Societal gender role norms play a crucial role in shaping men's and women's career aspirations. However, prior research documenting this key role of gendered norms has primarily focused on heterosexual women and men in the global North-West. Previous studies documenting differences in career interests by sexual orientation suggest that gender role norms might affect lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) women and men less strongly than heterosexuals. This large-scale, preregistered study sought to document group differences in norm perceptions, career interests and their relationship. To this end, 18,351 university students (n = 3318 LGB, n = 15,033 heterosexual) from 46 countries completed a self-report survey about their gender, sexual orientation, perceptions of societal gender role norms, as well as their personal gender role beliefs and career interests. Analyses revealed that, compared to heterosexual individuals, LGB individuals reported significantly less stereotypical career interests and endorsed less traditional gender role beliefs about careers. As predicted, perceptions of societal gender role norms predicted career interests for heterosexual but not for LGB participants. Moreover, LGB participants showed a weaker relationship between societal gender role norms and own gender role beliefs than straight participants did. Interestingly, we found no evidence that this effect was conditional on the level of LGBT acceptance in different countries sampled. We discuss implications of this new evidence for understanding occupational gender segregation from an intersectional perspective.

Despite the growing demand for care economy employees (e.g., nurses, teachers, and social workers), men remain underrepresented in these careers. While economically developed countries support more equal rights for women and men, their labor markets are highly gender segregated (Charles, 1992, 2003). We conducted a focused investigation of this paradoxical pattern in the care economy, testing whether gender gaps in care economy career interest are larger in more economically developed countries and, if so, what psychological and cultural factors underlie these patterns. We examined these questions with labor data from 70 countries (Study 1) and a preregistered study of career interests among 19,240 university students from 49 countries (Study 2). Although more economically developed countries tend to promote greater gender equality, our results reveal that the gender gap in care economy representation (Study 1) and interest (Study 2) is especially large in such countries. We did not observe parallel patterns for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics representation or interest. Results from Study 2 supported an integrated theoretical account of this development paradox in care economy interest: Cross-national variation in the gender gap in care economy interest was predicted by country-level variation in economic development and individualism/collectivism but not by self-expression values or country-level gender equality, countering prior (controversial) claims of a gender equality paradox. Furthermore, larger gender gaps in communal values (e.g., men's lower valuing of helping and caring for others) were a proximal predictor of larger gender gaps in care economy interest in highly economically developed countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

For any urban development, the opinion of the final stakeholders is essential. However, the uncensored youth perception regarding the urban environment is rarely included in the decision-making process. Here, we present the youth’s perception of public spaces in the city. The empirical research was conducted in Kaunas, which is a typical tertiary city. That is why such results are comparable with findings from other middle-sized cities around the world. The photovoice research method was applied to gather data on youth perception of public spaces. The dataset consisted of 793 unique responses from young people. The qualitative analysis was conducted by using MaxQDA 24 software. Our findings suggest that young people prefer to spend time with friends in man-made urban environments rather than in natural or semi-natural green spaces. Many of their favourite places are considered to be well suited to young people’s needs. Suggestions for improving their favourite places mostly revolve around built infrastructure, yet many of them emphasise the importance of sustainable urban development.

Monografijoje autoriai analizuoja politinių problemų reprezentavimą ir dėmesio konkrečioms problemoms chronologinę kaitą Lietuvos žiniasklaidoje, remdamiesi originaliu A. Downso (1972) naujienų dėmesio ciklo modeliu. Šis modelis buvo atnaujintas ir aktualizuotas, atsižvelgiant į naujų medijų atsiradimą ir įsigalėjimą. Leidinyje tyrinėjama, kaip keičiasi politinių problemų pateikimas ir dėmesys joms nuo pirminio iškėlimo iki pavertimo realiais politiniais sprendimais. Siekiant tinkamai išnagrinėti temą, tyrimui pasirinktos šešios politikos problemos, sulaukusios plataus rezonanso visuomenėje Sauliaus Skvernelio vadovaujamos 17-osios Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybės kadencijos laikotarpiu. Į tyrimo lauką pateko vaiko teisių apsaugos reforma, etatinio mokytojų darbo užmokesčio reforma, aukštojo mokslo reforma, vaistų kompensavimo pertvarka, alkoholio kontrolės reforma, pensijų reforma. Politikos problemos monografijoje traktuojamos kaip dinamiški reiškiniai, kuriems būdingi dėmesio ciklai. Ypač svarbu suprasti naujienų dėmesio ciklus, kad būtų galima paaiškinti politikos problemų dėmesio ciklų Lietuvos žiniasklaidoje specifiką, įvairių suinteresuotųjų veikėjų vaidmenis, galimas manipuliavimo praktikas ir visų minėtųjų elementų santykį su galutiniais politikos rezultatais. Lietuvos situacijos analizė yra vienas iš pirmųjų tyrimų, kuris patvirtina tarptautinėje literatūroje pristatomus požiūrius ir prisideda prie tolesnio tiriamojo lauko teorijos plėtojimo.

