Foundations operate within external influences, requiring contextual factors to comprehensively assess their financial health. Our study investigates how political and economic environments—represented by political connections, accreditation evaluations, and the city of establishment—affect foundations’ financial health, measured by equity adequacy, operating margin, revenue diversification, and administrative cost ratio. We hypothesize that government connections enhance financial health by providing funding stability and regulatory legitimacy. These connections confer legitimacy, reflected in accreditation evaluations, which enhance public trust and attract diverse financial support. Thus, we propose that foundations with higher accreditation evaluations demonstrate stronger financial health. We further expect foundations in economically developed cities to exhibit stronger financial health due to more vibrant markets and networks. We use data on Chinese foundations, a legally defined category of nonprofits in China, alongside social associations (社会团体) and social service organizations (社会服务机构), and comparable to charitable nonprofits in the United States. Our findings reveal that politically connected foundations exhibit stronger equity adequacy, higher operating margins, and greater revenue diversification. Foundations with better accreditation evaluations show greater revenue diversification but weaker net asset accumulation. Foundations in developed cities report lower net asset accumulation and higher administrative costs. These results underscore that financial health cannot be fully understood through financial metrics alone; external political and economic environments provide essential context. Foundations should strategically align their financial and charitable activities with their external environments to achieve sustainable financial health.

A large number of young adults still live with their parents because they have difficulties entering the job market, because of low wages, or the cost of housing. Despite much research in social science on the consequences of this salient social trend, we lack an understanding of its implications for public opinion. This research note fills this gap by investigating whether such living arrangements between working age children and their parents is correlated with household members' political stances. Specifically, I expect that the anxiety induced by seeing their children having difficulties to become independent will lead parents to hold more negatives political stances, while the same outcome is expected from working age children who failed to fly the nest compared to their independent peers. Using data from the European Social Survey in 32 countries covering the period between 2002 and 2016, I show that, for both parents and young adults, cohabitation is associated with negative evaluations of the national economy and of the government's performance. Studies that do not take into account the situation of other household members might miss an important part of the opinion formation puzzle.

Designing products for diverse stakeholders and environments requires understanding contextual factors, as neglecting them often leads to design failures. However, guidance on integrating context during back-end design phases is limited. To address this gap, we developed the Contextual Product Testing (CPT) protocol, which involves testing prototypes in stakeholders’ contexts of use, gathering data through observations and interviews, and analyzing insights based on contextual factor categories. To evaluate the protocol, we conducted a case study using an interactive toy chest prototype that encourages children to clean up after playtime. Results from ten families revealed contextual barriers, enablers, and actionable recommendations. Our findings suggest the protocol offers a structured approach for incorporating context into back-end design, improving products for real-world use.

Incorporating contextual factors into engineering design processes is recommended to develop solutions that function appropriately in their intended use contexts. In global health settings, failing to tailor solutions to their broader context has led to many product failures. Since prior work has thus far not investigated the use of contextual factors in global health design practice, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 experienced global health design practitioners. Our analysis identified 351 instances of participants incorporating contextual factors in their previous design experiences, which we categorized into a taxonomy of contextual factors, including 9 primary and 32 secondary classifications. We summarized and synthesized key patterns within all the identified contextual factor categories. Next, this study presents a descriptive model for incorporating contextual factors developed from our findings, which identifies that participants actively sought contextual information and made conscious decisions to adjust their solutions, target markets and implementation plans to accommodate contextual factors iteratively throughout their design processes. Our findings highlight how participants sometimes conducted formal evaluations while other times they relied on their own experience, the experience of a team member or other stakeholder engagement strategies. The research findings can ultimately inform design practice and engineering pedagogy for global health applications.

