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As humanity reaches the 5.0 industrial revolution, education plays a critical role in boosting the quality of human resources. This paper reports bibliometric research on emerging TiP during 1993-2022 in the educational field to analyse its development on any level of education during the last three decades. This study employed a Scopus database. The findings are that the trend of TiP publication in educational fields has tended to increase every year during the past three decades and conference paper became the most published document type, the USA is the country which produces the most publications; "Students" being the most occurrences keyword and total link strength. The publication of the TiP is ranked to the Quartile 1, which implies that a publication with the cited performance is a publication with credibility because the publisher has a good reputation. Researchers can find the topics most relevant to other metadata sources such as Web of Science, Publish, and Perish.

This paper presents an overview of approaches and proposals to improve the integration of migrant children in schools in Spain and it is linked to the European research project Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MiCREATE). It focuses on a part of the research in which stakeholders were interviewed. Based on the needs of migrant children and practices already implemented in Spain, experts from different fields problematised and proposed improvements in current policies and practices in education. The main conclusions indicate that a more holistic and transversal approach to the inclusion of migrants is needed, as well as better coordination between institutions in different contexts and areas of action. This implies rethinking inclusive practices and involving children's families and taking their environment into consideration, as well as supporting educational practices that foster a sense of belonging among migrant children and their families in schools, the community, and society. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of gathering data from stakeholders in different fields of expertise and areas of action in order to obtain a more complex and insightful overview of the phenomenon under study.

Immigrant minority (IM) languages have a significant presence in certain European regions. Nonetheless, these languages are not usually included in the school curriculum. This paper aims to analyse the studies published between 2010 and 2020 considering IM languages in multilingual European education contexts. The method included a search of academic papers published in the databases ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus, which yielded 42 studies. The studies were analysed by considering: (1) the demographic characteristics of the countries where the studies were conducted, (2) the sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic focus of the papers in relation to the European country, and (3) the characteristics of the bi-multilingual education programme including IM languages. The results indicate that: (1) the demographic characteristics of the country are not strictly related to the number of studies published, (2) most studies have a sociolinguistic approach even though many studies analyse both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors, and (3) only seven multilingual education programmes including IM languages were described in these papers. We conclude that there is a lack of research focusing on IM languages in educational settings and discuss how addressing these gaps could create opportunities for building equitable multilingual communities in Europe.

There is an increasing interest and growing practice in Citizen Science (CS) that goes along with the usage of websites for communication as well as for capturing and processing data and materials. From an educational perspective, it is expected that by integrating information about CS in a formal educational setting, it will inspire teachers to create learning activities. This is an interesting case for using bots to automate the process of data extraction from online CS platforms to better understand its use in educational contexts. Although this information is publicly available, it has to follow GDPR rules. This paper aims to explain (1) how CS communicates and is promoted on websites, (2) how web scraping methods and anonymization techniques have been designed, developed and applied to collect information from online sources and (3) how these data could be used for educational purposes. After the analysis of 72 websites, some of the results obtained show that only 24.8% includes detailed information about the CS project and 48.61% includes information about educational purposes or materials.

Verbal interaction has been the subject of a growing interest among language professionals in Europe since the CEFR was published in 2001; in linguistics, verbal interaction has long been studied. In the Bakhtinian approach, it is even considered "the fundamental reality of language". All types of interaction share the fact that they are dynamically co-constructed by participants. How then can we assess or certify interactional competence on an individual basis when dynamic instability prevails? What criteria can be defined in order to deconstruct interactional competence into specific operational criteria, if interaction is intrinsically multidimensional? These are the questions that we address in this paper. To do so, this paper presents the insights gained as a result of the co-operation between two certification systems: CertAcles (Spain) and CLES (France), both belonging to NULTE ("Network of University Language Testers in Europe"). These certification systems have agreed to collaborate extensively, sharing their constructs and assessment routines. As a result, CertAcles is shifting towards more contextualized tasks and CLES is considering adopting descriptive assessment scales for interaction (C1 level). We hope to demonstrate that the materialization of scientific collaboration of this kind can help improve individual systems.

This paper introduces a learning analytics policy and strategy framework developed by a cross-European research project team -- SHEILA (Supporting Higher Education to Integrate Learning Analytics), based on interviews with 78 senior managers from 51 European higher education institutions across 16 countries. The framework was developed adapting the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA), which is designed to develop effective strategies and evidence-based policy in complex environments. This paper presents four case studies to illustrate the development process of the SHEILA framework and how it can be used iteratively to inform strategic planning and policy processes in real world environments, particularly for large-scale implementation in higher education contexts. To this end, the selected cases were analyzed at two stages, each a year apart, to investigate the progression of adoption approaches that were followed to solve existing challenges, and identify new challenges that could be addressed by following the SHEILA framework.

