Search Results (139)

Dogs’ societal roles have shifted globally. In private spheres, dogs are increasingly regarded as family and granted legal protections, but in public, they are framed as dangerous and subjected to increased legal restrictions. Changing perceptions of dogs and differences in the law’s beneficiaries may influence how people develop legal knowledge. Where enforcement is limited or challenging, legal knowledge becomes an important component of the law’s capacity to shape behaviour. Using the United Kingdom (UK) as a case study, we examined people’s knowledge of 22 laws, divided between UK-wide current laws, nation-specific laws, and plausible hypothetical laws representing high-priority issues. We conducted a nationally representative survey with 1758 participants, split equally across the four UK nations. We first conducted exploratory model-building to identify variables associated with knowledge and then analysed these variables using multinomial models. Accurate legal knowledge among the UK public was limited, with participants frequently overestimating the existence of laws that prioritise dogs and their owners. Dog owners responded with greater certainty but not greater accuracy than non-dog owners. Older participants were more accurate overall, while responses to hypothetical laws suggested generational differences in views on animal welfare. These findings suggest gaps between the law in reality and what people assume the law to be. Full article

The scope of actual pro-environmental initiatives, programs, interventions, and campaigns is limited. Therefore, spillover effects from these activities to other domains of economy, the private sphere, and society are crucial to achieve a transformation of society towards sustainability. Starting from the known literature and using Google Scholar as a platform for searching additional studies, this explorative, traditional narrative review analyses behavioural spillover effects, where either one behaviour influences the likelihood of another behaviour, or an intervention shows an impact on an environmentally significant behaviour, which it did not primarily address. In the scientific literature, spillover is classified by direction (environmentally positive versus negative), involved behaviours (similar or cross-behavioural), timing (short or long term), context (e.g., work to private life), and social scope (personal, interpersonal, intra- and inter-organisational, intergroup, or international). Positive spillover can result from cognitive dissonance reduction, consistent self-perception, pro-environmental values, norms, self-identity, action-based learning, and habit formation. Negative spillover emerges through rebound effects, moral licensing, and psychological reactance. Stronger spillover is observed between similar behaviours, while cross-domain spillover is generally weaker. According to previous research, a facilitated participatory approach with strong pro-environmental orientation appears recommendable for practitioners to foster the value change required for effective and sustained positive spillover. Full article

Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains understudied in China despite its public health significance. Previous research lacks comprehensive analysis of how Chinese media frames this issue, creating a gap in understanding the sociocultural factors shaping public discourse. This study employs corpus-based framing analysis of 603 news articles (435,581 words) from major Chinese newspapers spanning 2012–2022, a period encompassing significant legal developments including the 2016 Domestic Violence Law. We analyze how IPV is framed through examination of keyword frequencies, collocation patterns, and concordance analysis. Our findings reveal that IPV is predominantly framed as matrimonial conflict and family dispute rather than criminal violence requiring state intervention. We argue that framing IPV as a ‘family issue’ operates as a spatial containment strategy, relocating violence to the domestic sphere while rerouting intervention into administrative/civil channels rather than criminal accountability spaces. Our findings reveal significant imbalances in stakeholder representation, with government and legal voices dominating the public discourse domain while community support organizations are marginalized. Source attribution patterns produce uneven zones of legitimacy, where state actors occupy authorized public space while survivors’ experiences remain confined to private, silenced domains. This research enhances the understanding of IPV media coverage in China while highlighting the need for more inclusive public discourse. Full article

This study proposes a novel theoretical synthesis, bridging the sociology of lived religion with economic club good theory to explore the high-commitment dynamics in domestic spheres in the analysis of “Amen meals”, a rapidly spreading ritual among Jewish women. Using a qualitative–ethnographic methodology based on 23 participant observations and 53 in-depth interviews with a diverse spectrum of Jewish women in Israel, the research examines the ways this ritual functions as a gendered religious economy. The findings identify emotional stringency as a key mechanism for communal cohesion: unlike traditional religious clubs that filter out free riders through external prohibitions, this economy demands a tariff of emotional exposure and vulnerability, where public tears serve as costly signals of commitment. These enable the participants to gain access to exclusive club goods such as social insurance and spiritual agency. The study concludes that Amen meals challenge the binary between institutional–rational and private–emotional spheres, positioning women’s ritual creativity as a mutual insurance system for risks that formal institutions fail to cover. It reveals the powerful economies operating within the lived religion of women. Full article