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre-registered, cross-national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries indicated the degree to which they believe childcare is (descriptive norm) and should be (prescriptive norm) equally divided among mothers and fathers. Policies were primarily operationalized as the existence of parental leave options in the respective country. The descriptive and prescriptive norms of equal division of childcare were stronger when parental leave was available in a country - also when controlling for potential confounding variables. Moreover, analyses of time since policy change suggested that policy change may initially affect prescriptive norms and then descriptive norms at a later point. However, due to the cross-sectional nature of the data, drawing causal inferences is difficult.

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender-based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental-leave intentions in young adults (18-30years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identified as women; 5,062 identified as men) across 37 countries that varied in parental-leave policies and societal gender equality. In all countries, women intended to take longer leave than men. National parental-leave policies and women's political representation partially explained cross-national variations in the gender gap. Gender gaps in leave intentions were paradoxically larger in countries with more gender-egalitarian parental-leave policies (i.e., longer leave available to both fathers and mothers). Interestingly, this cross-national variation in the gender gap was driven by cross-national variations in women's (rather than men's) leave intentions. Financially generous leave and gender-egalitarian policies (linked to men's higher uptake in prior research) were not associated with leave intentions in men. Rather, men's leave intentions were related to their individual gender attitudes. Leave intentions were inversely related to career ambitions. The potential for existing policies to foster gender equality in paid and unpaid work is discussed.

Vis dažniau iškylantys ekologijos ir gamtos saugojimo iššūkiai skatina mąstyti apie darnų vystymąsi. Vadovėlį parengę mokslininkai teigia, kad pagrindinė darnaus vystymosi idėja – suvokti, kaip žmonija turi gyventi tenkindama savuosius poreikius ir turėdama itin ribotus išteklius. Leidinio autoriai – skirtingų mokslo krypčių atstovai, todėl darnaus vystymosi ir šiai sričiai artimų temų problematika apžvelgiama iš skirtingų socialinių, ekonominių, inžinerinių ir kitų mokslo sričių perspektyvų. Leidinyje plačiai aptariamas išteklių valdymas, jų analizė, keliamas svarbiausias klausimas – kaip žmonės turėtų prisitaikyti prie šios planetos išteklių ribotumo? Išsamioje teorinėje vadovėlio dalyje skaitytojas supažindinamas su darniu vystymusi, šios šakos raida ir svarbiausiais komponentais. Kituose skyriuose darnaus vystymosi komponentai nagrinėjami detaliau: aptariamas socialinės gerovės ir laimės suvokimas, žiedinės ekonomikos pavyzdžiai ir svarba, klimato kaita, skaitmeninės kultūros įtaka. Skyrių pabaigoje pateikti klausimai leis įtvirtinti sukauptas žinias ir ugdytis esmines darnaus vystymosi kompetencijas: sisteminį mąstymą, numatymą, normatyvinę kompetenciją, strateginę kompetenciją, bendradarbiavimą, kritinį mąstymą, savivoką ir integruotą problemų sprendimo kompetenciją. Vadovėlis skirtas plačiam skaitytojų ratui, siekiančiam įgyti globalų, kritišką ir refleksyvų sąmoningumą, socialinio, ekonominio, kultūrinio ir aplinkos konteksto suvokimą, etinę poziciją, paremtą darnaus vystymosi principais.

The article addresses social actors’ representation in the political discourse. The theoretical part of the article discusses the issues related to the communication of political problems in news media as well as social actors’ participation as the basic condition of the discourse. The remaining part of the article introduces the study which reveals the social representation of social actors in the political discourse with a focus on the case of the teachers’ pay reform. The analysis of the research data shows that the discourse of the teachers’ pay reform existed as the battleground for various social groups and information about the planned and implemented reform was disseminated to the public. The data presented in this article show that representatives of the state and authorities as well as teachers represented by the trade unions were the most active social actors’ groups in the mediated discourse. The first category of actors was actively pursuing the campaign to promote the reform while the second was seeking to draw attention to the shortcomings of the reform and calling for its improvement. The confrontation between these two camps was consistently accompanied by the analyzed discourse on the reform of teachers’ pay.