This paper undertakes a critical analysis of the various hegemonic educational discourses applied to schemes for a minimum income and the social effects that they cause in the field of education and training for groups at social risk. Through consideration of these discourses, it will be determined what role education plays within them, highlighting the principles of employability and the Theory of Human Capital underlying training in minimum income schemes. The paper will shed light to the "poverty business" that training courses for the poor have provided for certain private enterprises. These characteristics have taken the shape of an increasingly prevalent educational discourse that may be termed `the Holy Crusade to Educate the Poor'. Finally, the paper will argue about the possibilities and limitations of an alternative model for minimum income schemes: The Universal Basic Income (UBI).

The growing numbers of mobile students over the years made the provision of student services a key topic of interest for higher education institutions. In order to offer a better experience for international students, it is important to be aware of and assess their needs in relation to different sets of support services. The data used in this paper were gathered through the ESNsurvey 2016 project, a research venture focused on the experiences of participants in short-term student mobility in Europe. Responses were collected from 12,365 international students, who have participated in a short-term (3-12 months) study period abroad mostly through Europe's most promoted mobility program called ERASMUS+. For the purpose of this paper, the focus was only on the aspect of host university support services. The comments of 2,012 students about their experiences were analyzed using a probabilistic methodology known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The findings reveal that some international students' concerns are not fully addressed by higher education institutions. The main problem areas identified with respect to host support services were admission, living costs, including accommodation and money concerns, and IT and bank issues. It is strongly recommended that universities address the problematic areas through student support services by assessing international students' opinions and needs.

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in Western European countries during the Middle Ages were below twenty percent of the population. For most countries, literacy rates did not experience significant increases until the Enlightenment and industrialization. Two early exceptions to this broad trend were the Netherlands and England, which had achieved literacy rates above fifty percent of their populations by the mid-seventeenth century. The explanations for these divergent trends are the structural changes in formal institutions that embodied capital markets, protected private property, and overall established the initial steps in developing modern political institutions. This created incentives to invest more in schools per capita as well as incentives for a middle class to invest more in literacy and numeracy skills for a market-exchange economy that was becoming more specialized in division of labor.

Widespread use of the Internet in 21st century society is not risk-free. This paper studies the comorbidity of some problematic uses of Internet with depression in order to assess their correlation. With that aim, a meta-analysis of 19 samples obtained from 13 different studies (n=33,458) was carried out. The subjects of these studies are adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 years ([mu]=15.68) from different cultures and continents (Europe, Euro-Asia, America and Asia). The effect size obtained from the use of a random-effects model (r=0.3, p<0.000) is significant, moderate and positive, thus confirming the relation between pathologic uses of the Internet and depression. Moreover, meta-regression test results showed that 9% of the variance (R2=0.09) is associated with the male gender, while age and culture are not significant variables. The variability rate of the studies is high (I2=87.085%), as a consequence of heterogeneity rather than publication bias, as Egger's regression test shows (1-tailed p-value=0.25; 2-tailed p-value=0.50, and [sigma]=1.57). Therefore, the need for specific interventions in secondary education dealing with this issue is evident to ensure that it does not extend into adult life.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the most commonly used L2 learning strategies, especially those of communicative type, of undergraduate students and how these strategies are related to their language performance. Additionally, this study also aims to examine the effect of gender on the type of strategies they use and how this fact affects learning. We make a comparative study of the use of L2 learning strategies by Spanish undergraduates and by those coming from the Erasmus+ program and from the Republic of Korea. In terms of data collection, two instruments have been used, a self-made profile questionnaire and the SILL inventory (Oxford, 1990), in order to evaluate students' use of L2 learning strategies, data on the similarities and differences in the use and level of frequency of use of strategies employed by our students. Furthermore, the emerging profile of the data analysis obtained has been described and we have made an assessment by comparing our data with that of previous research. In addition, we also find that gender is a significant factor among all students regardless their nationalities. We discover that the female students make a greater use and with more frequency of all type of learning strategies, especially those of communicative type, with special relevance in the socio-affective strategies. In our conclusion, we point out that training in learning strategies for second language acquisition can help learners learn better by increasing their awareness of L2 learning strategies, and by increasing the number of strategies they use. Moreover, knowing the L2 learning strategies used by our students becomes a guarantee of success when designing teaching methodologies aimed at achieving significant learning results.

