Responding to everyday problems and crises: Measuring community resilience.

Resilience is of the upmost importance to deal with everyday problems faced by communities. The concept of community resilience is gaining prominence in disaster management policy and practice, and it has been shown to be an important factor during pandemic recovery such as during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. We present an instrument for community resilience assessment adapted for disasters like the pandemics. The instrument was based on the theory-based and evidence-informed Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) Assessment Survey, adapted for the first time to Portuguese. Another strong feature of this study relates to the targeted participants, namely human service workers (598). They are key informants for their close involvement with communities. This version of the CART was reliable. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good relationship between the observed variables and their underlying latent constructs. Moreover, tests for measurement invariance across participants showed that differences in factor variances and covariances were not attributable to age-based differences in the properties of the scales themselves. Our findings support the fundamental idea that it is worthwhile to have an instrument to measure community resilience. Thus, our study adds to the evaluation of the CART, supporting its value as a robust instrument to measure resilience at the community level in different countries.

Inequity in healthcare use among older people after 2008: The case of southern European countries.

Despite the sizeable cuts in public healthcare spending, which were part of the austerity measures recently undertaken in Southern European countries, little attention has been devoted to monitoring its distributional consequences in terms of healthcare use. This study aims at measuring socioeconomic inequities in primary and secondary healthcare use experienced some time after the crisis onset in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The analysis, based on data drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), focuses on older people, who generally face significantly higher healthcare needs, and whose health appeared to have worsened in the aftermath of the crisis. The Horizontal Inequity indexes reveal remarkable socioeconomic inequities in older people's access to secondary healthcare in all three countries. In Portugal, the one country facing most severe healthcare budget cuts and where user charges apply also to GP visits, even access to primary care exhibits a significant pro-rich concentration. If reducing inequities in older people's access to healthcare remains a policy objective, austerity measures maybe pulling the Olive belt countries further away from achieving it.

Who Delays Childbearing? The Associations Between Time to First Birth, Personality Traits and Education.

Using data from a large-scale survey, the British Household Panel Survey, this paper assesses the influence of personality traits on the timing of first childbirth and investigates whether, and in what way, personality traits explain the differences in maternity timing across educational groups. We estimate a log-logistic model of the time to first childbirth and show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the Big Five personality traits and the timing of motherhood. The results also show that highly qualified women who are 'open-minded' have the lowest hazards of childbirth, lower than similar less educated counterparts.

Psychological distress of marital and cohabitation breakups.

Using data from a large survey, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper explores the extent to which marital and cohabiting unions differ with respect to the short-term effects of union dissolution on mental health. We compare married individuals who divorced or separated with cohabitors whose first union ended and test the hypothesis that married individuals experience larger negative effects. Results show that initial differences are not statistically significant once the presence of children is controlled for, suggesting that the presence of children is a particularly significant source of increased psychological distress in union dissolutions. However, parenthood does not explain serious psychological distress, which appears to be associated with enduring traits (the personality trait neuroticism).

Yearning, learning, and conceding: reasons men and women change their childbearing intentions.

People's childbearing intentions change over the course of their reproductive lives. These changes have been conceptualized as occurring in response to the realization that an individual is unlikely to achieve his or her intended fertility, because of constraints such as the "biological clock" or lack of a partner. In this article, we find that changes to child-bearing plans are influenced by a much wider range of factors than this. People change their plans in response to the wishes of their partners, in response to social norms, as the result of repartnering, and as the result of learning about the costs and benefits of parenthood; there are also differences between the factors that influence men's and women's decision-making. In a departure from existing studies in this area, we use a flexible analytical framework that enables us to analyze increases in planned fertility separately from decreases. This allows us to uncover several complexities of the decision-making process that would otherwise be hidden, and leads us to conclude that the determinants of increases in planned fertility are not simply equal and opposite to the determinants of decreases.