Volume 43, Issue 2

The relative proportion of people with dementia in the total population of many countries will strongly increase in the medium term, and encounters with people affected will become an everyday experience. Given the specific symptoms of dementia - particularly the successive loss of declarative and biographical (episodic) memory - the question arises as to how social interaction with people with dementia is shaped and whether we can, given the reduced level of socio-cognitive and communicative resources, speak of interaction with people with dementia in a strictly sociological sense at all in these cases. These issues are discussed on the basis of an evaluation of existing studies about interaction and communication with people with dementia. For this purpose, the concept of interaction is extended in four dimensions: thematic continuation, reference to shared knowledge, formal-procedural continuation and bodily-affective responsiveness.

This paper examines the effect of commuting on life satisfaction. In order to evaluate the consequences of commuting, additional models test the effects of commuting on wages as well as satisfaction with both the work and the residential situation. The empirical analysis is based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period 1998-2009 and the Indicators and Maps on Spatial Development (INKAR) of the (German) Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs, and Spatial Development. Fixed-effects models reveal a small but robust negative effect of commuting on life satisfaction. Furthermore, the results prove the expected positive relationship between commuting distance and earnings. Job and housing satisfaction are, however, not influenced by the distance between work and home. Consequently, commuting pays off financially but adversely affects life satisfaction.

The birth of a child increases the room needs of families and potentially increases room stress if families are not able to increase their housing space accordingly. In this study, the timing and magnitude of housing size adjustments are examined. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2011) are analyzed using panel regression models. Results show that families with low economic resources only slightly increase their residential space due to childbirths, which, on average, results in sharp increases in room stress. Families with ample economic resources increase their housing space in anticipation of childbirths. A few years after the event, however, room stress is similar to the pre-event level for these families. Second births are less often associated with housing adjustments.

The present article shows, in a case study, how basic problems of interactions in Job Centres are shaped by expectations deriving from the social levels of organization and interaction and can be solved by a specific modification of the person category of the good customer. This client is categorized as a customer with the will to be willing: By wanting what the Job Center staff wants him or her to want and by accommodating to the contingent goals of political discourse and public administration as much as possible she or he enables the interaction to transform organizational and interactional expectations into addressable expectations. In this way he or she constitutes a vital link within the managerial guidance system of a modern labor administration.