During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, edX launched an initiative, called the Remote Access Program, to give access to free certificates for its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to the communities of its partners. This paper describes the experience of a Higher Education (HE) institution in Europe participating in this initiative as a strategic action to spread MOOCs, not just as a resource to open the university educational offer but also to improve the professional development possibilities of its community. This case study explores general data about the participation of over 7,700 people (23,4% of the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia's community) in these courses and data from participants (1,515) about their initiative perceptions. The data obtained evaluates how a university community integrates MOOCs into their day-to-day life under certain conditions and their perception of the quality and usefulness of the courses. Data shows most of the community did not have experience or knowledge about MOOCs (73%), they used it (they obtained 5,202 certificates, a 33% completion rate), they value the course quality (4.1/5) and are happy with the initiative (4.7/5), and they think MOOCs will be useful for their career (3.67/5) and will take more MOOCs in the future (98%, with 71% thinking it is worth paying for the certificate). These results remark the importance of thinking about MOOCs in HE Institutions not just as a punctual resource but as a strategic investment affecting the university teaching offer, the professional development of its community, and their social compromise.

This literature review aims to examine the approach given to open science policy in the different studies. The main findings are that the approach given to open science has different aspects: policy framing and its geopolitical aspects are described as an asymmetries replication and epistemic governance tool. The main geopolitical aspects of open science policies described in the literature are the relations between international, regional, and national policies. There are also different components of open science covered in the literature: open data seems much discussed in the works in the English language, while open access is the main component discussed in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking papers. Finally, the relationship between open science policies and the science policy is framed by highlighting the innovation and transparency that open science can bring into it.

Rare diseases (RD) are those affecting at least 1 of 2.000 inhabitants. Many RD, induce disabling conditions and those school age affected children usually miss classes due to the complicated diagnostic procedures and the several medical treatments they need, thereafter. It is still unknown the exact number of students in this situation in Navarra (Spain), although according to data from the INE [16], there should be at least 1300 children with disabilities from which at least 372 children in school age could be RD affected. These students should be able to be identified in schools, as the vast majorities need help at some point, derived in some cases from cognitive deficiencies but in others, from their absence of classes due to health complications. Some Rare Disease Affected Students (RDAS) also suffer from bullying due to the ignorance of their peers or even teachers, towards their situation. In this paper, the use of Cmap Tools software, together with a planned intervention in each school from Navarre, attended by at least, one RDAS, is proposed for creating knowledge models based on the specific RD affecting children in Navarre. This way, a RD based Knowledge Model Net (RDKMN) could be built, together with affected and non affected students, and this meaningful knowledge could be useful for any school attended by children suffering the same disease in Spain or other European countries. This could become a powerful international inclusive and didactic tool, which could help normalizing RD and including RDAS in the educational field, creating inclusive schools, and therefore spreading the knowledge to the social field.

The recent phenomenon of worldwide declining enrolments in engineering-related degrees has led to the gradual decrease in the number of engineering graduates. This decrease occurs at a time of increasing demand in the labour market for highly qualified engineers, who are necessary for the implementation of fundamental societal functions. This paper initially presents a survey of practices, which are currently employed by academic institutions in Europe in order to increase the attractiveness of their engineering studies. It then provides a detailed analysis of the benefits and proliferation of distance education to increase attractiveness of engineering studies based on a set of interviews. Results of this study highlight a lack of a distance-learning dimension in the implementation of engineering studies in the European Area and discusses in detail ways in which distance learning can be utilised in engineering studies for the benefit of increasing their attractiveness. It has also been noted that institutions employing distance learning as part of their engineering studies, see this as highly beneficial for their students but also for the academic institution itself with some reservations in terms of the pedagogical adequacy of materials and instructional approaches used in distance education courses.

This paper reports on an investigation examining provision of physical education continuing professional development (CPD) in European countries undertaken to identify the types of practices being employed. We begin by providing a brief overview of what we currently know about CPD internationally in general education and physical education. Data are reported to reflect Parker and Patton's (2017) key characteristics of CPD that highlight effective CPD, summarise current trends and issues in physical education, and are intended to serve as a guide to how teachers learn and how they might be better served in that learning in these European countries. Studying current practices in CPD provision identified in this study provided modest insight to inform teacher education programmes and CPD providers on the current status of physical education CPD currently being employed in Europe. We propose these findings might inform international and comparative education with respect to CPD and set the foundation for physical education colleagues in Europe to develop a CPD network where endeavours such as sharing of CPD practices, engaging in discussion of those practices, and the design of collaborative research on such CPD practices are based.

