Introduction: Urinary incontinence (UI) is common across the female lifespan and is linked to diminished confidence, reduced participation, and social isolation. Access to care is especially limited in rural communities. Pelvic floor muscle training is effective, but delivery models often overlook the psychosocial burden of UI, particularly loneliness among older adults. We developed and piloted an intergenerational, group-based program with virtual clinical support to test and explore whether it could improve continence while also fostering social connection and reducing isolation for seniors.

Methods: A 12-week, single-cohort pre–post intervention was delivered at a supported-living lodge in Hinton, Alberta. Eight women with UI were enrolled (six postmenopausal and two postpartum); seven completed the program. Sessions (twice weekly) combined education (breathing strategies, the Knack, urge-suppression), supervised exercises, and home exercises. Virtual oversight used Zoom and a telepresence robot; content was iteratively refined via Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles. Outcomes included PFDI-20, PFIQ-7 questionnaires, and 3-week interval bladder diaries tracking voids, leak episodes, etc. Given ordinal scales and small sample size, descriptive summaries were used.

Results: Data were available for seven participants. Improvements were most frequent for frequent urination (5/6, 83%) and urgency leakage (4/7, 57%); stress-related leakage improved in 4/7 (57%). Bladder diaries indicated fewer leak episodes by week 12 with stable bowel patterns. Participants reported reduced reliance on incontinence products; some discontinued containment aids, and one stopped an overactive-bladder medication after consulting a clinician. PFIQ-7 domains most often showing improvement were physical activity, travel, and social participation.

Conclusions: This exploratory pilot study demonstrated that a low-cost, intergenerational program with virtual clinical support was feasible in a rural setting and associated with clinically meaningful UI improvements and perceived gains in function and confidence. Despite limitations (small sample and no control group), findings justify a larger controlled evaluation and suggest group-based, tele-enabled pelvic floor rehabilitation can expand access to conservative UI care in underserved communities.

Despite growing Black African immigration to the U.S. South, dominant integration frameworks overlook the historical and cultural contexts shaping Black migration. As a result, the distinct stories, desires, and post-migration strategies of this population are often silenced. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining first-generation sub-Saharan African immigrants’ lived experiences in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on how these intersecting identities: race, gender, and reason for migration, affect their experiences of social inclusion. Through semi-structured interviews with 24 participants, 10 conflict-generated migrants and 14 voluntary migrants, this study employs a decolonial feminist lens to center participants’ voices and epistemic sovereignty in defining social inclusion. Findings reveal that social inclusion is neither linear nor uniform but a dynamic, ongoing negotiation mediated by structural barriers and everyday interactions. Participants’ hybrid identities functioned simultaneously as barriers and sources of resilience, requiring tripartite, strategic navigation between African heritage, American Blackness, and institutional expectations. Migration pathways shaped by colonial histories and ongoing geopolitical marginalization significantly influenced inclusion strategies: conflict-affected immigrants prioritized safety and community cohesion, while voluntary migrants emphasized professional advancement. Across experiences, participants employed cultural balancing, selective adaptation, and code-switching to maintain identity while expanding opportunities. This research makes three key contributions: (a) it applies decolonial feminist epistemology to African immigrant studies in the South; (b) it demonstrates that social inclusion requires context-specific, intersectional approaches rather than universal models; and (c) it positions the U.S. South as a unique site where historical racial legacies intersect with contemporary immigrant negotiations. The study reimagines immigrant belonging through frameworks that honor transnational attachments, recognize epistemic diversity, and acknowledge the affective, unfinished nature of inclusion.

This ongoing research explores socioeconomic insecurity (Probst, 2008) in Southern Italy through a mixed-methods approach (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004), with particular attention to the forms of female inactivity and marginality that translate into digital informal work (Williams, 2010; Williams, 2019; Park, 2025).
The condition of “autonomy” of digital traders and the invisibility of housewives’ domestic work (Fortunati, 2007) emerge as different but intertwined configurations of precariousness. In this context, home-based work and the emerging practices of live shopping on platforms such as TikTok represent a privileged observatory of bottom-up strategies to counter impoverishment, in response to the crisis of the welfare system and policies for female employment.
Live shopping is not only a new sales model but also a significant transformation of digital commerce that intertwines entertainment, interaction, and creativity within the domestic space (Conor, 2015; Harini, 2024; Puspawati, 2023).
The integrated analysis of official statistical sources, digital ethnography, and interviews enables the presentation of both macro-perspectives and micro-life stories, which are capable of describing the processes of redefining housewives’ economic survival strategies (Jarrett, 2016).
Live shopping thus constitutes a field of tensions between marginality and innovation, exclusion and new forms of empowerment. The informality of platforms opens up spaces for micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment, for equitable access to economic resources for housewives but at the same time raises questions about new forms of self-exploitation and the balance between work and care (Arcidiacono, 2024; Farinella, 2021).
Can digital labour (Fuchs, 2014), which by its very nature is not equally accessible and is potentially a generator of social and economic inequality, represent a real future alternative for inactive women? My research aims to clarify this paradox from a local and gendered perspective.