This study examines the relative influence of environmental contexts (family, school, neighborhood) on child behavioral health at ages 3, 5, 9, and 15 years. Path analysis was conducted on a sample of 4,898 urban children from a longitudinal dataset called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Child physical abuse, emotional abuse, maternal depression, substance use, neighborhood social cohesion, neighborhood poverty, school connectedness, and peer bullying had concurrent relationships with child behavior problems at one or more developmental stages. Early childhood abuse (age 3) and school age environmental contexts (age 9) had lasting effects on later behavior problems. Findings underscore the importance of both multilevel contextual factors and developmental timing in determining behavioral health outcomes in children.

Engineering designers are encouraged to consider relevant contextual factors throughout their design processes. However, specific practices for incorporating context into design processes are lacking in the existing literature, and curricula related to the use of context during design processes is limited. As a preliminary step toward characterizing novice engineering designers' use of contextual factors, we qualitatively coded 10 mechanical engineering capstone design reports for contextual factors; half of the projects had domestic sponsors with varying themes, and the other half of the projects had international sponsors with a global health theme. Our findings showed that teams considered technological and institutional factors most frequently; other factors were considered less frequently. Global health themed design teams considered more contextual factors than non-global health themed teams. There was considerable variability among the contextual factors considered, as well as the stages during which they were considered. These outcomes have the potential to inform the development of pedagogical tools to support the acquisition of skills related to formally addressing context during engineering design processes.

Recent years have seen a surge in research comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, yet synthesizing this literature is complicated by the diversity of language and social backgrounds behind these dichotomous labels. The current study examines the labels and descriptions reported in 186 studies comparing bilinguals and monolinguals published between 2005–2015 in order to understand how bilingualism has been operationalized and to describe the degree to which different facets of bilingual experience are reported. Proficiency and usage were the most frequently reported features (77% and 79%), followed by language history (67%) and the language of schooling (60%). However, less than half of the studies measured proficiency objectively or reported proportional usage, and even less – 30% – described the sociolinguistic context from which the sample was drawn. Given the increase in language contact due to globalization, more transparent and comprehensive reporting of participant characteristics is critical to building our understanding of how bilingualism affects experience.

School bonding has been identified as a protective factor for a broad range of adolescent outcomes, and it is thus important to identify factors that foster positive relationships with school. The ecological perspective suggests the importance of both individual and contextual antecedents across developmental periods, yet previous research has tended to examine only a narrow selection of school bonding correlates. This study sought to identify longitudinal influences on school bonding, examining the role of both individual and contextual factors over childhood and early adolescence. We draw on data from 1,308 participants (51% female) in the Australian Temperament Project, a large representative Australian sample that has followed the psychosocial development of participants from infancy to adulthood, and thus provides a rare opportunity to address this gap in the literature. Path analysis was conducted to examine individual and contextual predictors of school bonding at 15–16 years. The individual characteristics of higher academic achievement and sociability, and lower hyperactivity predicted school bonding. Contextual factors also made a significant contribution, including the parent–child relationships and maternal education. The results indicate that both individual and contextual factors make unique contributions to school bonding in adolescence, suggesting a number of potential targets for intervention.

The goal of this study was to propose a systematic classification of relevant personal factors for describing the background of an individual's life and way of living. The German Society of Social Medicine and Prevention constituted an ICF working group consisting of members from Medical Advisory Boards of Statutory Health Insurances (n = 6) and other institutions (n = 12) in 2009. A two-tier consensus building approach was utilised to construct and document the personal factors, with an initial team of experts compiling the personal factors and a second group of experts, who had not participated in developing the initial proposal, validating the process. The consensus process resulted in personal factors classified into 72 categories and arranged in six chapters as follows: general factors normally unchangeable (chapter 1); a person's inherent physical and mental constitution (chapters 2 and 3); more modifiable factors, such as attitudes, basic skills and behaviour patterns (chapter 4); life situation and socioeconomic/sociocultural factors (chapter 5); and other health factors e.g., prior interventions (chapter 6). We believe the personal factors from this effort to be a good basis for a wider global dialogue on their operationalisation.