The engineering graduate of today will engage in a career which will span the middle of the twenty-first century, and beyond. They will work in a world which is increasingly more complex and uncertain than at any time before. This will require an integrated combination of technical knowledge and transferable skills and values, to a greater extent than ever before. This paper highlights the need for the contemporary engineering graduate to develop capacity to deal with increased uncertainty and complexity. It seeks to demonstrate how this can be achieved through developing key graduate attributes. These attributes may be promoted through suitable exposure to progressively more open-ended problems and activities across the programme. A number of exemplars are provided from two European chemical engineering programmes.

Purpose: This paper aims to explain the development of an online training curriculum to enable students to acquire the transversal competences needed to work on smart cities projects. In this curriculum, a modern approach to the teaching-learning process was applied, suitable for the interdisciplinary and multinational learning challenges that smart cities impose, but within the framework of a university-industry European partnership. Design/methodology/approach: To develop the curriculum, the competences needed for smart cities, common to all disciplines and fields, had to be researched. In addition, real smart cities projects also had to be selected for work following a project-based learning methodology. For both, this study applied the Delphi method, selecting the most relevant ones based on the data obtained by performing a multi-criteria decision analysis. Findings: The procedure followed for the identification of transversal competences in a field, the design of an innovative online training program and the results of the first edition of the program are discussed. Research limitations/implications: The processes that were developed, both to detect the most relevant transversal competences and to design the online training program, could be extrapolated to other areas. Moreover, it is very likely that the competences detected in this work could also be extrapolated, for the most part, to interdisciplinary teams. Originality/value: To date, there is no European initiative addressing the challenges of smart cities that requires a major adjustment in higher education, in the relationship between universities and all the mechanisms of lifelong learning with the industry related to smart cities. This work is a pioneer in this regard.

Multicultural European societies increasingly demand internationally oriented citizens, who are willing to actively participate in civic life and able to successfully access the labour market. The European dimension in education supposedly endows youngsters with civic values, multiculturalist attitudes and plurilingual competences which ultimately lead to raising awareness of their Europeanness. Formative years at university, pivotal to students' individual life course and projects, are a decisive stage in the development of supranational, collective identity-formation. Similarly, pan-European study programmes are aimed at inspiring a sense of European citizenship and identity, the most renowned of which within the Higher Education context is Erasmus+. By conducting focus group interviews, this paper probes Andalusian university students' understanding of their European identity and verifies the causal dynamics between European identity-taking and foreign country sojourns, comparing the perceptions expressed by returnees to those by students who have not had the opportunity to participate in international study programmes (ISP) at higher education yet. Results evidence students' apparent supranational orientation, general awareness of commonalities across Europe and utilitarian outlooks on the EU, although not a clear discernment of its institutions or a marked European identity.

Purpose: Teamwork has long featured in social science research. Further, with research increasingly "cross-national," communication becomes more complex, for instance, involving different cultures, languages and modes of communication. Yet, studies examining team communicative processes that can facilitate or constrain collaboration are rare. As a cross-national European team representing varied disciplines, experiences, languages and ethnicities, we undertook to examine our communication processes with the aim to promote better qualitative research practices. Design/methodology/approach: Viewing reflection as a tool for enhancing workplace practices, we undertook a structured reflection. We developed an empirically derived framework about team communication, then used it to analyse our interaction practices and their relative effectiveness. Findings: The results highlighted two under-examined influences, the use of different modes of communication for different purposes and the need for face-to-face communication to address a particularly challenging aspect of research, negotiating a shared coding scheme to analyse diverse cultural and linguistic qualitative data. Practical implications: The study offers a procedure and concepts that others could use to examine their team communication. Originality/value: The communicative processes that can constrain and facilitate effective cross-national research team collaboration are rarely examined. The results emphasise the need for careful negotiations around language, epistemologies, cultures and goals from the moment collaboration begins in formulating a project, through applying for grant funds, to when the last paper is published -- timely in a context in which such work is increasingly expected.

