Planned Happenstance Skills and Occupational Identity Status in High School Students

This study investigated how the 5 components of planned happenstance skills are related to adolescents' occupational identity statuses. A canonical correlation analysis was performed with a sample of 370 high school students in South Korea. The results indicated that higher identity statuses (i.e., achievement and moratorium statuses) were significantly related to the 5 components of planned happenstance skills, whereas lower identity statuses (i.e., foreclosure and diffusion statuses) were not significantly related to the 5 components of planned happenstance skills. In addition, the results of the mediation analysis indicated that the transition from moratorium to achievement status was positively mediated by 3 components of planned happenstance skills: optimism, persistence, and risk taking.     

Regression analysis of competing risks data via semi-parametric additive hazard model

When the subjects in a study possess different demographic and disease characteristics and are exposed to more than one types of failure, a practical problem is to assess the covariate effects on each type of failure as well as on all-cause failure. The most widely used method is to employ the Cox models on each cause-specific hazard and the all-cause hazard. It has been pointed out that this method causes the problem of internal inconsistency. To solve such a problem, the additive hazard models have been advocated. In this paper, we model each cause-specific hazard with the additive hazard model that includes both constant and time-varying covariate effects. We illustrate that the covariate effect on all-cause failure can be estimated by the sum of the effects on all competing risks. Using data from a longitudinal study on breast cancer patients, we show that the proposed method gives simple interpretation of the final results, when the primary covariate effect is constant in the additive manner on each cause-specific hazard. Based on the given additive models on the cause-specific hazards, we derive the inferences for the adjusted survival and cumulative incidence functions.     

Empirical Studies of Child Welfare Training Effectiveness: Methods and Outcomes

Although public child welfare agencies, as well as contracted private providers, conduct extensive amounts of training, the evaluation evidence for effectiveness of training interventions is sparse. This article provides a critical review of published reports of the child welfare training evaluation literature. When we conducted a search of the literature published since 1990, 14 articles met the criteria for inclusion. These articles are reviewed according to: training audience, training duration, research design, sample size, outcome measures, and reported results. Our conclusions identify strengths and weaknesses in evaluation approaches to date and suggest strategies for enhancing the evidence base of this core intervention in child welfare.     

What Accounts for the Variations in Nonprofit Growth? A Cross-National Panel Study

Previous studies of nonprofit growth have lamented the lack of cross-national longitudinal data measuring the size of the nonprofit sector across countries, which has made it difficult to assess the current state of knowledge about the nonprofit sector beyond national boundaries. Recent progress in measuring nonprofit growth using panel studies or cross-national data has compensated for the limitations of the existing research, but even the recent data are either country specific or cross sectional in nature. This study takes on the challenge of supplementing the current research by measuring nonprofit growth using internationally comparable longitudinal data. Specifically, this study focuses on whether certain key indicators of the overall state of the economy can be used to predict and explain the size of nonprofit sectors cross-nationally. The overall state of the economy has considerable relevance for nonprofit growth, as it influences the levels of government funding and private philanthropy that benefit the nonprofit sector. The results indicate that the existing theories about the nonprofit sector account for variations in nonprofit growth but are limited in their explanations of the underlying dynamics of such variations beyond national boundaries. Social origins theory is a useful addition that helps to explain cross-national variations in nonprofit growth. Importantly, the interplay among the government, private philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector is dynamic, and its effect on economic indicators varies across nonprofit regime types when sociodemographic variables are controlled.     

父母资助对城市子女住房费用的影响——基于韩国家庭面板数据的实证研究

大城市过高的房价使得很多适婚人群很难仅凭自身经济能力购买住房。因此,很多新婚夫妇向父母寻求经济资助,父母的经济能力和支持程度对新婚夫妇居住的住房条件以及婚房形式产生非常重要的影响。本文利用韩国劳动面板数据分析父母的收入和资产对子女新婚居住形式与费用的影响。分析结果显示,当不区分男女样本进行回归时,子女的收入、教育水平和地区变量等一般认为会影响住房费用的因素在统计上均不显著。这表明新婚夫妇在筹备婚房的过程中所承担的责任往往并不相同。将男女样本分别进行回归时发现父母资产水平对新婚夫妇居住费用产生显著影响。特别是新婚夫妇中男方的住房方式受到父母资产的影响程度高于女方。这反映出婚房筹备方面男性承担主要费用的实际社会现象。而且比起父母当前收入,父母居住的住宅价格对新婚夫妇住宅价格产生更显著的影响,说明父母资产在婚房筹备上起到重要作用。城市居民的住房状况不仅涉及年轻人生活质量,也通过代际关系影响老年人的资产与收入,是关乎民生的重大社会问题。我国政府也面对同样的问题,应该加快建立和完善多层次城镇住房供应体系,对不同收入家庭实行不同的住房供应政策。发展租赁市场作为补充,建立购租并举的住房制度。住房政策与供应模式的创新与改革将有助于解决城市居民购房能力不足的问题,对推动国内消费模式的变化与长期持续中高速经济增长都将产生深远影响。     

