Autonomy and loneliness - longitudinal within- and between-person associations among Swedish older adults

Using structural topic modeling to understand ethnicity-related narratives

OBJECTIVE

Narrative identity is a promising approach for understanding the content of individuals' ethnic identities but can be limited by the time-intensive nature of human coding and the reliance on preestablished coding systems.

BACKGROUND

The aim of our preregistered study is to elucidate the content of individuals' ethnicity-related experiences using a novel statistical approach.

METHOD

We applied structural topic modeling (STM), a natural language processing tool, to narratives written by an ethnically diverse sample of 1149 young adults about a moment they felt aware of their ethnicity.

RESULTS

We identified 14 topics within ethnicity narratives and analyzed how each topic related to both the participant's ethnicity and the human-coded themes of agency and communion. For example, the topic Gained perspective of structural inequality was associated with greater agency, whereas Peer dynamics was associated with greater communion. Ethnic/cultural celebration was associated with both.

CONCLUSIONS

This study introduces STM as a useful tool for extracting topic content in narrative data and demonstrates how the multi-method assessment of ethnicity narratives provides greater insight into the content of ethnic experiences. These findings contribute to our understanding of contextualized aspects of personality, including the innovative ways we might examine them.

The pros and cons of remote work in relation to bullying, loneliness and work engagement: A representative study among Norwegian workers during COVID-19

Remote work became the new normal during COVID-19 as a response to restrictions imposed by governments across the globe. Therefore, remote work’s impact on employee outcomes, well-being, and psychological health has become a serious concern. However, the knowledge about the mechanisms and outcomes of remote work is still limited. In this study, we expect remote work to be negatively related to bullying and assume that bullying will mediate remote work’s impact on work engagement and loneliness. To test our hypothetical model, we applied a cross-sectional design using data from a large representative sample of 1,511 Norwegian workers. The data were collected in September 2021 during a period of COVID-19 restrictions in Norway. The results confirmed our hypotheses: remote work was positively related to loneliness and work engagement but negatively related to bullying. Further, bullying was positively related to loneliness and negatively related to work engagement. Moreover, bullying was also found to play a partial mediating role, supporting our hypothesis. This study suggests that remote work is related to both positive and negative mechanisms in the workplace. Remote work can potentially reduce bullying and have a protective function in preventing bullying. However, since remote work has positive relations with both loneliness and work engagement, this study illustrates that organizations should be cautious and perhaps consider a moderate level of remote work. Hence, the results have several implications for HR policies and management.