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain. Following a general introduction on the glottopolitical approach to migration processes and a historical overview of tendencies of discursive simplification in Europe and the Americas, the co-text of the term 'immigrants' in a corpus including drafting guides of Easy-to-Read, newspapers and websites of the supporters of this variety is analysed in the empirical part. Methods of semantic discourse analysis (semantic relations and prototype theory) allow to identify new meanings and categories that are constructed in the selected texts ('immigrant' as a co-hyponym of 'person with a disability').

The purpose of this paper is to carry out an empirical examination of the supply-side factors influencing dropout rates in MBA programs. We analyze the extent to which the resources and characteristics of the program (content, teaching methodology, course load, class size, partnerships, reputation) influence these rates. A GLM analysis was conducted on data obtained from a final sample of 94 executive MBA programs in Western Europe. The results indicate that several supply side factors significantly affect dropout: intensity of case study learning, number of credits per month, class size, and proportion of lessons given at partner institutions. Several implications for the design and management of higher education programs have been drawn from this research.

The health and social crisis caused by coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has had an especially strong impact on the academic prospects of the most vulnerable populations in society. This paper focuses on the consequences of the current crisis in terms of their potential to negatively impact school disengagement and early school-leaving rates. First, the author reviews the causes of early school leaving, divided into exogenous and endogenous factors. Second, the key findings of a media coverage analysis are presented. This analysis focuses on key educational aspects and consequences related to the COVID-19 crisis and the potential impact on disengagement, early school leaving and educational inequality gaps. Lastly, in the light of those consequences, a sociocultural model of behaviour is suggested as a useful lens to envision solutions.

In recent years, e-learning and b-learning designs for graduate courses have proliferated in the European Higher Education Area. This paper includes the definition for a model for the assessment of the quality of on-line teaching based on an audit by specialised technical personnel who are independent of the design of the teaching materials and which could be a proposal for the higher education quality assurance models of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). This template would be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses. This model has been applied in external assessments of the on-line teaching given in the Master's Degree in the Diagnosis of the State of Conservation of the Historical Heritage by the Pablo de Olavide University of Seville, in the 2013-2014 academic year, with the purpose of validating the advantages of the method and examining aspects for improvement in accordance with the Deming cycle, also known as the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle. The instrument developed for the audits includes all the criteria and indicators considered relevant for quality assessment from a pedagogical perspective. The complete tool, developed in-house, is presented in this article as it is believed that it can serve as a model for the assessment of any on-line teaching.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has emerged as a response to Europe's calls for increasing plurilingualism, due to its dual-focused approach which aims to foster and consolidate both non-language subject matter and language learning. As the approach becomes more widespread, more resources become available to help teachers facing new methodological challenges. However, there are still wide gaps between the demand for CLIL teachers and the current levels of training and professional development available. In this paper, we review the research on the teacher training to acquire the linguistic competences on the foreign language as well as a particular bilingual methodology and professional development needs of CLIL teachers in Europe, and particularly in Spain. Findings show that teachers' professional development needs center around (1) the need for improvements to their language proficiency (particularly aural skills), (2) the need for methodological training in areas such as materials design as a response to the lack of materials particularly addressed to this methodology, (3) the opportunities to collaborate with others (e.g. coordinators and teaching assistants) in order to plan in advance the CLIL methodology that will be used in schools and (4) the need to create rubrics to assess in a transparent and efficient way.

Scholarly studies of international student mobility programs have increased during the last two decades, particularly following the Bologna Declaration. Nevertheless, a systematic review of international student mobility programs and the outcomes and benefits derived from participation in such programs has not been undertaken. This paper provides a comprehensive review of studies examining the various outcomes of student participation in short-term international mobility programs and identifies under-researched areas such as employment and career outcomes. A future research agenda based on the review is outlined, along with recommendations for improving research designs in order to increase our understanding of the short- and long-term outcomes of international student mobility programs.

This article presents results from an extensive systematic and meta-analytical review of the effectiveness of school-based bullying prevention programs. Its main aim is to explore the results of this meta-analysis specifically in regard to variations in the effectiveness of school-bullying programs globally and the effectiveness of specific anti-bullying programs. Our meta-analysis included 100 independent evaluations, and found that, overall, programs were effective in reducing school-bullying perpetration and victimization. In the present paper, we focused on 12 countries (e.g., Italy, Norway, USA, UK), three regions (i.e., Europe, North America, and Scandinavia) and four anti-bullying programs (i.e., KiVa, NoTrap!, OBPP, and ViSC) with multiple evaluations. Our results showed that anti-bullying programs evaluated in Greece were the most effective in reducing bullying perpetration, followed by Spain and Norway. Anti-bullying programs evaluated in Italy were the most effective in reducing bullying victimization, followed by Spain and Norway. Evaluations conducted in North America were the most effective in reducing bullying perpetration, and evaluations conducted in Scandinavia were the most effective in reducing bullying victimization. Evaluations of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program produced the largest effect sizes for bullying perpetration outcomes, but the NoTrap! Program was the most effective in reducing bullying victimization. We also systematically review the core components of the intervention programs and make recommendations for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

