2026 February - 88 articles
Older adults with disabilities face compounded vulnerabilities due to both functional limitations and socioeconomic disadvantage. In South Korea, where public welfare systems remain fragmented and cultural values emphasize independence and productivi...
Political theorists have suggested that democracy is at odds with liberalism. Moreover, with fears about the recent rise in populism, there is growing skepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive. In her recent work, Demo...
Does the completeness of actors’ knowledge affect the exercise of power in social structures? Exchange theories and the experiments used to test them vary in the level of information availability—ranging from fully transparent to sharply...
The purpose of this article is to present a systematic reflection on my experience teaching international English as a Second Language (ESL) students about Indigenous rights and reconciliation in a year-long university ESL course in Canada during the...
This study aims to explore perceptions among students at Jordanian universities regarding “wasta,” defined as the use of social relations or kinship ties to pressure faculty members into granting them undeserved academic privileges, and t...
The article explores letter writing as both an artistic practice and a relational method of inquiry. Through an exchange of letters between two academics, the authors reflect on how their correspondence deepened their relationship and created space f...
Social capital influences community disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. In 2020, Kyne and Aldrich introduced the Social Capital Index (SoCI), a pioneering, publicly available county-level measure capturing bonding, bridging, and linking so...
The Welsh Government commissioned research to develop a national model of support to improve wellbeing and educational outcomes for children when a parent goes to prison, with a particular interest in collaboration between prisons and schools. Centra...
This paper explores the controversial issue of the extent to which human rights values are universal and applicable within all cultural contexts across the contemporary world. It evaluates three claims that are commonly made by those working in the f...
This study aims to examine eating practices during pregnancy as socially organized everyday labor (foodwork) embedded in daily life. Drawing on the sociology of food, it analyzes how pregnancy reshapes eating routines, food classifications, procureme...
This article presents an arts-based and polyvocal account of Gira Ingoma (One Drum per Girl), a women- and girl-led cultural initiative in Rwanda that reconstructs drumming, warrior dance, and self-praise poetry to advance gender equality and contrib...
Energy communities in Denmark, Italy, and Norway were investigated to explore factors that enable or hinder the behavioral and social transformations necessary to achieve a socially just environmental transition, particularly in projects involving vu...
(1) Background: This article investigates the status relationship between academic and vocational tracks in the four largest cities in Norway. While previous qualitative research has mainly examined academic and vocational tracks separately, this art...
Rapid workplace changes have been associated with increased burnout and turnover intention. This study investigates the mechanisms linking decent work to employees’ turnover intention through a moderated mediation framework, in which burnout me...
Given the critical role of national authorities in the asylum process, sociolinguistic research on inequalities in narrative assessment has prioritised the high-stakes hearings within the official process. It is, however, also crucial to analyse how...
Population aging has increased reliance on family carers, whose psychosocial burdens and support needs vary by life stage. This exploratory study aimed to compare psychosocial care burdens and support needs between middle-aged family carers (MFCs) an...
Brazilian women’s migration to Portugal has increased in recent years, driven by hopes of safety, improved living conditions, and professional opportunities. Yet these aspirations frequently collide with structural barriers and experiences of d...
This study investigates research engagement among teachers specializing in language education for people with refugee and migrant backgrounds in Greece. Given the non-standardized and relatively unstructured nature of language education in such setti...
The potential of social entrepreneurship to address persistent social problems through innovative and sustainable solutions has been increasingly recognized in recent decades. While persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to face significant...
In Taiwan, with the increase in the elderly population and the emergence of a super-aging society, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) has developed various long-term care (LTC) centers, offering different types of services to effectively impro...
Background: Occupational gender segregation is a key driver of labor market inequality and is prominent across occupations, within occupations, and within workplace task groups. This paper explores how structural arrangements and cultural messages sh...
Despite the progress made in recent decades, sexism is a prevalent problem today and has permeated society at a systemic level, including education. This study seeks to analyse the perception of sexism by senior secondary school teachers and trainee...
Community-oriented policing (COP) has long been hailed as an approach to enhancing community trust in police, addressing community problems proactively rather than reactively, and fostering police-community engagement. However, some law enforcement a...
This paper introduces the Sextuple Helix Innovation Model as an extension of the Quintuple Helix Innovation Model by Carayannis and Campbell. The epistemic perspective considers the understanding of generative AI (GenAI) as a sixth helix of knowledge...
Background: This study aims to explore the potential factors that can support Ph.D. students in completing their theses in a timely manner while maintaining their mental well-being. Theory: Based on the JD-R model, we discriminate between two indepen...