Analytical binomial lookback options with double-exponential jumps

We study the problem of the convergence of the adjusted binomial lookback option in double-exponential jump diffusion models. By using the results of [Dai, M., (2000). A modified binomial tree method for currency lookback options. Acta Mathematica Sinica, 16, 445–454; Kou, S., & Wang, H. (2004). Option pricing under a double exponential jump diffusion model. Management Science, 50, 1178–1192] and [Park, H.S., Kim, K.I., & Qian, X. (2009). A Mathematical modeling for the Lookback option with jump diffusion using Binomial tree method. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, preprint], we show the equivalence between the adjusted binomial tree method and the explicit difference scheme. The convergence is also theoretically proved through the notion of viscosity solution. Numerical results coincide with the theoretical results.     

A genetic algorithm approach to developing the multi-echelon reverse logistics network for product returns

Traditionally, product returns have been viewed as an unavoidable cost of doing business, forfeiting any chance of cost savings. As cost pressures continue to mount in this era of economic downturns, a growing number of firms have begun to explore the possibility of managing product returns in a more cost-efficient manner. However, few studies have addressed the problem of determining the number and location of centralized return centers (i.e., reverse consolidation points) where returned products from retailers or end-customers were collected, sorted, and consolidated into a large shipment destined for manufacturers’ or distributors’ repair facilities. To fill the void in such a line of research, this paper proposes a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model and a genetic algorithm that can solve the reverse logistics problem involving product returns. The usefulness of the proposed model and algorithm was validated by its application to an illustrative example dealing with products returned from online sales.     

Do Children With Gender Dysphoria Have Intense/Obsessional Interests?

This study examined whether children clinically referred for gender dysphoria (GD) show increased symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Circumscribed preoccupations or intense interests were considered as overlapping symptoms expressed in GD and ASD. In gender-referred children (n = 534; 82.2% male) and their siblings (n = 419; 57.5% male), we examined Items 9 and 66 on the Child Behavior Checklist, which measure obsessions and compulsions, respectively. Non-GD clinic-referred (n = 1,201; 48.5% male) and nonreferred (n = 1,201; 48.5% male) children were also examined. Gender-referred children were elevated compared to all other groups for Item 9, and compared to siblings and nonreferred children for Item 66. A gender-related theme was significantly more common for gender-referred boys than male siblings on Item 9 only. A gender-related theme was not significantly more common for gender-referred girls compared to their female siblings on either item. The findings for Item 9 support the idea that children with GD show an elevation in obsessional interests. For gender-referred boys in particular, gender-related themes constituted more than half of the examples provided by their mothers. Intense/obsessional interests in children with GD may be one of the factors underlying the purported link between GD and ASD.     

Surviving grief: An analysis of the exchange of hope in online grief communities

Online grief communities represent relatively new forms of peer support. However, the degree to which they are helpful for individual grieving processes is unknown. To date, no research has evaluated the type or quality of support exchanged in online grief communities. To begin to address these questions, this study analyzed 564 messages from internet grief websites to: (1) classify the type of helping skills used, and (2) extract themes contained in the content of the messages. Messages selected for analysis were the first response to an original post, assuming they would be the first effort to provide support to a grieving individual. Results revealed a majority of responses contained self-disclosure. Themes in the messages suggested provision of more than "one-way" support; messages themes also included exchanging hope for the future by sharing one's own story, validating the grief experience, providing resources, and exchanging psychosocial support. Clinical implications and research recommendations are discussed.     

In search of the “best” growth inhibitor

In searching for the “best” growth inhibitor, we decided to consider growth inhibition in terms of the lengths of the terminal sprouts. For it is logical to infer that the trees with the longer sprouts (after a 20-month period) will most likely be the ones that will need trimming in the future. Additionally, we reasoned that if a particular treatment produced a smaller proportion of “long” sprouts, then it would be a more effective growth inhibitor. It was now necessary to define what was meant by “long”. After consultation with foresters we chose cutoff lengths of 15.0, 25.0 and 35.0 cm. Hence the response variable was chosen to be the proportion of the terminal sprouts on a tree that exceeded a specified cutoff length. By varying the cutoff lengths, we would minimize the effect of the arbitrariness involved in choosing one particular length.