Reforms in higher education have been passed in many European countries in the last decades, mostly trying to adapt national systems to new European and global challenges. This study examines some consequences of such major reforms in France and Spain. Specifically, these reforms introduced new agencies whose remit was inter alia to provide evaluation of research and to make such assessments pivotal for academic career progression. The paper investigates empirically whether, and to what extent, these new forms of authority have been capable of engendering the expected change to the system of academic career evaluation. The respective policy approaches and policy implementation in France and Spain reveal that these reforms triggered a reconfiguration of powers at various levels of academic life – affecting strategies for successful career development. Policy-making implications are relevant when these two countries are compared, suggesting that more radical policy approaches (coercive isomorphism, the French case) do not result in more change to academic evaluation practices than mimetic ones (the Spanish case). It is also important to note that coercive isomorphism encountered more frictions in its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain has traditionally shown one of the lowest levels of participation in the rented market within the housing system in Europe. Several authors have argued that housing policies oriented toward facilitating housing access have not paid enough attention to the development of the sector, except for decreasing its regulation. During the last decade, Spain, as many other European countries, has witnessed a relative increase in demand for rented dwellings and subsequent rent increases. A debate is taking place where possible regulation and alternative ways of increasing the rent supply are being discussed to ease the persistent problem of housing access of Spanish households. We argue in this paper that rent regulation cannot be decontextualised from the housing system, especially in countries like Spain where the rented sector has acted as social housing and tenants' financial vulnerability is high. We distinguish between measures with short term effects such a rent regulations and interventions addressing the lack of rent supply with a longer impact. Finally, we advocate for a national framework that allows enough regional and local freedom to adequately solve their rented housing situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this article is to set the scene for the following special issue, which contains four papers relating to research on parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation in different jurisdictions. In Continental Europe, Parliaments (although in a rather different range: more in countries such as Italy and Spain, less in countries such as Germany) have developed a more-in-depth approach in scrutinising the quality of legislation, i.e. a set of tools, standards and bodies to scrutinise it downstream, than that of Westminster jurisdictions. In the latter, a high-standard quality of legislation is guaranteed upstream by having bills drafted by Parliamentary Counsel, although in the United Kingdom there is currently a debate concerning the opportunity to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation. The hypotheses of this research were that the aforementioned models of parliamentary scrutiny are differently shaped in those jurisdictions due to the drafting model and the form of government established there. Against this background, the United States Congress is a very different animal: due to the peculiarities of the legislative process in the presidential system, the scrutiny in Congress relies on multiple parties. The reason why articles have been commissioned here is to test now on a larger scale the aforementioned hypotheses, which have already been partially proved in a previous article mainly concerning Italy (E. Albanesi, 'Parliamentary Scrutiny of the Quality of Legislation within Europe' (2021) Statute Law Review). This time the analysis will focus on two Continental European parliamentary systems (Spain and Germany), one jurisdiction belonging to the Parliamentary Counsel/Westminster model (Canada) and one presidential system (the U.S.). The articles published here seem to support on a larger scale the aforementioned hypotheses. The article on Canada also helps reflect upon the opportunity to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation in Westminster jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Following the 2008 economic crisis many countries implemented austerity policies, including reducing public spending on health services. This paper evaluates the trends and equity in the use of health services during and after that period in Spain – a country with austerity policies – and in Germany – a country without restriction on healthcare spending. Methods: Data from several National Surveys in Spain and several waves of the Socio-Economic Panel in Germany, carried out between 2009 and 2017, were used. The dependent variables were number of doctor's consultations and whether or not a hospital admission occurred. The measure of socioeconomic position was education. In each year, the estimates were made for people with and without pre-existing health problems. First, the average number of doctor's consultations and the percentage of respondents who had had been hospitalized were calculated. Second, the relationship between education and use of those health services was estimated by calculating the difference in consultations using covariance analysis – in the case of number of consultations – and by calculating the percentage ratio using binomial regression – in the case of hospitalization. Results: The annual mean number of consultations went down in both countries. In Spain the average was 14.2 in 2009 and 10.4 in 2017 for patients with chronic conditions; 16.6 and 13.5 for those with a mental illness; and 6.4 and 5.9 for those without a defined illness. In Germany, the averages were 13.8 (2009) and 12.9 (2017) for the chronic group; 21.1 and 17.0 for mental illness; and 8.7 and 7.5 with no defined illness. The hospitalization frequency also decreased in both