Research indicates that African, Caribbean and Black Identifying (ABCI) young people face barriers when accessing mental health services (Cénat, et al, 2025; Okusanya & Meyer, 2025; Finnigan, et al, 2022; Fante-Coleman & Jackson-Best, 2019; Galimore et al, 2023) including systemic, practitioner related, mental health literacy and discrimination. The current body of academic scholarship highlights a gap in empirical research focused solely on the perceptions of psychotherapy among this population. This community-based participatory action research study involves a partnership with African Caribbean Wellness Initiatives (ACWIs) in southwestern Ontario Canada and seeks to address this gap by including voices of young people who have engaged in psychotherapy. Transition from adolescence to young adulthood comes with expected as well as unexpected changes (Jankowiak, et al, 2025; Arnett, 2024, 2004; Mandarino, 2014; Steinbeck & Khon, 2013; Havighurst, 1972) including physical, psychological, and sexual changes through the transition into early adulthood. These changes, coupled with usual stressors of life transitions, can compound their emotional distress and even cause health crisis. Young people raised in households of new immigrant parents are more likely to experience intense emotional and psychological challenges that may require the assistance of health professionals like counsellors and psychotherapists. However, experience indicates that their perceptions of psychotherapy determine the effectiveness of the intervention. The study will include the participation of young people of ages between 18 and 29 years, who either migrated to Ontario, Canada as children or were born to newer immigrant parents and have lived/still live in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The central aim of this community-based participatory action research is to explore perceptions of this distinct demography and advance best practices including considerations for an Afrocentric approach to psychotherapy which may lead to greater access to psychotherapeutic services.

Sport is widely recognized as a tool for social change, yet it operates through often contradictory logics. This paper aims to comparatively analyze two of these opposing logics of social innovation in contemporary sport: the logic of inclusion and the logic of selection.

To this end, a mixed-methods comparative case study, part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation, is presented. The first case ("Community Sport") analyzes a socio-sport project in a context of high vulnerability in Alicante (Spain), focusing on migrant-background children and youth. The second case ("Sport for Excellence") examines the high-performance sport model within a Spanish university institution, which functions as a talent management system.

Research progress shows divergent results that reflect both logics. In the community-based case, the inclusion model achieves a majority participation of migrant-background girls (63.3%), reversing historical trends of exclusion documented at the national level. Conversely, the excellence model operates through a strict selection of talent, generating a specific habitus and lifestyles centered on performance.

The analysis concludes that sport is not a univocal social tool; its social impact depends on the logic that structures it. It can simultaneously function as a powerful mechanism for equity and social cohesion at the grassroots level and as a system of stratification and elite production at the top. Understanding this ambivalence is crucial for designing more effective and socially aware public sports policies.

Parental stress is a nationwide health crisis according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2024 advisory. To allay stress, expecting parents seek advice and share experiences in a variety of venues, from in-person birth education classes and parenting groups to virtual communities such as BabyCenter, for example, a moderated online forum community with over 4 million members in the United States alone. In this study, we aim to understand how parents talk about pregnancy, birth, and parenting by analyzing 5.43M posts and comments from the April 2017--January 2024 cohort of 331,843 BabyCenter "birth club" users (that is, users who participate in due-date forums or "birth clubs'' based on their babies' due dates). Using BERTopic to locate breastfeeding threads and LDA to summarize themes, we compare documents in breastfeeding threads to all other birth-club content. Analyzing time series of word rankings, we find that posts and comments containing anxiety-related terms increased steadily from April 2017 to January 2024. We used an ensemble of topic models to identify dominant breastfeeding topics within birth clubs, and then explored trends among all user content versus those who posted in threads related to breastfeeding topics. We conducted Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify the most common topics in the full population, as well as within the subset breastfeeding population. We find that the topic of sleep dominates in content generated by the breastfeeding population, as well anxiety-related and work/daycare topics that are not predominant in the full BabyCenter birth-club dataset.

This study explores how public attitudes toward the introduction of shared parental leave (SPL) as a legal measure for childcare vary across European societies. Specifically, it examines how individual-level characteristics and country-level characteristics related to gender equality and parental leave (PL) policy arrangements shape men and women’s attitudes.

Drawing on data from the European Social Survey (2022/23), a random-intercept logit model was applied to analyze the relationship between individual and contextual factors and support for a legal measure requiring both parents to take equal periods of paid leave. The dependent variable distinguishes between negative or neutral versus positive attitudes toward the introduction of such a legal measure.