This article investigates the potential of the block as a tool for sustainable and inclusive urban design. It aims to identify the morphological and typological principles that make the block a resilient structure, capable of ensuring density, spatial clarity, and a balanced relationship between public, collective, and private spheres. Focusing on reformed urban blocks built in Berlin between 1890 and 1940, this paper examines the intersection of urban morphology, housing reform, and metropolitan architecture, addressing them not primarily as historical objects, but as spatial and typological models relevant to contemporary urban challenges. The research is based on historical and archival sources, morphological analysis, typological classification, and the systematic redrawing of selected case studies at multiple scales, from the urban fabric to apartment layouts and architectural details. Exemplary cases were selected and redrawn in order to allow direct comparison and measurement of spatial and typological features. The results identify recurring block configurations, housing layouts, and architectural solutions that mediate density, livability, and urban clarity, showing the Berlin reform block as a lasting design paradigm that offers enduring lessons for contemporary challenges of density, sustainability, and urban quality. Full article

Eco-anxiety has emerged as a significant psychological response to the climate crisis. Yet its relationship with pro-environmental behavior remains far from settled, with findings ranging from behavioral paralysis to active engagement and seemingly contradictory evidence accumulating across studies. To clarify both the magnitude of this association and the conditions under which it holds, we conducted a systematic review and three-level random-effects meta-analysis. We systematically searched five databases (ProQuest, APA PsycArticles, PubMed, among others) through April 2025, identifying 20 independent studies that contributed 60 effect sizes (N = 34,206). The pooled results revealed a significant, small-to-moderate positive association between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behavior (r = 0.24, 95% CI [0.15, 0.32], p < 0.001). So far, fairly straightforward. The complication emerged when examining heterogeneity: we observed substantial variation across studies (I² = 95.4%), with a 95% prediction interval ranging from −0.22 to 0.61. What this tells us is that eco-anxiety does not uniformly predict action across contexts; the variability is considerable and meaningful. Moderator analyses offered important clarification. The association proved significantly stronger for public and collective behaviors, such as activism and advocacy (r = 0.36), compared to private sphere actions (r = 0.22). Beyond this, effects were more robust in adult samples (r = 0.30) than among adolescents (r = 0.18). These findings suggest something worth emphasizing: eco-anxiety appears to function not merely as a pathological burden but as an adaptive, context-sensitive correlate of collective engagement. Put differently, the distress people experience in response to climate change may channel productively into systemic action, particularly when social and collective pathways are available. What this means for practice is significant. Future interventions, in this perspective, should focus on channeling climate distress toward collective, structural engagement rather than defaulting to individual behavioral prescriptions alone. Full article

Background/Objective: Feminist theories and feminist economics have contributed to making visible the structural relevance of care work in sustaining capitalist societies and social reproduction, arguing that care must be addressed as a political phenomenon rather than a merely domestic issue. This perspective is particularly pertinent in contemporary healthcare, where chronic care represents one of the major public health challenges in a context of population ageing and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases. The aim is to contribute to a critical understanding that can support the development of public policies recognizing care as a fundamental pillar of socio-healthcare provision and as a matter of collective responsibility. Methods: A narrative literature review with a critical feminist approach was conducted using PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science. Results: A total of 299 records were identified, of which 30 studies were included following screening and eligibility assessment. Care is an essential element for sustaining life, although it has historically been rendered invisible, feminized, and relegated to the private sphere. Chronicity requires simultaneous consideration of the material dimension of care (as work), the subjective dimension (including emotional bonds and moral responsibility), and the political dimension (shaped by power relations). Global care chains reveal persistent inequalities related to gender, class, and race. Conclusions: Care is a structural, political, and transnational category that sustains life and healthcare systems. In the field of chronic care, the recognition, redistribution, and socialization of care are essential for achieving social justice and for safeguarding the dignity of both caregivers—predominantly women—and care recipients. Full article