countries. The majority of the analyses presented no significant differences in relation to education. Conclusion: In both Spain and Germany, service use decreased between 2009 and 2017. In the first few years, this reduction coincided with a period of austerity in Spain. In general, we did not find socioeconomic differences in health service use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe accounts for the largest number of assisted reproduction treatments (ARTs) in the world, with 56 percent of the global reproductive market quota, followed by Asia (23 percent) and North America (15 percent). However, Europe’s legal landscape of reproductive bio-commodities is a patchwork of permissive and restrictive countries, one of the main reasons for the transnational movement to access ARTs. Spain is the main destination for European middle- and upper-class couples seeking egg donation. The use of legislation has been a significant feature in making Spain a leading country in the global reproscape. This paper aims to understand the specific role of several undetermined legal concepts used by the Spanish regulation, such as “compensation” or “best interest of the child” in making global reproductive bio-commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the first women to hold teaching and research positions in Spanish universities during the first third of the twentieth century. It traces the paths of the pioneers who used their intellectual capacity to broaden the scope for their working lives. Legal changes introduced in 1910 made it possible for women with a university degree to work as professors in the university or in secondary schools, and in libraries, museums or archives. The writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, was the first woman to be appointed as a lecturer for her literary merits. She taught on a PhD course at the University of Madrid, and was followed by other female lecturers, at the Faculties of Philosophy and Letters, Science, Pharmacy and Law; in this order. The paper recalls these first female lecturers, the posts they occupied, the situations they encountered, and their overall trajectories. All began to work in the midst of a strong androcentric culture. Very few of those who started as lecturers before 1936 – the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – continued later at university on a permanent basis. The majority chose other types of employment which offered greater stability in less time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the patterns of mobility from Spain to other European countries that have emerged since the economic crisis of 2008. To do this, we have carried out an in-depth analysis of the main statistical sources on migration flows from Spain's National Statistics Institute. Based on this analysis we have developed a typology of the "new emigrants", including returnees, re-emigrants and Spanish-born migrants. However, the article shows that these mobilities do not only result from a new phenomenon, since there is a continuity with earlier Spanish migration cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This paper focuses on the issue of intimate partner violence and, specifically, on the distribution of femicides over time and the existence of copycat effects. This is the subject of an ongoing debate often triggered by the social alarm following multiple intimate partner homicides (IPHs) occurring in a short span of time. The aim of this research is to study the evolution of IPHs and provide a far-reaching answer by rigorously analyzing and searching for patterns in data on femicides. Methods: The study analyzes an official dataset, provided by the system VioGén of the Secretaría de Estado de Seguridad (Spanish State Secretariat for Security), including all the femicides occurred in Spain in 2007-2017. A statistical methodology to identify temporal interdependencies in count time series is proposed and applied to the dataset. The same methodology can be applied to other contexts. Results: There has been a decreasing trend in the number of femicides per year. No interdependencies among the temporal distribution of femicides are observed. Therefore, according to data, the existence of copycat effect in femicides cannot be claimed. Conclusions: Around 2011 there was a clear change in the average number of femicides which has not picked up. Results allow for an informed answer to the debate on copycat effect in Spanish femicides. The planning of femicides prevention activities should not be a reaction to a perceived increase in their occurrence. As a copycat effect is not detected in the studied time period, there is no evidence supporting the need to censor media reports on femicides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The main aims of this paper are to analyse the monetary value of informal care time using different techniques and to identify significant variables associated with the number of caregiving hours. Data and methods: A multicentre study in two Spanish regions in adult caregivers was conducted. A total sample of 604 people was available. A multivariate analysis was performed to identify the variables associated with the number of hours of caregiving time. In the monetary valuation of informal care provided, three approaches were used: replacement cost method, opportunity cost and contingent valuation (willingness to pay and willingness to accept). Results: The main determinants of the amount of time of informal care provided were age, gender, the level of care receiver´s dependence and the professional care services received (at home and out of home). The value estimated for informal care time ranges from EUROS 80,247 (replacement cost method) to EUROS 14,325 (willingness to pay), with intermediate values of EUROS 27,140 and EUROS 29,343 (opportunity cost and willingness to accept, respectively). Several sensitivity analyses were performed over the base cases, confirming the previous results. Conclusions: Time of informal care represents a great social value, regardless of the applied technique. However, the results can differ strongly depending on the technique chosen. Therefore, the choice of technique of valuation is not neutral. Among the determinants