Increasing walking in college students using a pedometer intervention: differences according to body mass index

Objective: The researchers assessed the effectiveness of a pedometer intervention and differences in walking behaviors according to body mass index (BMI). Participants: Two hundred ninety college students completed the intervention from January to February 2005. Methods: Participants wore pedometers 5 days per week for 12 weeks and completed questionnaires assessing demographic information. The authors calculated daily step averages for weeks 1, 6, and 12. They then classified students as underweight (UW), normal weight (NW), or overweight/obese, by BMI. The authors analyzed data using repeated-measures analysis of variance. Results: The average number of daily steps increased from week 1 to week 6 (p < .001) and week 12 (p = .002). UW participants reported the fewest steps at each time point, but the difference was significant only when compared with NW participants (p = .03). Conclusions: These results support the effectiveness of a pedometer intervention to increase walking in college students. Health benefits other than weight management should be emphasized to maximize the effects for all students.     

On Causal Inferences for Personalized Medicine: How Hidden Causal Assumptions Led to Erroneous Causal Claims About the D-Value

Abstract

Personalized medicine asks if a new treatment will help a particular patient, rather than if it improves the average response in a population. Without a causal model to distinguish these questions, interpretational mistakes arise. These mistakes are seen in an article by Demidenko that recommends the “D-value,” which is the probability that a randomly chosen person from the new-treatment group has a higher value for the outcome than a randomly chosen person from the control-treatment group. The abstract states “The D-value has a clear interpretation as the proportion of patients who get worse after the treatment” with similar assertions appearing later. We show these statements are incorrect because they require assumptions about the potential outcomes which are neither testable in randomized experiments nor plausible in general. The D-value will not equal the proportion of patients who get worse after treatment if (as expected) those outcomes are correlated. Independence of potential outcomes is unrealistic and eliminates any personalized treatment effects; with dependence, the D-value can even imply treatment is better than control even though most patients are harmed by the treatment. Thus, D-values are misleading for personalized medicine. To prevent misunderstandings, we advise incorporating causal models into basic statistics education.     

Does schooling protect sexual health? The association between three measures of education and STIs among adolescents in Malawi

While multiple studies have documented shifting educational gradients in HIV prevalence, less attention has been given to the effect of school participation and academic skills on infection during adolescence. Using the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, a longitudinal survey that followed 2,649 young people aged 14–17 at baseline from 2007 to 2013, we estimate the effect of three education variables: school enrolment, grade attainment, and academic skills—numeracy and Chichewa literacy—on herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) and HIV incidence using interval-censored survival analysis. We find that grade attainment is significantly associated with lower rates of both HSV-2 and HIV among girls, and is negatively associated with HSV-2 but not HIV among boys. School enrolment and academic skills are not significantly associated with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for boys or girls in our final models. Efforts to encourage school progression in high-prevalence settings in sub-Saharan Africa could well reduce, or at least postpone, acquisition of STIs.     

Social welfare grey zones: how and why subnational actors provide when nations do not?

In an era where even citizenship is not a guarantee of access to the welfare state, can non-citizens gain access to social protection? Using health care as a lens, and the United States and Spain as cases, we find that non-citizens do have access to social protection via what we call ‘grey zones’, namely points of disagreement between national and local governments that create opportunities for non-citizens. Grey zones are possible due to processes that are often seen as disenfranchising: the denationalisation of policy and the disaggregation of citizenship. In addition, they tend to open up regardless of the nature or intent of national reforms. That said, we find significant variation in the extent to which subnational governments take advantage of them. While differences are somewhat explained by partisanship, significant outliers warrant further investigation.     

Advocacy Communication and Social Identity: An Exploration of Social Media Outreach

Increasingly, advocacy organizations employ social networking sites as inexpensive and often effective ways to disseminate outreach messages. For groups working to reach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth, social media provide key platforms for connecting with target audiences. Although these young people increasingly utilize social media, little is known about how digital advocacy campaigns influence their sexual identity formation. This article applies concepts of social identity to examine how LGBTQ youth understand advocacy campaigns, how they perceive LGBTQ as a social category presented in campaigns, and what values they assign to LGBTQ group membership.     

Dynamic and Marketing Capabilities as Predictors of Social Enterprises’ Performance

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Social enterprises (SEs) have an increasingly important role in developing more equitable societies worldwide. The...     

Explaining Variations in the Nonprofit Founding Process

Although the organizational founding process is subject to various isomorphic pressures, significant variation is still found in the completion, ordering, and timing of founding events. Prior research on entrepreneurship suggests the importance of education and previous experience in determining who is best positioned to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities, which may explain some of the variation in the founding process. In this article the authors present an analysis of an original survey of recently founded religious nonprofits to better understand how founder, organizational, and contextual characteristics influence the founding process in this specific nonprofit context. Overall, the authors’ findings show that founder education and experience particularly affect the founding process as well as organizational characteristics; however, these effects vary across different dimensions of this process.     

Approaches to Equity Management and their Relationship to Women in Management

Developing equitable practices that provide fair access for all individuals to the benefits and burdens within an organization remains a dilemma for management both in policy and in practice. Research continues to show that the employment status and representation for members of some groups is significantly less than in relation to those of other groups. Addressing the issue of disparity has resulted in a number of different approaches. The main aim of this paper is to explore the ability of a typological theory of equal employment opportunity implementation to account for the differences in the numbers of women in management and in management tiers. This paper identifies and analyses four ideal-typical equity management approaches to achieving workplace parity: traditional (non-compliance), anti-discrimination, affirmative action and equal employment opportunity. While the objective of these approaches may be to ensure equity management in order to encourage equal outcomes the results tell a different story. Results show that an affirmative action approach to equity management predicts increases in women in management across all tiers of management.