Individual-level variables include age, marital status, number of children, subjective household income, education, and place of residence. Contextual indicators encompass the Gender Equality Index (overall score and domains of work, money, and time), full-rate equivalent parental leave for mothers and fathers, shareable paid parental leave (in weeks), the full-time employment rate of mothers with children aged 0–14, and public expenditure on family leave per live birth (in current USD PPP).

Results indicate that in societies with advanced gender equality, support for a rigid legal requirement mandating equal parental leave is weaker, while flexibility in leave use is more strongly endorsed as a means of promoting gender equality. Conversely, in societies with larger gender disparities, the introduction of an equal-split parental leave policy is more likely to be perceived as a step toward greater equity, fairness, and improved reconciliation of paid work and childcare.

This paper, entitled “Human Resource Management and Labor Relations in Tourism and Cultural Enterprises: Evidence from Crete”, presents the findings of a postdoctoral research conducted at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. This study aims to highlight the significance of leadership, the quality of labor relations, and the development of skills in the sectors of tourism and culture—two fields of strategic importance not only for the Greek economy but also for the broader study of the sociology of tourism.

The methodology adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research. In the quantitative phase, questionnaires were distributed to 500 tourist and cultural enterprises across all prefectures of Crete, mapping management practices and human resource strategies. In the qualitative phase, in-depth interviews were conducted with employees, providing insights into workplace experiences, levels of job satisfaction, and the social dynamics shaping labor relations.

The results demonstrate that business success depends on two interrelated pillars: First, the leadership capabilities of employers, who are responsible for cultivating a culture built on trust, collaboration, and continuous learning. Second, the employees’ competencies—both technical (hard skills) and social (soft skills)—which enhance productivity, improve service quality, and ultimately shape the visitors' experience. At a sociological level, these labor relations and skills transcend the workplace, generating social identities, professional status, and collective experiences that influence how tourism is perceived and experienced as a social and cultural phenomenon.

In conclusion, this study shows that the synergy between management and the workforce functions not only as a mechanism of competitiveness but also as a social driver shaping the resilience, sustainability, and legitimacy of the tourist and cultural sectors. The contribution of this research is therefore twofold: it provides practical guidance for human resource management and enriches sociological discourse on tourism as domain where labor, economy, and society intersect.

Abstract

Background: Teachers’ occupational health problems have attracted increasing attention from researchers worldwide, as they are closely linked to both teacher well-being and educational quality. Nevertheless, the specific mechanisms connecting stress sources and health problems unique to teachers remain insufficiently understood. In particular, little is known about whether these associations differ between female and male teachers. To address these limitations, the present study employed network analysis using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022.

Methods: A total of 2,092 teachers from Hong Kong were included in the analysis. Network analysis was conducted to explore the interconnections among nine identified sources of teacher stress and ten teacher health problems. In addition, gender-specific networks were estimated to examine potential differences in the structure and centrality of nodes between female and male teachers.

Results: The findings indicated that administrative tasks were the most salient source of stress in the overall network, while fatigue was the most prominent health problem. Gender differences emerged in both the central nodes and the network edges. For female teachers, administrative workload and fatigue were central concerns, whereas for male teachers, intimidation or verbal abuse by students and fatigue were central.

Discussion: These findings highlight the necessity of reducing administrative workload and implementing strategies to mitigate teacher fatigue. Moreover, gender-specific interventions are warranted to address distinct stressors and health challenges faced by female and male educators, thereby promoting teacher well-being and supporting sustainable educational development.

Umuarama, in the northwest of Paraná, was founded on 26 June 1955 and completed 70 years in 2025. Despite its historical youth, it has consolidated itself as a regional center of development, with an economy based on agribusiness, commerce and services. Recognized as the "Capital of Friendship", it stands out for its modern infrastructure, good health, education, leisure and safety indicators, as well as quality of life for its inhabitants. Its cultural identity and strategic position in the Entre Rios region reinforce its attractiveness as a promising medium-sized city in southern Brazil. The study evaluates the urban development of Umuarama in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identifying advances and challenges. The circular city approach involves not only environmental and economic aspects, but also social inclusion, job creation in the circular economy, and community empowerment through sustainable public spaces. According to the Sustainable Development Index of Cities (IDSC-BR), Umuarama occupies the 325th position in the national ranking. Although it is not among the most sustainable, it already has practices aligned with the SDGs: health and leisure services (SDG 3), structured educational institutions (SDG 4), diversified economy that promotes decent work and growth (SDG 8) and green areas that support sustainable cities (SDG 11). The performance in the IDSC-BR indicates advances in quality of life, infrastructure and economy, but also reveals challenges in waste management, use of renewable energy and urban mobility. The municipality has favorable conditions and alignment with the SDGs, but needs to expand environmental policies to consolidate itself as a reference in sustainability.