Online hate speech poses a growing socio-technological threat that undermines democratic resilience and obstructs progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16). This study examines the regulatory and behavioral dimensions of this phenomenon through a combined legal analysis of platform governance and an empirical survey conducted on Meta platforms, based on a sample of young Hungarians (N = 301, aged 14–34). This study focuses on Hungary as a relevant case study of a Central and Eastern European (CEE) state. Countries in this region, due to their shared historical development, face similar societal challenges that are also reflected in the online sphere. The combination of high social media penetration, a highly polarized political discourse, and the tensions between platform governance and EU law (the DSA) makes the Hungarian context particularly suitable for examining digital resilience and the legal awareness of young users. The results reveal a significant “awareness gap”: While a majority of young users can intuitively identify overt hate speech, their formal understanding of platform rules is minimal. Furthermore, their sanctioning preferences often diverge from Meta’s actual policies, indicating a lack of clarity and predictability in platform governance. This gap signals a structural weakness that erodes user trust. The legal analysis highlights the limited enforceability and opacity of content moderation mechanisms, even under the Digital Services Act (DSA) framework. The empirical findings show that current self-regulation models fail to empower users with the necessary knowledge. The contribution of this study is to empirically identify and critically reframe this ‘awareness gap’. Moving beyond a simple knowledge deficit, we argue that the gap is a symptom of a deeper legitimacy crisis in platform governance. It reflects a rational user response—manifesting as digital resignation—to opaque, commercially driven, and unaccountable moderation systems. By integrating legal and behavioral insights with critical platform studies, this paper argues that achieving SDG 16 requires a dual strategy: (1) fundamentally increasing transparency and accountability in content governance to rebuild user trust, and (2) enhancing user-centered digital and legal literacy through a shared responsibility model. Such a strategy must involve both public and private actors in a coordinated, rights-based approach. Ultimately, this study calls for policy frameworks that strengthen democratic resilience not only through better regulation, but by empowering citizens to become active participants—rather than passive subjects—in the governance of online spaces. Full article

(1) Background: Each generation’s approach to private-sphere environmentalism is shaped by distinct historical and socio-economic contexts, values, educational opportunities, and living conditions. The aim of this article is to identify differences on this issue among four generations (BB, X, Y, Z) of Poles. (2) Methods: An online survey was conducted on a quota sample of 1000 individuals, with each generation represented by 250 participants. The sample was balanced across generations in terms of gender, education, and place of residence. (3) Results: The top private-sphere environmental behavior was waste segregation (M = 5.1, SD = 1.23), followed by using reusable bags (M = 4.92, SD = 1.2) and reducing energy use (M = 4.57, SD = 1.2). The older the generation, the higher the score in the private-sphere environmentalism index (F = 33.3 (3, 996), p < 0.001). Significant predictors of the private-sphere environmental behaviors (PSE) index were age, gender, environmental concern, and perceived self-impact on the environment, and the final hierarchical regression model explained 38% of the variance in the PSE index. (4) Conclusions: These results underscores the need to account for generational contexts when developing behavior-change strategies and sustainability policies aligned with SDG 12. Full article

University Dual Training is constructed at the intersection of academic and professional spheres, shaping a complex and multifaceted educational model. The aim of this study is to analyze the media representation of University Dual Training within the Spanish higher education landscape. The analysis focused on news articles published in the digital press of Spanish universities between 2021 and 2025. Following the methodological principles of a systematic review, a total of 81 news items (comprising 747 lexical segments) were identified and categorized 60 from 25 public universities and 21 from 7 private institutions. Data analysis, supported by the MAXQDA 24 software, enabled the identification of trends in the use of keywords, temporal evolution, and prevailing themes, along with the degree of relevance attributed to this training modality. The findings reveal an institutional tendency in media dissemination centred on promoting University Dual Training as a pathway for educational innovation, highlighting experiences and collaborations with companies, and projecting a discourse in which universities present themselves as committed to this modality. The study concludes that digital university newspapers convey the relevance and impact of University Dual Training as a modality that brings together diverse stakeholders, creating a space of collaboration and shared responsibility that strengthens student training and employability. Full article

Street art increasingly reshapes aesthetic hierarchies by introducing previously marginalised media into the public sphere. A compelling example is the artistic practice of the Polish artist NeSpoon (Elżbieta Dymna), whose work merges the visual language of traditional lace with the communicative strategies of contemporary urban art. Active since the late 2000s, NeSpoon combines stencils, ceramic lace imprints, and large-scale murals to translate the intimacy of handcraft into the visibility of public space. Her works function as both aesthetic interventions and acts of civic pedagogy. This study employs a qualitative visual research design combining multi-site digital inquiry, iconological and semiotic analysis, and mini focus group (N = 22). Three purposefully selected cases: Łódź, Belorado, and Fundão, were examined to capture the site-specific and cultural variability of lace murals across Europe. The analysis demonstrates that lace functions as an agent of cultural negotiation and a medium of heritage literacy, understood here as embodied and place-based learning. In Łódź, it monumentalises textile memory and women’s labour embedded in the city’s industrial palimpsest. In Belorado, micro-scale responsiveness operates, strengthening the local semiosphere. In Fundão, lace enters an intermedial dialogue with azulejos, negotiating the boundary between craft and art while expanding local visual grammars. The study introduces the conceptualisation of the monumentalisation of intimacy in public art and frames heritage literacy as an embodied, dialogic, and community-oriented educational practice. Its implications extend to feminist art history, place-based pedagogy, urban cultural policy, and the preventive conservation of murals. The research elucidates how domestic craft once confined to the private interior operates in public space as a medium of memory, care, and inclusive aesthetics. Full article

