Long-term care in Spain: Difficulties in professionalizing services

The aim of this article is to analyze the difficulties in professionalizing the long-term care system in Spain. Since 2006, the new Spanish law has recognized care as a subjective right, and regulations are being designed to create a framework for its professionalization. Nowadays, family remains the most important group of providers who care for their elders, and women remain the main informal caregivers. Why do families resist using public long-term care services and professional carers included in the new law? The hypothesis highlights sociocultural factors as an obstacle to professionalization of long-term care services in addition to political and economic factors. The results show qualitative data about expectations, preferences, and discourses that women caregivers have in relation to their responsibility. The empirical material includes 25 interviews with different profiles of caregivers and six focus groups with family caregivers. The article suggests that the Spanish ideal of care is a problem for the professionalization of services because the family remains as the main provider of care—without specific skills, knowledge, and abilities.     

Rules Infants Look By: Testing the Assumption of Transitivity in Visual Salience

What drives infants’ attention in complex visual scenes? Early models of infant attention suggested that the degree to which different visual features were detectable determines their attentional priority. Here, we tested this by asking whether two targets—defined by different features, but each equally salient when evaluated independently—would drive attention equally when pitted head‐to‐head. In Experiment 1, we presented 6‐month‐old infants with an array of Gabor patches in which a target region varied either in color or spatial frequency from the background. Using a forced‐choice preferential‐looking method, we measured how readily infants fixated the target as its featural difference from the background was parametrically increased. Then, in Experiment 2, we used these psychometric preference functions to choose values for color and spatial frequency targets that were equally salient (preferred), and pitted them against each other within the same display. We reasoned that if salience is transitive, then the stimuli should be iso‐salient and infants should therefore show no systematic preference for either stimulus. On the contrary, we found that infants consistently preferred the color‐defined stimulus. This suggests that computing visual salience in more complex scenes needs to include factors above and beyond local salience values.     

Domains, ranges and strategy-proofness: the case of single-dipped preferences

We characterize the set of all individual and group strategy-proof rules on the domain of all single-dipped preferences on a line. For rules defined on this domain, and on several of its subdomains, we explore the implications of these strategy-proofness requirements on the maximum size of the rules’ range. We show that when all single-dipped preferences are admissible, the range must contain two alternatives at most. But this bound changes as we consider different subclasses of single-dipped preferences: we provide examples of subdomains admitting strategy-proof rules with larger ranges. We establish exact bounds on the maximal size of strategy-proof functions on each of these domains, and prove that the relationship between the sizes of the subdomains and those of the ranges of strategy-proof functions on them need not be monotonic. Our results exhibit a sharp contrast between the structure of strategy-proof rules defined on subdomains of single-dipped preferences and those defined on subsets of single-peaked ones.     

Bat boxes in urban non-native forests: a popular practice that should be reconsidered

Impact mitigation practices are currently one of the hottest topics in conservation and regarded as priorities worldwide. Forest bat populations are known to provide important ecosystem services such as pest control and bat boxes have become one of the most popular management options for counteracting the loss of roosts. However, bat boxes tend to be employed in non-native forests near highly humanized areas where human disturbance is higher. The aim of this study was to evaluate how the surrounding landscape composition affects bat box occupancy in urban non-native forests along the Mediterranean corridor in the Northeastern Iberian Peninsula. Two hundred wooden bat boxes were monitored in young non-native forests in the period 2004–2012. The influence of land cover on occupancy rate of bat boxes was analysed at the landscape level in a 5 km buffer around bat-box stations. In total, 1659 inspections were carried out, in which a 15 % occupancy rate was detected. Bat boxes hosted three different species (Pipistrellus pygmaeus, Pipistrellus kuhlii and Nyctalus leisleri). More than 70 % of the occupancy can be explained by habitat and spatial composition. The presence of urban areas around bat boxes tends to have a negative impact on bat occupation rates; by contrast, forest coverage has a positive effect, especially for the tree-dwelling bats. These patterns could be associated with the large number of available roosts in buildings, microhabitat or phylopatry. Thus, to increase success, we suggest that landscape composition should be considered when using bat boxes for conservation.     

Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes–no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected language-specific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers’ ratings of these utterances as interrogatives.     

Family support policies and child outcomes: a realist-scoping review*

Family support policies (FSP) refer to government policies that promote the well-being of families with children (e.g. job-protected paid leave, cash transfers, childcare). We developed an initial conceptual and theoretical framework of FSP and conducted a realist-scoping review to document the state of evidence regarding the influence of FSP on three child outcomes: poverty, development, and health. Based on the contexts and mechanisms through which FSP are hypothesized to affect child outcomes, we constructed a framework to guide a search of five electronic databases (OVID, ProQuest, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Knowledge). We analysed articles meeting our inclusion criteria (i.e. conceptualized FSP as a function of the welfare state; conceptualized child poverty, development, and health as outcomes; and conducted empirical analyses) in relation to our mechanisms and thematic concerns (context, developmental periods, and differential impacts). A total of 22 studies met our inclusion criteria, which tested 25 independent child outcomes. Our findings identified initial mechanisms that explain the relationship between FSP and child outcomes through (1) increasing parents’ basic capabilities, (2) shaping parents’ childcare options, and (3) influencing parental leave-taking and shifting beliefs about gender relationships in the home and workplace. Future work will be to test these mechanisms and framework through a realist synthesis.     

Staff Reactions Toward Lesbian,Gay, or Bisexual (LGB) People Living in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs) Who Actively Disclose Their Sexual Orientation

Fifty-three staff members currently working in residential aged care facilities located in Barcelona, Spain, were asked about the way they would react if a resident told them that he or she felt sexually attracted and had maintained sexual relationships with another resident of the same gender. Acceptance of non-heterosexual sexual orientation was a frequent answer, and around one in four professionals stated that they would try helping the resident in question, by offering a private space or giving some emotional support. However, some reactions were not consistent with a respectful approach toward sexual diversity, as, for instance, informing the resident’s family or advising the resident to keep his or her sexual orientation hidden. We highlight the importance of developing formal policies and offering formal training to staff in order to address the specific needs of older LGB people living in RACFs.     

Simultaneous marginal survival estimators when doubly censored data is present

A doubly censoring scheme occurs when the lifetimes T being measured, from a well-known time origin, are exactly observed within a window [L, R] of observational time and are otherwise censored either from above (right-censored observations) or below (left-censored observations). Sample data consists on the pairs (U, δ) where U = min{R, max{T, L}} and δ indicates whether T is exactly observed (δ = 0), right-censored (δ = 1) or left-censored (δ = −1). We are interested in the estimation of the marginal behaviour of the three random variables T, L and R based on the observed pairs (U, δ). We propose new nonparametric simultaneous marginal estimators [^(S)]_T, [^(S)]_L{\hat S_{T}, \hat S_{L}} and [^(S)]_R{\hat S_{R}} for the survival functions of T, L and R, respectively, by means of an inverse-probability-of-censoring approach. The proposed estimators [^(S)]_T, [^(S)]_L{\hat S_{T}, \hat S_{L}} and [^(S)]_R{\hat S_{R}} are not computationally intensive, generalize the empirical survival estimator and reduce to the Kaplan-Meier estimator in the absence of left-censored data. Furthermore, [^(S)]_T{\hat S_{T}} is equivalent to a self-consistent estimator, is uniformly strongly consistent and asymptotically normal. The method is illustrated with data from a cohort of drug users recruited in a detoxification program in Badalona (Spain). For these data we estimate the survival function for the elapsed time from starting IV-drugs to AIDS diagnosis, as well as the potential follow-up time. A simulation study is discussed to assess the performance of the three survival estimators for moderate sample sizes and different censoring levels.