Understanding convictions, your own included

International child well-being league tables circulate widely. Their result depends at least as much on the chosen weightings as on the situations described.

The latter is a ratio whose denominator moves. The former relates employment to the population, which makes it less sensitive to movements into inactivity.

European surveys allow reported contact frequency to be compared. What those comparisons measure is less obvious than it seems.

A remark goes unnoticed by one person and stays with another for three days. What differs is not sensitivity in general, but what the sentence touches.

You think a disagreement has been settled; it resurfaces six months later, identical. That repetition is not a failure: it is the rule, and it has been measured.

A third of two-year-olds were in school in France in the early 2000s, against a small fraction today. Evaluations explain that movement poorly.

The finding has been stable for forty years and in every country measured. Successive reforms have not reversed the gradient.

Retirement removes at a stroke the main context for encounters in adult life. Surveys show very different trajectories by situation.

Two instruments bearing the same name can rank the same people in an almost different order. The distinction that explains it dates from the early 2000s.

The phrase has become the announcement of an imminent break-up. Yet it describes an ordinary way of functioning, one that has nothing to do with disengagement.

Banned in French primary schools since 1956, it continues to exist. Syntheses find an effect close to zero among the youngest and measurable in upper secondary.

A firm may have an interest in paying more than necessary. The theory is old, and empirical tests give mixed results.

The literature on repairing relationships is almost entirely marital or workplace-based. What exists on friendship amounts to few studies.

Digital writing lost prosody and manufactured a substitute system in thirty years. It works, imperfectly, and it produces its own misunderstandings.

Residence is set with the mother in a large majority of cases, and the law provides for that nowhere. Understanding the gap means distinguishing what is adjudicated from what is agreed.