Client satisfaction with home care services in rural Russia

The objective of this work is to explore the satisfaction of a sample of 300 frail elders living in a rural Russian area with the support services provided by social service agency staff. The client population lives in extremely difficult conditions in terms of housing and associated communal services. They reported very high levels of satisfaction with the agency-provided services, both general satisfaction and their satisfaction with the specific services received during the reference visit inquired about by the interviewer. The degree of satisfaction is likely related to the difficulty of their living environment and their probable poverty, as well as the quality of services received. Attempts to relate the variance in the satisfaction ratings to the extent of activity limitations and the volume of formal and informal care using multivariate analysis met with limited success, owing in part, at least, to the limited variance in the dependent variables. Nevertheless, the patterns identified are broadly consistent with expectations based on modeling previously done for the U.S. populations receiving at-home care. The results clearly indicate the value of providing such services to frail elders in such circumstances.     

Locus of control and race track betting behaviors: A preliminary investigation

Principal components factor analysis of a fifteen-item betting behavior question-naire and the internal-external locus of control scale administered to 175 male racegoers at two different race tracks yielded four interpretable behavior patterns approximating four personality dimensions found in the gambling literature.     

Site-Specific Applications of Probabilistic Health Risk Assessment: Review of the Literature Since 2000

Whether and to what extent contaminated sites harm ecologic and human health are topics of considerable interest, but also considerable uncertainty. Several federal and state agencies have approved the use of some or many aspects of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), but its site-specific application has often been limited to high-profile sites and large projects. Nonetheless, times are changing: newly developed software tools, and recent federal and state guidance documents formalizing PRA procedures, now make PRA a readily available method of analysis for even small-scale projects. This article presents and discusses a broad review of PRA literature published since 2000.     

Contingency and Social Change: Collective Engagement in Conditions of Radical Uncertainty

This paper addresses the nexus between contingency, social engagement and change, through investigating the potential of severe (“disruptive”) contingency to bring about new forms of joint agency. By challenging Boltanski's notion of existential tests (which can only be experienced in isolation), the paper argues that social actors can experience disruptive contingent events in an inherently intersubjective manner. Although they severely hinder social interaction, disruptive contingent events enable a possibility of what might be called “negative common knowledge” between social actors which in turn renders certain societal norms meaningless. This possibility is mediated through processes of mutual engagement (calls between actors) that could, further, be transformed into a new “norm circle” (Dave Elder-Vass). Social domination – in particular its “complex” variety – in this context appears as the obstructing of such transformation. A recent political episode in Serbia is analyzed to demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contingency and the logic of complex domination.     

Network construction/restoration problems: cycles and complexity

Journal of Combinatorial Optimization - In network construction/restoration problems introduced in Averbakh and Pereira (IIE Trans 44(8):681–694, 2012; Eur J Oper Res 244:715–729,...     

Prediction of sports injuries in football: a recurrent time-to-event approach using regularized Cox models

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - Data-based methods and statistical models are given special attention to the study of sports injuries to gain in-depth understanding of its risk factors and...