Ricerc@Sapienza

Teachers and educators represent meaningful relationships for children, and their attitudes can have a major influence on a child’s development. This research examined the role of background characteristics, contact experiences, and sexual prejudice in determining beliefs about children’s adjustment in same-sex parent families. The sample consisted of 323 Italian teachers and educators working in nursery schools, kindergartens, and primary schools.

Usually people consider morality traits to be highly valuable, both in themselves and in others. Moreover, they tend to select moral groups and are often motivated to protect the positive identity of their groups by derogating immoral ingroup members. However, sometimes even moral ingroup members could represent a threat to the group and therefore be negatively evaluated, such as in the case of people who report another person's wrongdoing (whistleblowing). To date an investigation of people's judgments of someone who self- disclose his/her own wrongdoing is still missing.

On the basis of a newly built regional panel data set that considers both the evolution of employment indicators in the Italian regions and indicators of counterfeiting activities and criminality, we empirically explore the link between joblessness and criminality. During the period of a deep economic and financial crisis we observed that, unexpectedly, unemployment and inactivity rates rise together. The paper studies whether and to what extent, in the considered period, criminal activities of counterfeit and other forms of crime have affected unemployment and inactivity rate.

In the context of an international research project on older people’s relations with and through mobile telephony, Italian participants spontaneously provided narrations on mobile phones that appeared to be structured around strong stereotypes. Respondents show a twofold representation of mobile phones either as a simple communication tool or as a ‘hi-tech’ device, which generates multifaceted stereotypes.