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This paper aims to understand if buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, a digital type of credit that targets young consumers, acts as a protective or a risk factor for food insecurity among young consumers in Australia.

The study uses survey data from a representative sample of young consumers aged 18–24 from all internal states and territories in Australia. Propensity score matching is used to test two hypotheses: BNPL drives young consumers to food insecurity, and food insecurity leads young consumers to use BNPL.

There is evidence that BNPL use is driving young Australian consumers to experience food insecurity, but there is no evidence of food insecurity driving the use of BNPL services.

The evidence of BNPL driving young consumers to experience food insecurity calls for the adoption of practices and stronger regulation to ensure that young users from being overindebted.

Although the link with more traditional forms of credit (such as personal loans) and consumer wellbeing has been explored more broadly, this project is the first attempt to have causal evidence of the link between BNPL and food insecurity in a high-income country, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. This evidence helps to fill the gap about the protective or risky nature of this type of digital financial product, as experienced by young Australians.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

This paper addresses the changing relationship of public and private life, as that relationship is altered by emerging communication technologies. Implicit in the writings of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is an answer to the changes in the social domain we are now experiencing. Each of these scholars offers valuable insights into how the conceptualization of the self shifts over time. Considered as a group, their collective writings deepen the significance of each singular perspective. These scholars are concerned with the process of social change, with the transformations of technology, and with the evolution of human awareness. In so far as Ong argues for a secondary orality and McLuhan argues for a new awareness of interrelatedness, one must ask to what end? It cannot merely be that the emergence of new social forms implies no consequence, leads to nowhere in particular.

This study aims to identify the impact that Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy tendencies have on avoidance and revenge-seeking after a service failure. The research examines the role that negative affect and desire for revenge play in aggressive behaviors by consumers.

The study uses a survey research methodology. The measurement model is validated using CFA, and hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling. The mediated and serially mediated relationships are calculated using the bootstrap method by creating estimands to test the effects.

Machiavellianism is less likely to drive avoidance and negative affect, reducing desire for revenge, negative word of mouth and vindictive complaining. Those with narcissism tendencies are likely to develop a negative affect and a corresponding desire for revenge after the failure only if negative affect is developed. Consumers who exhibit psychopathy tendencies are likely to seek out revenge directly.

Each Dark Triad tendency influences consumer avoidance and revenge-seeking in different ways when a consumer’s goals are impeded. Companies can focus on service recoveries differently based on the types of tendencies of consumers engaging in avoidance and revenge-seeking.

The individual paths from Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy tendencies to avoidance and revenge-seeking are developed and analyzed. Further distinctions between each Dark Triad tendency aids service providers in addressing and preparing for these consumer behaviors.

Despite mixed evidence, researchers often suggest that married adults tend to live generally healthier lifestyles than their unmarried counterparts. In this chapter, we propose and test a reconceptualization of the health lifestyle that distinguishes between “homebody” risks and “hedonic” risks that may help to make sense of previous findings concerning marriage and health-related behavior.

Using data from the 2004 Survey of Adults (n = 1,385), we employ ordinary least squares regression to model indices of normative and conventional homebody risks (greater body mass, infrequent exercise, poorer diet, and abstinence from alcohol) and unconventional and potentially dangerous hedonic risks (smoking, heavy drinking, going out to bars, eating out, inadequate sleep, and driving without seatbelts) as a function of marital status.

Our key findings indicate that married adults tend to score higher on homebody risks and lower on hedonic risks than never married adults, net of controls for age, gender, race/ethnicity, citizenship, interview language, education, employment status, household income, and religious involvement.

Research limitations include cross-sectional data, restricted indicators of health-related behavior, and narrow external validity.

Contrary to previous research, we conclude that the lifestyle of married adults is not uniformly healthy.

Catatonia is increasingly recognised as a comorbid syndrome of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASDs). The assessment and management of individuals with comorbid ASD and intellectual disability (ID) adds a further dimension to this already complex presentation, with few cases identified in the literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents four cases of catatonia in individuals with comorbid ASD and ID. The diagnostic challenges, response to treatment and prognosis are discussed whilst comparing with the existing literature.

A high index of suspicion is required to recognise the subtle catatonic features seen in patients with ASD and ID. Clinicians should be particularly vigilant following stressful events in young adults. The assessment of catatonia in ASDs and ID requires a pragmatic approach given the lack of suitable diagnostic tools and difficulties completing investigations. Caution is advised when using rating scales as they are not validated in ID. The mainstay of treatment is lorazepam, although responses vary.

The discussion of these four cases strengthens the existing literature, and highlights the implications a comorbid diagnosis of ID has on the assessment and management of catatonia in ASDs.

Organizations across the globe are acknowledging that their current managers and leaders‐in‐waiting will one day leave their posts, be it to retire or because a more appealing job offer has arisen. With this in mind, many companies are development increasingly effective strategic methods for training their high‐potential employees.

While many studies investigate student leadership development in educational contexts or curriculum-based programs, little is known about the efficacy of leadership development programs that emerge in municipalities. This mixed methods case study explored the leadership development of participants in three nine-month youth leadership programs at a municipal-based prevention, treatment, and outreach center in the United States. Qualitative focus groups and quantitative surveys using the Student Leadership Practices Inventory (SLPI) were used to collect data at the beginning and end of the three programs along with a post-program evaluative survey. Findings from the qualitative and quantitative analyses are first presented individually and then expressed using a joint display table to visually represent the integrated results. Findings showed that the programs positively influenced participants’ perceptions, characteristics, and behaviors as youth leaders in their communities. Participants not only indicated improvements in their leadership practices according to the SLPI from pre- to post-program, but also demonstrated more complex understandings of leadership and what it means to be a leader in one’s community. These findings are useful for individuals and organizations planning student leadership development programs and should inform future research in the field.

This chapter explores factors presented in romance novels that reify gendered assumptions of masculinity and femininity to present readers with narratives that serve as powerful agents of socialization.

We conducted directed content analyses of over 180 mass-market romance novels published by Harlequin and Silhouette over an approximate 30-year period to ascertain common themes regarding gender polarization and gender schematicity in the maintenance of family and work.

Our review of this literature illuminates the assumption of “naturalized” gender roles for men and women in the construction and maintenance of marriage and the family, calling attention to the ways in which we remain constrained to polarized gender roles in the depiction of romantic encounters.

This study is limited to romance novels published prior to 2006, although we see replications of gender schematic narrative in current romance narratives featuring paranormal encounters (Twilight) and erotica (Fifty Shades of Grey).