LED strips are increasingly used as lighting sources in public and private spaces. However, traditional photometric methods, such as integrating spheres, are unsuitable for measuring their light parameters, often resulting in significant errors and requiring expensive instrumentation or calibration. These errors are typically caused by non-uniform illumination of the internal surface or improper internal geometry, especially when measuring LED sources. This article presents the development of a low-cost integrating device specifically designed to measure LED strips’ light parameters. The device is a compact cube with a volume of less than 1.0 m³. It was tested against alternative methods using an integrating sphere and a goniophotometer in a professional photometric laboratory. The verification results confirmed its effectiveness. The device showed the maximum relative error of luminous flux measurement to be around 5% compared with the accurate, expensive goniophotometric method. For colorimetric measurements, the maximum Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) absolute error was about 35 K for an LED strip with a CCT of 4000 K, indicating a difference imperceptible to the human eye. These results demonstrate the device’s proper relevance in the research and development of LED strip-based lighting equipment to improve lighting equipment quality and control processes. The device is easy to replicate, significantly reducing production and transportation costs, making it an excellent solution for companies and research units seeking a cost-effective method for LED strip measurements. Additionally, the device can measure other light sources or luminaires with reasonably small sizes emitting light in only one hemisphere. The device is the basis of a patent application. Full article

After the end of the Second World War, Hungary, like other war-torn countries, was left with countless orphaned children. The collapsed state structures were unable to care for them, so only various private or church initiatives—such as Gaudopolis, a children’s home set up by the Lutheran pastor Gábor Szehló—provided a means of survival. However, in East-Central Europe—including Hungary, Poland and Romania—where the Soviet Union had a sphere of influence, the emerging Soviet-style system was aimed at the political re-education of society. Ideological goals categorically excluded the possibility of churches being involved in the care and education of youth beyond the existing legal framework. Any person who engaged in such activities was cracked down upon. This study examines the role and responsibility of church persons in the care and upbringing of orphaned children through the fate of the Roman Catholic priest István Regőczi. In the decades of communist dictatorship, István Regőczi repeatedly reorganised orphanages, where he carried out youth education activities based on principles similar to scouting. The values he imparted to the children—such as the Christian religion, family protection, mutual help and social solidarity—were all values of Christian socialism. However, the communist dictatorship—promoting its own political ideology, Marxism—sought to take control of the upbringing and education of children by nationalising all institutions involved in this activity. Anyone who resisted this—as István Regőczi did—was made impossible in the people’s democracy of the 1950s and 1960s, and his child-saving, educating and teaching activities were prevented, even if the courts sentenced him to longer or shorter prison sentences for the crimes of illegal youth organisation, incitement and the abuse of freedom of association. This study, comparing what is described in István Regőczi’s memoirs with the surviving archival sources, shows how during these terrible decades it was possible to save orphaned, needy children and raise them in a Christian spirit, even against the will of the authorities. Full article

In recent years, the concept of the commons has gained relevance across academic, legal and civic spheres as an alternative framework for managing shared resources. Rooted in Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work on collective governance, contemporary debates on the commons increasingly challenge the traditional binary of private versus public ownership by foregrounding the social function of these resources and the role of their communities in their administration. Urban commons, in particular, have emerged as dynamic spaces of experimentation, where local actors reclaim underutilised or abandoned assets and activate them through bottom-up processes of care, cultural production, and civic innovation. While international literature provides a robust conceptual foundation for understanding commoning practices, their practical implementation mostly depends on local specificities, such as legal and social contexts. Despite the important milestone of the Rodotà Commission’s proposal (2007) and Law 168/2017 on collective domains, the Italian regulatory framework remains highly fragmented, with regional and municipal regulations pioneering policies and practices frequently driven by community-led efforts to redefine the use and governance of public assets. This paper contributes to the growing debate on urban commons by investigating how, since 2011, experiences of collaborative care of the commons in Southern Italy have rekindled interest in the issue raised in 2007, highlighting a strong connection between the regulatory and social dimensions of these processes. The study develops a methodological framework—the COMmons Places ASSessment (COMPASS)—to evaluate the enabling conditions and governance dynamics of these processes. The research specifically focuses on five case studies in the Campania region, where diverse actors have mobilised to reclaim and transform public heritage through cultural, social, and creative activities. From the results, insights on collective management practices emerge potentials and criticalities of the analysed governance, as well as of the designed decision-making process and their effectiveness for the open, participatory, and sustainable management of urban commons. Full article