How to Stop a Fight - A Qualitative Video Analysis of How Third-parties De-escalate Real-life Interpersonal Conflicts in Public

Objective: While previous research agrees that third-parties often manage to de-escalate interpersonal conflicts when they intervene, we still know little about how they achieve this influence. The aim of the current study is to address this gap in the literature by investigating how third-parties de-escalate conflicts. Method: We conduct a two-part qualitative analysis of CCTV footage of 48 real-life conflicts from the streets of Amsterdam. The first part consists of an inductive analysis of CCTV-footage investigating the typical sequence of de-escalatory interventions. The second part consists of a deductive coding based on the findings from part 1 of the analysis. Results: We identify an ideal-typical model of de-escalation consisting of three phases: objection, separation, and placation. This model describes how third-parties adapt their intervention to the reaction of the antagonists of the conflict through a contingency principle: when the current phase of intervention fails to de-escalate the conflict, the third-party proceeds to the following phase of the model. We also identify observable intervention behaviors that are characteristic of each of the three phases. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that there is not one way to de-escalate a conflict, but rather that third-parties are successful because they adapt their intervention to the situation at hand. The findings of this study imply that if we want to get closer to understanding when third-party interventions are effective, we need to acknowledge the complexity of these interventions and move beyond the action/inaction dichotomy.

Workplace Conflicts and Perception of Quality Higher Education in Ghana

Conflicts as a complex reality are common in higher education settings. Unfortunately, little is known about their impact on perceptions of the quality of higher education. This study assessed the impact of structural and interpersonal conflicts on the perception of quality higher education. To obtain the data, the study used a cross-sectional survey research design. The study sampled 310 academic and administrative staff from three universities in Northern Ghana using a multi-stage sampling technique. The questionnaire was the primary data-gathering tool. The prevalence of conflicts and perception of quality in higher education were assessed using simple frequencies and percentages, while the structural equation modelling technique was used to investigate the complex relationship among structural conflicts, interpersonal conflicts, and perception of higher education quality. The results indicate that most workplace conflicts in higher education are structural in nature, arising from jurisdictional uncertainties, interdependence, and authority relationships. The findings further indicate that structural and interpersonal conflicts have little influence on perceptions of quality higher education. Nevertheless, in terms of direction, structural conflicts have a positive link with the perception of quality higher education, whereas interpersonal conflicts have a negative relationship. It is hereby recommended that a cross-sectional survey on the influence of conflicts on effective teaching and learning in public universities in Ghana should be conducted.

The Dynamics of Workplace Relationships, Employee Well-Being, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Employees globally are expected to flourish amidst the uncertainty, volatility, and complexities of the muddy waters of Industry 4.0. To identify changes in the perceived workplace relationships and consider initiatives that will improve interpersonal relationships at work in the 4IR. A review of literature will be conducted on the following key variables: 4IR. In the 4IR, provision of interpersonal other than digital means of communicating with employees, effectiveness in intra-organizational information sharing among employees, constant training on new and improved technological tools of working will be useful. Human resource practitioners should focus on designing strategies to improve IR at work, in order to minimize interpersonal conflicts, provide social support and improve organisational performance.

Daily Reports of Aggressive Behaviors in Interpersonal Conflicts

Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable, but the probability that conflicts involve aggressive behavior varies. Prior research that has tended to focus on victimization in intimate partnerships reported through retrospective designs. Addressing these limitations, the current study examines daily reports of behaving aggressively in any conflict across relationships in a sample of 512 young adults drawn from the nationally representative iCOR cohort. Respondent attitudes and affective measures were collected at the end of the daily data collection period. Regression methods were applied to examine the probability and frequency of aggression, investigating early and recent exposure to adversities, attitudes, self-control, affect and emotional states, and alcohol use behavior. Recent adversities and the propensity to endorse a defensive honor code attitude, consistent with theory and retrospective studies of aggression, predicted both prevalence and frequency of aggressive behavior. The associations of childhood maltreatment and self-control with the prevalence of behaving aggressively were as expected, but these constructs were significantly associated with the frequency of aggression with unexpected, inverse directionality. Moreover, respondents’ affect and other emotional states were only associated with the frequency, not the prevalence, of aggressive behavior. Overall, this daily data collection constructively distinguished risk and protective factors for behaving aggressively more often. Further research is needed to disentangle the extent to which affective states drive or is a consequence of frequent aggressive behavior.

The Use of Digital Technologies in the Institute of Higher Education

The article presents a description of modern digital tools that can be used in the educational process for more activating content in the formation of the necessary professional competencies in students. The use of the Internet board "Miro" allows students to master such concepts as "conflict" and "conflict resistance" while studying the discipline "Conflictology"; the digital tool "Nearpod" while studying the topic "Conflict Management in the Organization" made it possible to present a presentation and, after studying its content, conduct online testing on the "Test Wizard" platform, using tasks of varying complexity; the use of artificial intelligence is also possible as a new tool for resolving interpersonal conflicts - on the platform of the TELEGRAM social network.

Dostoevsky - Strakhov - Tolstoy: Toward to the Story of One Conflict

The well-known epistolary conflict between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Strakhov over the latter's slander of the great Russian writer's terrible sins is considered in the article from the point of view a philosophical anthropology and relations not two but between three participants of this story: Dostoyevsky, Strakhov and Tolstoy. This conflict is presented through anthropological, existential, and class prisms of description, based on a reconstruction of Strakhov's concept of man as a controversial, dual, and undefined being reflected in Dostoevsky's work. A direct relation between the definition of the dual nature of man in the works of Strakhov and Dostoevsky and interpersonal conflicts within "boundary forms of literature" is substantiated. Special attention is paid to the class of seminarians, the object of Dostoevsky's targeted criticism. He saw their worst characteristics in Strakhov personality. Tolstoy plays the role of an arbiter in this controversy, assessing the situation both in terms of literary, existential and religious thought. In the course of his examination of this conflict, his unexpected closeness to Dostoevsky was discovered in regard to assessment of Strakhov. The point of their coincidence was the "pink Christianity" of the writers, who justify man in a quite similar manner, in terms of their religious consciousness.

The Effectiveness of Indigenous Conflict Management Strategies in Localized Contexts

The professionalization of addressing conflict creates a field filled with specialists highly trained to apply modularized and manualized, often evidence-based solutions. But how effective are these professionalized conflict management strategies in Indigenous and localized cultural contexts compared to homegrown Indigenous approaches? While instances of these Indigenous peacebuilding and conflict management strategies are routine throughout the world, to date, no one has attempted to test which conflict management approaches are most effective empirically, nor has the literature sufficiently addressed the contexts in which strategies are most helpful. Using multi-dimensional scaling and chi-square tests of independence applied to a similarity matrix of co-occurrences from select Outline of Cultural Materials subjects from the Human Relations Area Files cultural database, this study tests the hypothesis: Indigenous conflict management strategies are more effective (i.e., less associated conflict) than non-Indigenous conflict management strategies in Indigenous contexts. We show that Indigenous conflict management approaches co-occur with conflict less often than non-Indigenous strategies. From an applied perspective, when we break conflict into four discreet types—sociocultural/interpersonal, political, legal/judicial, and economic—Indigenous conflict management strategies co-occur most often with socio-cultural types of conflicts. The results suggest that Indigenous approaches are more effective in Indigenous contexts overall, while they are most often applied to socio-cultural and interpersonal conflicts. Based on our findings, homegrown solutions effectively manage, resolve, and transform localized conflicts.