Curriculum Framework, Teaching Standards Framework (Marco para la Buena Enseñanza), Law 20.379, and Law 21.805. Following a thematic analysis of these documents, semistructured interviews were conducted with four early childhood teachers to triangulate the findings. The results, presented across three thematic categories, reveal an ambiguity in the state’s positioning, oscillating between its role as a guarantor of rights and a provider of targeted services. Care is also incorporated into the educational sphere in a fragmented manner—as a learning objective and a condition for achieving educational outcomes—without being fully recognized as a constitutive dimension of teaching work. This situation contributes to the invisibilization of teachers as care workers and the reproduction of gender inequalities. The study contributes to the literature by approaching care from an educational perspective, highlighting underexplored tensions and emphasizing the need to incorporate a feminist and intersectional perspective into educational policies to advance the recognition of care as a right and a central component of the teaching profession.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15060410

Authors: Letizia Carrera

This article investigates the intricate interplay between ressentiment—as social emotion—social love, and solidarity in democratic societies, focusing on the urban environment as the primary stage where these processes materialize. Far from being a marginal emotion, ressentiment is deeply intertwined with democratic life, arising from the gap between proclaimed values and lived conditions. It represents an affective reaction to the perceived betrayal of the promise of equality inscribed in democratic ideals. The discussion explores how perceptions of injustice can fracture trust and intensify divisions, but also how they, under certain conditions, can be redirected toward political engagement and common action. The city, characterized by density, diversity, and the continuous negotiation of difference, can serve as a privileged arena for this transformation. Urban space does not merely reflect inequalities; it actively shapes social processes and provides the infrastructure through which collective sentiments are articulated. In this context, “social love” is conceptualized not as a sentimental aspiration, but as a relational force capable of redirecting the moral indignation of ressentiment, far from strategies of grievance politics toward constructive forms of social and political belonging. Cities can function as laboratories of solidarity where grievances are reframed into collective projects that strengthen social cohesion. Mitigating the destructive potential of ressentiment requires addressing its structural roots through inclusive urban policies and dialogical spaces. An approach grounded in social love can counter fragmentation, mobilizing emotions in the service of substantive equality. In this perspective, the city can become a space and a laboratory for change, where resentment can be channeled as a generative force capable of sustaining widespread forms of social love and a sense of the common good.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15060409

Authors: Nancy Kuhuski Sarah Dubitzky

Protecting the safety and well-being of children in public child welfare is one of the most critical and demanding jobs in social work. Burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and moral injury are prevalent in this field and often occur simultaneously. This intersectional experience impacts the deepest level of a person—their soul. When left unaddressed, these soul wounds come at a high cost to the workers, organizations they work for, the clients they serve, and their greater communities. This qualitative study sought to explore and identify the characteristics of soul care and the power it has to transform the lived experiences of child welfare workers. Collaborative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven workers who had been in this field for 10 or more years and described themselves as having good soul care. Findings from this study concluded the combination of strongly held core beliefs and engagement in a steady regulation loop constituted soul care. Soul care can occur regardless of circumstance. When a soul wound occurs, the Soul Wound Cycle is activated. The momentum of the regulation loop propels one’s movement through this cycle, allowing the processing of the soul wound, resulting in increased resiliency and regaining of equilibrium, ultimately leading to better outcomes for children.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15060408

Authors: Masateru Higashida

This study examined how indigenous perspectives are represented and discussed in the mainstream literature within the field of international social work. A scoping review was conducted to map both well-established and under-researched discourses in the literature. The findings revealed that the majority of the papers shed light on indigenous knowledges and practices in non-Western countries or regions and particularly within the Global South context, while countering imperialistic and colonialist discourses. Additionally, several papers addressed the need to move beyond the dichotomy between universalisation and indigenisation and the Western versus non-Western binary. The study findings also indicate research gaps that have remained unfilled in the mainstream literature.

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci15060407

Authors: Elena Morgenthaler Andrew Childs Benoit Leclerc Danielle Reynald

Dark web drug market participants (both buyers and vendors) face frequent disruptions that affect their access to marketplaces. While these disruptions vary in their duration and the actors involved, existing research has largely concentrated on closures by law enforcement. Recognising the broader range of disruptions experienced by participants is essential for understanding how dark web markets adapt and evolve. This paper presents a typology of dark web drug market disruptions, informed by the current literature, categorising disruptions along two key dimensions: the duration of the disruption (temporary versus permanent) and the actor involved (internal versus external) in the disruption. This typology provides a comprehensive framework for analysing how different forms of disruption may influence market participant decision-making processes and the resilience of illicit online drug markets. In doing so, the typology highlights how disruptions that differ in duration and origin may have varying implications for participant behaviour and market resilience.