of informal care time, the professional care received at home has a complementary character to informal care, while the formal care outside the home has a substitute character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship among the presence of illegal immigrants on national soil and the risk of increase of infectious diseases for the native-born populations has been accurately analyzed in recent years, stimulating the debate about the opportunity of granting health care services to illegal immigrants for reasons of common safety. This paper analyzes the regulation of health care services for illegal immigrants in three different European countries: Germany, Italy and Spain, chosen because they represent three different models of decentralized State. Even if they are due to observe the same international conventions and to respect the same dispositions issued by the European institutions on health care services, every country developed its own strategy on the matter. After a description of the specific strategies adopted in the three countries on national level, the paper examines policies and plans implemented at local level by German, Italian and Spanish local institutions. These policies resulted in many cases to be extremely efficient in achieving the final goal of health care services: to ensure a general “right to existence" for all members of a community, without difference between citizens, legal or illegal immigrants. Considering the increasing number of immigrants and refugees present on European soil, the paper suggests therefore in its final part that also other European countries should adopt similar policies at local level in the next future, as well as to consider the opportunity to assure the access to the same health care services to both illegal immigrants and native-born individuals without restrictions, in order to grant safer health conditions to the whole resident communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy and Spain, as countries of recent immigration and high irregularity rates, have struggled to adapt their statistical system, especially their population registers, to adequately reflect the presence of an increasing number of immigrants in their territory. The population registers of the two countries have adapted differently to these changing realities: Spain introduced significant improvements in Padrón which have increased its coverage and accuracy. This is still not the case in Italy, making it necessary to resort to non-random sampling methods. The paper discusses the methodological implications of these differences and evaluates different methodological solutions based on both random and non-random sampling methods in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fight against unwanted sea migration in Southern Europe has triggered the territorial redefinition of European Union (EU) borders and transformed the relationship between sending and receiving countries in the region. This paper focuses on the strategies that the EU and Spain adopted to seal the maritime border around the Canary Islands between 2005 and 2010. According to the primary and secondary data used here, the closure of the Atlantic route that happened in this period was the result of the combination of defensive and preventative measures along and beyond this section of the EU border. Initiatives aimed at promoting economic development, creating jobs at origin, and temporary migration programs paved the way for cooperation among governments, thus making possible the deployment of military resources along the border, the return/deportation of unwanted EU-bound migrants, and the externalization of migration control responsibilities. Cooperation and the mixture of proactive and reactive initiatives seen in this case study are likely to become the hallmark of a new kind of global anti-immigration border that extends beyond the territory of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the outbreak of the crisis in Southern Europe, young highly educated Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Greeks have been taking their talents and expertise to other countries in search of a better quality of life and career prospects. This paper explores the characteristics of these new emigrants, the reasons for which they are leaving, and whether these reasons are shaped by the economic crisis, by pre-crisis grievances, or by other factors. We analyse original data from 6377 questionnaires collected in 4 countries through an e-survey we ran in 2013. We refer to the existing literature on the drivers of highly skilled emigration and the (un)employment situation in the four aforementioned Southern European countries which have been hardest hit by the economic crisis. We suggest that while gender is not important, age, marital status, education and satisfaction with current employment (both income related and with regard to future prospects) are important factors predicting emigration. Non-economic factors, notably career opportunities, quality of life and future prospects supersede all other considerations in the decision to emigrate for these highly educated Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While earlier accounts approach the informal economy as a sign of underdevelopment, particularly in the Global South, recent studies tend to re‐frame informal economic practices by acknowledging how it allows various actors to create spaces to manoeuvre. In this context, scholars emphasise the multiple linkages between formal and informal economic domains. To push this notion of intersected practices further, we move away from the notion of the 'informal sector' – as a domain with clear demarcations and introduce the notion of in/formal circuits. The latter highlights the multiple interrelations between activities and fluid geographies involved. From this starting point we analyse the socio‐economic activities of Senegalese and Gambian migrants living in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that started in Barcelona but also involved other places, we illustrate the ways they navigate in/formal circuits and the extent to which these navigations come with mobility within Europe, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]