Orientation: Research that considers the effects of individual characteristics and job characteristics jointly in burnout is necessary, especially when one considers the possibility of curvilinear relationships between job characteristics and burnout.

Research purpose: This study examines the contribution of sense of coherence (SOC) and job characteristics to predicting burnout by considering direct and moderating effects.

Motivation for this study: Understanding the relationships of individual and job characteristics with burnout is necessary for preventing burnout. It also informs the design of interventions.

Research design, approach and method: The participants were 632 working adults (57% female) in South Africa. The measures included the Job Content Questionnaire, the Sense of Coherence Questionnaire and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The authors analysed the data using hierarchical multiple regression with the enter method.

Main findings: Job characteristics and SOC show the expected direct effects on burnout. SOC has a direct negative effect on burnout. Job demands and supervisor social support show nonlinear relationships with burnout. SOC moderates the effect of demands on burnout and has a protective function so that the demands-burnout relationship differs for those with high and low SOC.

Practical/managerial implications: The types of effects, the shape of the stressor-strain relationship and the different contributions of individual and job characteristics have implications for designing interventions.

Contribution/value add: SOC functions differently when combined with demands, control and support. These different effects suggest that it is not merely the presence or absence of a job characteristic that is important for well-being outcomes but how people respond to its presence or absence.

Middle school tracking is a common feature of many counrties' school system. In this paper, we examine if a one-year delay in middle school tracking influences the probability of track changes at the upper secondary level, using panel data for Geneva (Switzerland) over the period 1993-2007. We tyke advantage of a natural experiment, whereby a group of middle schools tracked their students a year later than the rest of schools. Because of specific conditions, we argue that selection into treatment is independent of potential outcome and, therefore, use a regression design to identify the average treatment effect. Both linear probability and panel data models estimate a small but significant negative impact of delayed middle-school tracking on the smoothness of upper secondary school transitions. However, we find that this negative effect of a later tracking decreases with the level of performance. We explain this result as a by-product of the "big-fish-little-pond" effect.

Using a typology based on different forms of capital, we focus on migrant integration into the Swiss schooling system, as expressed by their track choice at the upper-secondary level. In particular, we examine whether school transitions of children from certain migrant communities are negatively affected by a lack of social capital and apply for this purpose a two-step methodology based on the estimation of a reduced-form multinomial logit, using longitudinal data from the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland), for the period 1993-2007. While differing substantially between high-track and low-track students, results confirm that social capital matters independently of human and financial capital and, while affecting all students, the impact of a lack of social capital is higher on high-track students. Among low-track male students, recent migrants are disadvantaged compared to natives and first-wave migrants, as they are, ceteris paribus, more often oriented toward non-certifying remedial education. Moreover, we find that structural compositions of middle schools explain almost all the estimated yearly school fixed-effects and that compositional changes clearly do not affect low-track and high-track students in the same way.

This paper presents a systematic study of survey mechanisms that produce or reduce minority bias in social surveys. It extends the work of Lipps et al. (2011) who have demonstrated that, in the Swiss context, the more an ethno-national minority community differs, socio-culturally and socio-economically, from the national majority, the less it is likely to be represented in its proper proportion in the major national surveys. Minority bias furthermore has a vertical dimension: socio-economic bias against individuals from the most deprived backgrounds becomes extreme within ethno-national minority communities. Using data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the Swiss sam- ple of the European Social Survey, in the present work we empirically assess the impact of three types of survey practices on minority bias: (1) strategies to increase overall response rates of the whole population indiscriminately from its minority status, (2) the use of pre- and post-stratification measures that take into account the overall share of foreigners in the national population, and (3) the conduct of interviews in a wider range of languages, in order to facilitate survey response among certain (linguistic) minorities. Our findings show that efforts to increase overall response rates can, paradoxically, create even more minority bias. On the other hand, they suggest that a combination of stratified sampling and a wider range of survey languages can have a positive effect in reducing survey bias, both between and within national categories. We conclude that measures that take into account and adapt to the social and cultural heterogeneity of surveyed populations do make a difference, whereas additional efforts that only replicate existing routine practices can be counter-productive.