Effective crisis communication by a political leader can be significant in managing a pandemic situation. In this article, we examine Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda's crisis communication on the social network Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a mixed content analysis method to analyse the posts published on the president's account between 2020 and 2021. Our research showed that Gitanas Nauseda recognised the health crisis caused by COVID-19 early and spread clear and empathetic messages that calmed residents and informed them on how to behave during the pandemic. However, due to the low frequency, the president's communication was barely seen and heard. In addition, there was no cooperation with the national government in the crisis communication. These factors may have led to a relatively small president's crisis communication role in the COVID-19 pandemic management in Lithuania.

Efektyvi politikos lyderio krizių komunikacija gali būti itin reikšminga pandemijos valdyme. Šiame straipsnyje siekiama ištirti Lietuvos Respublikos prezidento Gitano Nausėdos COVID-19 tematikos krizių komunikaciją socialiniame tinkle „Facebook“. Taikant mišraus pobūdžio turinio analizės metodą straipsnyje yra nagrinėjami 2020-2021 metų prezidento asmeninėje paskyroje paskelbti įrašai. Tyrimas parodė, kad Gitanas Nausėda anksti pripažino COVID-19 sąlygotą sveikatos krizę, skleidė pakankamai aiškias bei empatiškas žinutes, raminančias gyventojus ir informuojančias, kaip elgtis pandemijos laikotarpiu. Tačiau dėl nepakankamo intensyvumo prezidento komunikacija buvo menkai matoma ir girdima, be to, komunikuojant buvo beveik nebendradarbiaujama su Vyriausybe. Visa tai galėjo lemti mažesnį prezidento komunikacijos vaidmenį kovoje su pandemija.

Straipsnyje yra nagrinėjama politinio diskurso socialinių veikėjų reprezentacijų tema. Tyrimo autoriai socialines reprezentacijas suvokia kaip socialiai konstruojamas žinių formas, kuriomis remiantis individams yra siūloma interpretuoti tikrovę. Teorinėje straipsnio dalyje yra aptariami politinių problemų komunikacijos žiniasklaidoje bei diskurso veikėjų, kaip pamatinės diskurso sąlygos, klausimai. Likusioje straipsnio dalyje yra pristatomas internetinės naujienų žiniasklaidos tyrimo fragmentas, atskleidžiantis, kokios socialinių veikėjų reprezentacijos buvo kuriamos etatinio mokytojų darbo apmokėjimo reformą pristatančiame politiniame diskurse. Tyrimo duomenų analizė rodo, kad etatinio mokytojų darbo apmokėjimo reformos diskursas, kaip būdinga politinių problemų komunikacijai, tapo skirtingų socialinių grupių kovos lauku, per kurį apie planuotą ir įgyvendintą reformą buvo teikiama informacija visuomenei. Šiame straipsnyje pristatomo tyrimo rezultatai rodo, kad valstybės ir valdžios institucijų atstovai bei profesinių sąjungų atstovaujami mokytojai buvo aktyviausiai diskurse veikusios socialinių veikėjų grupės. Pirmoji veikėjų kategorija aktyviai vykdė reformos populiarinimo kampaniją, antroji – siekė atkreipti dėmesį į reformos trūkumus, ragino ją tobulinti. Šių stovyklų konfrontacija nuolat lydėjo etatinio mokytojų darbo apmokėjimo reformos diskursą.

The concept of Earth system science denotes a shift in the scientific discourse from disciplinary accounts of isolated components of the global environment towards the holistic and interdisciplinary treatment of their complex, functional interactions. We measure to what extent the environmental scientific literature of the past three decades reflects this system turn. Our initial dataset consists of 133,670 articles published in 95 relevant journals since 1990. We apply a combination of topic modelling and network analysis. Correlated Topic Models identify latent themes (“topics”) in the scientific discourse as well as intertopic correlations. This allows the generation of topic networks and thus the application of network-analytic techniques. We generate and analyze 2 topic networks. The first network focuses on climate linkages in a subset of our corpus consisting only of environmental journals without a climate-specific orientation: as the climate system is constitutional for the notion of Earth system science, a system turn should reflect itself in strong linkages between climate- and non-climate environmental topics. The second network, based on the full dataset, applies community detection to identify broader topical clusters. Here, we expect the system turn to manifest itself in communities with high topical diversity regarding the components of the global environment as well as types of human-nature interactions, rather than reflecting the boundaries between broader research fields. Our results show that climate topics are comparatively weakly connected and less integrated into broader thematic packages than other topics; that linkages frequently reflect conceptual debates rather than functional interactions between substantive environmental components; and that the scientific discourse splits into 4 broader domains, two of those being topically homogeneous and the other two comprising only marginally diverse topics. We conclude that the concept of Earth system science is primarily aspirational in nature rather than reflecting an empirical shift in the structure of the scientific discourse.

