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Building on the extant literature and utilizing data from the EU-SILC and the EU-LFS surveys conducted between 2009 and 2023, we empirically investigate the impact of poor employment conditions—associated with insecure or precarious employment—on third-country nationals’ (TCNs’) self-perceived health status (SPH). The role of employment conditions in health is examined by employing indicators of temporary, part-time, and self-employment. Driven by theory and empirical analysis, we also investigate the effects of additional variables, including long-term unemployment. Finally, to probe differences across countries, we examine how the effects of employment conditions on TCNs’ health vary across institutional settings, namely across different types of welfare state. Descriptive statistics and regression analyses of panel data reveal that employment conditions affect immigrants’ SPH and surface significant differences across countries. The estimated country-specific effects point to statistical average differences between Germany and two groups of countries: one showing higher effects (i.e., Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and France) and another with lower effects (i.e., Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain). The welfare model adopted by different countries is a qualitative significant predictor of TCNs’ SPH. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research, but also policy initiatives to improve TCNs’ employment conditions and, consequently, their health and overall well-being.

A relevant and timely book with a unique approach: the focus here is on how and why ethnic and racial minorities produce and consume media for themselves - not just how they are represented in or by the media.

How can the goal of the National Broadband Plan (NBP) to alleviate social disparities be achieved? Katz, Matsaganis and Ball-Rokeach believe that local ethnic media, working with local anchor institutions, are the key to ethnic and minority broadband adoption and social inclusion. The authors illustrate this by showing how ethnic media can help realize the NBP's goals generally, and specifically with regard to developing a National Digital Literacy Corps and an online Digital Literacy Portal. Such media are, however, threatened by ongoing media ownership concentration and the defunding of public media. Sustaining such media, they argue, requires proactive public policy: inclusion in the E-Rate program; help with going online; development grant opportunities; antitrust enforcement; adoption of the NBP's call for a National Digital Literacy Corps and an online Digital Literacy Portal; and more research on the content and contextual features of ethnic media and on how they compare with “mainstream” media. This will accelerate achievement of the NBP's goals.

Agenda setting has been developed, expanded, and employed in numerous studies as an analytical tool that affords an understanding of not only how our political reality is formulated but also how “realities” can be manufactured. However, as the authors argue, by grafting agenda setting and media systems dependency theory—two different traditions in mass communication theory—it is possible to better account for changes in the agenda-setting process because of shifts in the power relationships between all actors involved, especially under conditions of increased threat; conditions similar to those the American public has lived in since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Illustrations from Campaign 2004 complement this analysis. The authors suggest that it is critical to understand the dynamics of the making of “mediated realities” so as to alert readers of the importance in furthering critical media literacy skills necessary for the public to distinguish between facades and facts.

How can the goal of the National Broadband Plan (NBP) to alleviate social disparities be achieved? Katz, Matsaganis and Ball-Rokeach believe that local ethnic media, working with local anchor institutions, are the key to ethnic and minority broadband adoption and social inclusion. The authors illustrate this by showing how ethnic media can help realize the NBP's goals generally, and specifically with regard to developing a National Digital Literacy Corps and an online Digital Literacy Portal. Such media are, however, threatened by ongoing media ownership concentration and the defunding of public media. Sustaining such media, they argue, requires proactive public policy: inclusion in the E-Rate program; help with going online; development grant opportunities; antitrust enforcement; adoption of the NBP's call for a National Digital Literacy Corps and an online Digital Literacy Portal; and more research on the content and contextual features of ethnic media and on how they compare with “mainstream” media. This will accelerate achievement of the NBP's goals.

While the impetus for research that will help us understand what it is about the places we live in that matters when it comes to our health seems to be growing exponentially in the public health literature, our knowledge about the social mechanisms through which place or context-related effects manifest is still limited. The cross-pollination of public health research on the social determinants of health, on one hand, and, on the other, sociological investigation into the influences of various social processes on different facets of human life and behavior has been fruitful. However, important gaps remain unaddressed. The primary objectives of this dissertation are to re-introduce communication as an elementary social process through which individuals and communities organize their lives, and to develop a communication-based model of neighborhood health effects that can be applied by researchers, communication campaign professionals, and policy-makers to improve health care access and health literacy in diverse ethnic communities. Employing a multi-methodological and multi-level analytical framework, the author also addresses the question of how institutional resources available in a residential community operate as mechanisms of neighborhood effects, and investigates ways through which to gauge their impact as neighborhood actors in building health literacy and improving health care access. The theoretical framework guiding this project extends prior research on communication infrastructure theory and neighborhood effects theoretical models developed in sociology. The findings of the study indicate that the extent to which individuals are connected to other neighbors, local and ethnically-targeted media, as well as community-based organizations, is a critical factor in predicting prevention-oriented health literacy. Institutional community actors can amplify the positive effects of being part of such a neighborhood-wide storytelling network, even in circumstances where their independent influence may be small or negligible. The significance of the interaction effect between residents and institutional level actors is even larger in the case of predicting health care access. However, as the results indicate in this case, the influence of an integrated neighborhood storytelling network (STN) may be strongly and negatively affected by environmental factors. As an information resource, the storytelling network may be influenced by troubling developments in the community and breaking news, such as the closure of a medical facility. This type of ‘bad stories’ can impact residents’ perceptions of vulnerability and capacity to deal with health problems. The more connected to the STN residents are, the more susceptible they are to these negative effects.