AI-enabled chatbots are increasingly positioned as a remedy for breastfeeding support gaps in rural maternal health, offering private, immediate assistance amid persistent shortages of lactation specialists and limited access to care. However, their...
Workplace productivity fundamentally involves group processes where vertical authorities interact with lateral peer relationships, involving various types of resources. Leveraging theoretical arguments from self-determination, social exchange, and ju...
Cohabitation has become an increasingly common context for childrearing, yet children living with cohabiting parents often exhibit poorer academic outcomes than peers with married parents. This study examines whether these disparities stem from cohab...
A commitment to co-production in which social workers co-create research, knowledge, and practice with people from multi-disciplinary backgrounds and people with direct lived experience of accessing services, who are termed experts by experience (EbE...
This study evaluates the effectiveness of California’s homelessness assistance system by integrating national, state, and county-level trends with an analysis of structural barriers, policy implementation gaps, and service coordination challeng...
Social factors profoundly shape the bereavement process for individuals who have lost someone to a drug-related death. In this study, we integrate qualitative (n = 19), quantitative (n = 5), and mixed-methods (n = 2) results from a large research pro...
Perinatal mental health (PMH) conditions are the most common complications of pregnancy and the first postpartum year. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are increasingly recognized as important contributors to PMH, particularly postpartum depressi...
The paper presents reflections from four black women academics on their process of creating theatricalised performances about their experiences in higher education. These women are part of the research group Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FemDAC). T...
In a rapidly changing professional landscape marked by digitization, socio-economic transformations, and post-pandemic upheavals, understanding career trajectories has become an interdisciplinary concern. This study presents a systematic bibliometric...
After eight years, my term as Editor-in-Chief of Social Sciences has come to an end [...]
Interpersonal violence is now widely acknowledged as a key concern throughout sport. In response, governing bodies have started to introduce safeguarding strategies. One such example is the FIFA Guardians programme, which aims to introduce stronger s...
Livestock theft remains a deeply entrenched and economically damaging form of rural crime in South Africa, with significant implications for food security, community trust, and agricultural sustainability. This exploratory study critically evaluates...
This study explores how commercialization shapes gender representation and inequality within contemporary running culture. Situated within the broader context of sport and media consumption, it examines how bodies, identities, and spaces are discipli...
This study aims to explore the main factors for Yemeni international students’ choice and motivation for selecting China as their study destination. We employed a qualitative case study approach, and conducted twenty-five semi-structured, in-de...
Feminist identification has become an increasingly salient yet contested collective identity in contemporary societies marked by political polarization. This study examines how affective, perceptual, and ideological dimensions are associated with fem...
This article examines vulnerability to counterfeit currency fraud in Bulgaria by assessing citizens’ competence in recognizing genuine banknotes of the national currency (BGN) prior to the introduction of euro banknotes in 2026. Counterfeit ban...
The cultivation of civilized rural customs—a core dimension of China’s rural revitalization strategy—is crucial for revitalizing the spirit of its rural communities. This study, grounded in the strategic context of China’s rur...
This systematic literature review provides an extensive synthesis of the empirical, theoretical, and policy research on Black students with disabilities in higher education in Canada and the United States. Grounded in the Preferred Reporting Items to...
This article analyzes the historical relationship between Orthodox Christianity and nation formation. In past centuries, most adherents to the faith lived in the Ottoman and Russian Empires, under the Moscow and the Ecumenical Patriarchates. These tw...
Background: People navigating pregnancy face significant emotional vulnerability, with emotional support serving as a crucial protective factor for perinatal wellbeing. While there is emerging scholarship on how AI is used as a diagnostic tool during...
In MDPI’s first edition of the Special Issue on “Inclusive Research: Is the Road More or Less Well Travelled [...]
Excluding child abuse and neglect, children may experience violence in their day-to-day lives, but little is known about the frequency of such experiences or the characteristics of those who perpetrate this violence. Some characteristics of the envir...
Honour-based violence can be considered a serious global problem that involves violations of human rights, and having a disability may increase the risk of being subjected to violence. The purpose of this study was to investigate the situation and ne...
(1) Background: Menstruation is subject to stigma worldwide, which has led to restrictive cultural norms and taboos rooted in religion, customs, and patriarchal systems. The resulting ‘cultural stigma’ associated with menstruation exacerb...
Even when designed by and for members of (multiple) oppressed groups, nightlife is generally an unsafe experience. In response to this, awareness teams have emerged internationally in recent years, ensuring that members of these groups can continue t...
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