Sabina Lissitsa

Bio: Sabina Lissitsa is an academic researcher from Ariel University. The author has contributed to research in topics: The Internet & Digital divide. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 47 publications receiving 676 citations. Previous affiliations of Sabina Lissitsa include Ruppin Academic Center.

Examination of factors predicting secondary students' interest in tertiary STEM education

Abstract: Based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the study aims to investigate factors that predict students’ interest in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in tertiary education both in general and in relation to their gender and socio-economic background. The results of the analysis of survey responses of 2458 secondary public school students in the fifth-largest Israeli city indicate that STEM learning experience positively associates with students’ interest in pursuing STEM fields in tertiary education as opposed to non-STEM fields. Moreover, studying advanced science courses at the secondary school level decreases (but does not eliminate) the gender gap and eliminates the effect of family background on students’ interest in pursuing STEM fields in the future. Findings regarding outcome expectations and self-efficacy beliefs only partially support the SCCT model. Outcome expectations and self-efficacy beliefs positively correlate with students’ entering...

Four generational cohorts and hedonic m-shopping: association between personality traits and purchase intention

Abstract: In retailing, it is recognized that prominent differences exist between generational cohorts. As such, analysis of varying patterns of personality traits and their effects between generations is essential for understanding consumer behaviors. This research focuses on the association between the Big Five personality traits and m-shopping intentions of hedonic products among four generational cohorts: baby boomers and Generations X, Y, and Z. Generational cohort theory, the Big Five Personality Model, and resistance to innovations theory are integrated in a theoretical framework. The research was conducted by online survey of 1241 Internet users aged 14–72. Different patterns of effects of personality traits between generations were found. For baby boomers and Generation X, a positive association between openness to experience and m-shopping intention was found. Moreover, in these generations, personality traits were more powerful in predicting m-shopping intention, compared to younger generations. Among Generation Y, extraversion was positively correlated with m-shopping intention. Among Generation Z, a negative correlation between agreeableness and m-shopping intention was found. Based on our findings, we propose a generational approach to marketing strategy and suggest specific practical implications.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Abstract: By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Abstract: The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide

Abstract: Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 303 pp. $60 hbk., $20 pbk. Forecasts that the Internet heralds a world of more democracy and less poverty seem as inflated as dot.com stocks. This rosy view has electronic voting, political chat rooms, and email access re-engaging apathetic publics in politics. Digital technologies redress economic disparities, and the benefits of the Internet percolate down to transform poor societies. Equally exaggerated is the gloom of naysayers. The Internet Age has done little to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, the information haves and havenots, cyber-skeptics contend. Indeed, digital technologies could create new inequalities and reinforce the dominance of power elites. In her new book, Digital Divide, Pippa Norris, associate director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, steps into this fusillade of cyber-hyperbole, lowers the decibel with a well-written and thoughtful examination of Internet use and access in 179 countries and dissects the claims and counter-claims. Her research and findings place her on middle ground, somewhere between current reality and optimism. The Internet era seems to be changing "politics as usual" in a number of countries, expanding and loosening information about governments and politics, allowing the entrance of new political players, and fostering international movements on the environment, women's rights, and other issues across borders. The disappointment is that digital technologies are activating the already politically active and passing up the disengaged and uninterested. A major challenge to digital democracy is the gulf between the United States, Scandinavia, and other early Internet adopters and the rest of the world. That gap is now so wide that at the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the online community lived in the developed world. Internet use tracks the path of economic and technological development. But that situation could begin to change, Norris says. The Internet is in its technological adolescence. Costs of access are falling. And governments can make a difference if policymakers take the initiative. We have the historical patterns of other communication technologies to study. Norris examines theories of technological diffusion and points out that the American response to the Internet is more akin to the rapid spread of televisions and VCRs than the slower adoption of telephones and radios. American dominance could recede as Internet access grows worldwide. Contrary to what officials of the Bush Administration contend, Norris finds that the digital divide between rich and poor within the United States remains substantial. Europe mirrors that trend. In the long run, the Internet could become more accessible to the excluded: lower income families, minorities, and women. …