This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. The purpose of this methodological proposal is that of bringing the recent and critical planetary boundaries framework to the attention of ecosemiotics and biosemiotic criticism, and vice versa. Ecosemiotics is a branch of the biosemiotic modelling theory and is thus grounded in Charles Peirce’s schematic semiotics, but also developed in inspiration of Juri Lotman’s systemic semiotics. Both of these foundations of ecosemiotics are compatible with the rationale of Earth system science, given the schematism of Peirce’s semiotics and Lotman’s notion of meaning as an affordance of the biosphere. Far from exhausting the hermeneutic possibilities evoked by the discussed dataset, we argue that such semiotic analysis, made possible by the digital capacity of modelling large amounts of data, reveals new horizons for semiotic analysis, particularly regarding humans’ modelling of the environment.

New social media such as Facebook and Google+ are web-based communication platforms that enable socially meaningful interactions between contacts in the virtual space (Ellison et al. 2014). Studies show that new social media are particularly conducive to social capital development, as they offer its users the possibility of creating heterogeneous, extremely large electronic social networks (Hampton et al. 2011). This article presents the results of a quantitative research study on the social capital and trust of the Lithuanian population in the electronic social networks. The study used an adapted D. Williams’ Internet Social Capital Scale (2006).

The debates on how to foster civic participation have intensified in current years, especially with the coming of digital era. New electronic social networks and other digital platforms promising the unseen possibilities for variety of activities including civic participation, has been emphasized as a factor facilitating civic engagement (Smith, 2013). In this article, we test a hypothesis that people, who are actively engaged in electronic social networks at the same time are more likely participate in civic activities. The findings show that electronic social networks generally have a positive relationship with participation in various civic activities. More specifically, we find that engagement in specific networked activities, such as “offering topics for discussion”, “contributing to organized events” or “publication of content” have more influence on civic participation than others.

To substantiate the direction of the research, this paper establishes the factors which affect performance efficiency of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The authors' analyse the effect of management control on the economic efficiency of activities of state-owned enterprises by application of management audit. The paper seeks to highlight the higher utility of economic activity as well as return of capital which was used in the process of activities. The paper analyses the quality of management and economic activity in SOEs based on scientific literature as well as reports and decisions of the representative government institutions as well as the results of empirical research which was accomplished in Lithuania. The paper stresses that the state-owned commercial property in Lithuania has thus far been managed inefficiently. Unlike private companies, SOEs practically fail to render much use to the state. This fact does not allow SOE's to reach the highest economic benefit. Accordingly, the authors' present an innovative approach towards the improvement of the management of SOEs economic activities through application of the audit principles, which traditionally are associated with the assessments of financial activity. The proposed model can be further extended and employed in other countries of Northern Europe, specifically in Latvia, Estonia and other Post-Soviet countries.

This article discusses the concept of environmental compensation and provides the examples of environmental compensation practices in various European Union countries. The principle of environmental compensation is to avoid, minimize, restore or compensate the damage to the biodiversity due to human activities, however in practice it is almost impossible to achieve no net loss to the biodiversity. European Union has issued Directive that established the principles of environmental compensation already in 2004, however until now the practices of environmental compensation in European Union countries are very fragmented. The implementation of environmental compensation principles in urban development is constrained mainly by factors such as lack of space, and the complexity of environments that are affected. There is a lack of integrated approach towards the strategies how environmental compensation should be implemented in the planning of various projects that have impact upon biodiversity. Furthermore, there is a lack of holistic approach towards the nature in legislation and practices of environmental compensation, as usually focus of instruments is on specific parts of natural environment. Ideally, the principles of environmental compensation should be an integral part of national strategies of sustainable development.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.15.3.16616