Pathways from workplace flexibility to turnover intention: Role of work–family conflict,family–work conflict,and job satisfaction

This study examined the prevalence of workplace flexibility and the mechanisms that allow workplace flexibility to influence turnover intentions through work–family and family–work conflicts and job satisfaction among low‐wage workers in South Korea. Participants included 250 low‐wage workers whose monthly salary was less than 2 million Korean won (approx. $1,900). The study results indicate that low‐wage workers have limited access to workplace flexibility and that workplace flexibility plays a significant protective role in reducing their turnover intention, indirectly by decreasing work–family conflicts and enhancing job satisfaction. This article also discusses the implications of these findings for labor policy and social work practice.     

Impact of older adults' mobility and social participation on life satisfaction in South Korea

South Korea has been experiencing rapid population aging. In an aging society, the need for healthy lives is greater. Two of the fundamental factors to enable independent and active life for the elderly are mobility and social participation. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between older adults’ mobility, social participation, and quality of life in South Korea. We used data from the 2017 National Survey of Older Koreans conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs and applied hierarchical regression. The major finding was that older adults’ mobility had a positive impact on their life satisfaction. After controlling for older adults’ mobility, social participation was positively associated with life satisfaction regardless of the place of residence. The findings of this study not only make a valuable contribution to further research on mobility and social participation but also provide new insight into improving older adults’ quality of life.     

Inference and Decision Making for 21st-Century Drug Development and Approval

ABSTRACT

The cost and time of pharmaceutical drug development continue to grow at rates that many say are unsustainable. These trends have enormous impact on what treatments get to patients, when they get them and how they are used. The statistical framework for supporting decisions in regulated clinical development of new medicines has followed a traditional path of frequentist methodology. Trials using hypothesis tests of “no treatment effect” are done routinely, and the p-value < 0.05 is often the determinant of what constitutes a “successful” trial. Many drugs fail in clinical development, adding to the cost of new medicines, and some evidence points blame at the deficiencies of the frequentist paradigm. An unknown number effective medicines may have been abandoned because trials were declared “unsuccessful” due to a p-value exceeding 0.05. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has shown utility in the clinical drug development process for its probability-based inference. We argue for a Bayesian approach that employs data from other trials as a “prior” for Phase 3 trials so that synthesized evidence across trials can be utilized to compute probability statements that are valuable for understanding the magnitude of treatment effect. Such a Bayesian paradigm provides a promising framework for improving statistical inference and regulatory decision making.     

Noninformative priors for the between-group variance in the unbalanced one-way random effects model with heterogeneous error variances

For the unbalanced one-way random effects model with heterogeneous error variances, we propose the non-informative priors for the between-group variance and develop the first- and second-order matching priors. It turns out that the second-order matching priors do not exist and the reference prior and Jeffreys prior do not satisfy a first-order matching criterion. We also show that the first-order matching prior meets the frequentist target coverage probabilities much better than the Jeffreys prior and reference prior through simulation study, and the Bayesian credible intervals based on the matching prior and reference prior give shorter intervals than the existing confidence intervals by examples.     

Ethical Numbers: Ethics Training in U.S. Graduate Statistics Programs, 2013–2014

As important members of research teams, statisticians bear an ethical responsibility to analyze, interpret, and report data honestly and objectively. One way of reinforcing ethical responsibilities is through required courses covering a variety of ethics-related topics at the graduate level. We assessed ethics requirements for graduate-level statistics training programs in the United States for the 2013–2014 academic year using the websites of 88 universities, examining 103 biostatistics programs, and 136 statistics degree programs. We categorized programs’ ethics training requirements as required or not required. Thirty-one (35.1%) universities required an ethics course for at least some degree students. Sixty-two (25.5%) degree programs required an ethics course for at least some students. The majority (77.4%) of required courses were worth 0 or 1 credit. Of the 177 programs without an ethics requirement, 19 (10.7%) listed an ethics elective. Although a single ethics course is insufficient for instilling an ethical approach to science, degree programs that model expectations through coursework point to the value of ethics in science. More training programs should prepare statisticians to consider the ethical dimensions of their work through required coursework. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Foreign-born and native-born migration in the U.S.: evidence from linked IRS administrative and census survey records

Journal of Population Research - This paper details efforts to link administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to American Community Survey (ACS) and 2010 Census microdata for...     

Anmerkungen zur Publikation „Möglichkeiten und Probleme des Einsatzes postalischer Befragungen“ von Karl-Heinz Reuband in der Kzfss 2001, 2, S. 307–333

Reuband’s article purports to report empirical results that seem to contradict the widely held view of mail surveys. This assertion is made possible only by an unclear statement of hypotheses and a selective perception of the literature. The data analysis is based on techniques from the 1960s and 1970s; modern methods are not even mentioned. Although all the results reported in the article are based on local surveys conducted by a university institute, these are generalized to national surveys in general. The main points of this critique are methodological: careless literature review, lack of concrete hypotheses, inefficient data analysis and generalizations without empirical foundation.     

Determinanten regelkonformen Verhaltens am beispiel des Strassenverkehrs

The main role of traffic police enforcement can be seen as preventing road users from committing offences, which can be related to road crashes and injuries. As the operating principle underlying the impact of police enforcement a deterrence effect has been discussed repeatedly, whereas from a sociological perspective the importance of “Norm Internalisation” has been emphasised. Thus, the present paper aims at comparing the influence of “Norm Internalisation” and the variables constituting the deterrence effect on the compliance with rules in road traffic. Based on a secondary analysis of data from a project on behavioural determinants of police surveillance carried out by the “Institute of Applied Transport and Tourism Research” (IVT) on behalf of the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) an operationalisation of the construct “General Norm Orientation” is developed. In several subsequent steps of statistical analysis patterns of correlations with variables from Opp’s “Theory of Law Obedience” are revealed. Results show a sufficiently high internal consistency (α = 0,82) of the scale “General Norm Orientation” and significant correlations with variables from Opp’s theory. The directions of these correlations are as expected and confirmed by multivariate analyses. Results are discussed with respect to their implications for influencing road users’ behaviours.     

Beate Krais (Hg.): An der Spitze. Von Eliten und herrschenden Klassen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

‚The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly‘

According to the most influential contribution of recent years to the comparative study of advanced welfare states, Esping-Andersen’s ’Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism‘, the welfare state basically comes in three variants: as a social-democratic, a conservative, or as a liberal regime. Yet, at a closer look, in particular the ’conservative‘ regime-type represents a highly problematic category. The article claims that the major problems of Esping-Andersen’s typology and theory originate from his sole focus on the class conflict and his neglect of the religious cleavage. Major theoretical contradictions and empirical puzzles of his approach can be solved if we take not only the impact of the catholic social doctrine on the development of the welfare state into account, but consider also the influence of social protestantism, especially that of protestant dissent and of protestant non-conformism. The paper substantiates this claim with data for the early formative period of the welfare state (1890–1920) as well as for the high-time of the welfare state from the 1960s to the 1990s.