Constituents of healthy workplaces

The aim of the study presented here was to identify and characterize the constituents of a healthy workplace from the viewpoints of employees at four different companies with low rate of absenteeism due to illness. A non-randomized, purposive selection was made of 27 respondents -- four department heads, 16 white-collar workers, and seven blue-collar employees. The respondents were told to describe in writing how they experience factors contributing to good health at their workplace. The data analysis was carried out with a phenomenographic approach. Four main categories of health-related factors emerged: Good Work Environment, Active Keep-Fit Measures, Functional Leadership and Individual Responsibility. The employers fulfil demands for a good physical working environment, but the need for improvements in the psychosocial environment remains. The most promising finding is that the respondents' accept personal responsibility for maintaining their own good health.     

Parenting stress and parenting behavior among foster mothers of foster children with externalizing problems

Foster children often have externalizing problems. Since foster parents are selected and trained, they are often expected to be able to handle the externalizing problems of these children. Very little is, however, known about foster parents' parenting stress and parenting behavior in the context of challenging foster caregiving. In this study, the parenting stress and parenting behavior of 39 foster mothers of recently placed foster children with externalizing problems were studied. By using standardized measures with normative data, foster mothers' scores on different parenting stress and parenting behavior subscales were compared to published norms. Foster mothers of children with externalizing problems experienced more parenting stress than the norm group. The parenting context, provided by these foster mothers, was similar to the parenting context provided by the norm group. The prevalence of specific dysfunctional parenting behaviors (e.g., less involvement in positive parenting) was small to moderate, but nearly half of the foster mothers could be classified as making dysfunctional adaptations to their parenting environment. Moreover, only the minority of foster mothers provided an adaptive parenting context (e.g., more than average involvement in positive parenting). The implications of these results for pre-service training and on-going support for foster parents are discussed.     

The problem of Iraqi nationalism

This article analyses the development of a tenuous Iraqi national identity since the creation of the Iraqi state in 1920. Informed by the ideas of Anthony D. Smith, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, it argues that various political actors in Iraq have sought to reshape historical memory and thus forge a national identity. Despite many setbacks and a long series of authoritarian regimes seeking to appropriate Iraqiness for their own political purposes, and recently the threat from Kurdish irredentism, this article nevertheless contends that an Iraqi cultural ‘ethnicity’ has been created over the past nine decades.     

From knowledge to decision – a case study of sales and operations planning in health care

One of the most important challenges in health care management is balancing resources with fluctuating and uncertain demand. This study examines whether introducing a standardised process for sales and operations planning at a large university hospital improved specialty department managers’ knowledge of planning conditions and if so, whether decisions were made based on this knowledge. Using responses from a survey of 30 specialty department managers at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden, the analyses indicate that operational knowledge strengthens insights about the needs for strategic decisions, and vice versa. Moreover, knowledge is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for making decisions at the department level. An overall planning and decision structure is required and should be implemented first at the hospital level to effectively allocate resources.     

A Method to Generate Multivariate Data with the Desired Moments

We show how it is possible to generate multivariate data which has moments arbitrary close to the desired ones. They are generated as linear combinations of variables with known theoretical moments. It is shown how to derive the weights of the linear combinations in both the univariate and the multivariate setting. The use in bootstrapping is discussed and the method is exemplified with a Monte Carlo simulation where the importance of the ability of generating data with control of higher moments is shown.     

A Regression Model for the AUC of Clustered Ordinal Test Results and Working Independent Optimal Weights

We study a regression model on the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) for clustered (or repeatedly measured) test results. To account for cluster information, we consider a weighted estimating equation for Dodd and Pepe (2003 Dodd , L. , Pepe , M. ( 2003 ). Semiparametric regression for the area under the receiver operating charateristic curve . Journal of the American Statistical Association 98 : 409 – 417 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])'s regression model with working independence weights. We find the optimal weight in the given class of working independence weights to minimize the variance (or MSE) of regression estimators. We apply the proposed procedure to analyzing our recent experiment on diagnosing a liver disorder. In this experiment, we investigated MRI images of patients having symptoms of potential liver disorder to compare the performance of different MRI picturing methods in testing for liver disorders.     

Intensive family preservation services in Flanders: an outcome study

Set up as a one-group pre-test–post-test follow-up design, this study examines the outcomes of intensive family preservation services (IFPS) in Flanders addressing the following research questions: Does IFPS make a significant difference concerning (1) the interaction between parent and child? (2) social support as experienced by the parent? (3) stress and empowerment of the parent? and (4) the strengths and difficulties of the minor? Families seem to indicate that their family situation is more manageable, although still, professional help is needed. Parents feel more resilient about the situation and indicate that they can get along with their child better than before the crisis intervention. Parents still feel uncertain about the future and about their role as a parent. There seems to be no indications that their level and quality of social contacts have changed. Further research is suggested to provide more in-depth information about the conditions associated with processes of change during an IFPS intervention.     

Regularized Gaussian belief propagation

Belief propagation (BP) has been applied in a variety of inference problems as an approximation tool. BP does not necessarily converge in loopy graphs, and even if it does, is not guaranteed to provide exact inference. Even so, BP is useful in many applications due to its computational tractability. In this article, we investigate a regularized BP scheme by focusing on loopy Markov graphs (MGs) induced by a multivariate Gaussian distribution in canonical form. There is a rich literature surrounding BP on Gaussian MGs (labelled Gaussian belief propagation or GaBP), and this is known to experience the same problems as general BP on graphs. GaBP is known to provide the correct marginal means if it converges (this is not guaranteed), but it does not provide the exact marginal precisions. We show that our adjusted BP will always converge, with sufficient tuning, while maintaining the exact marginal means. As a further contribution we show, in an empirical study, that our GaBP variant can accelerate GaBP and compares well with other GaBP-type competitors in terms of convergence speed and accuracy of approximate marginal precisions. These improvements suggest that the principle of regularized BP should be investigated in other inference problems. The selection of the degree of regularization is addressed through the use of two heuristics. A by-product of GaBP is that it can be used to solve linear systems of equations; the same is true for our variant and we make an empirical comparison with the conjugate gradient method.     

Building a working alliance between professionals and service users in family preservation. A multiple case study

In the margin of the ongoing experimental and quasi‐experimental research projects on family preservation, some research projects focus on the process through which families accomplish change and acknowledge the importance of the working alliance. There is, however, little information about barriers and facilitators in building this working alliance. To fill this gap, we performed a multiple case study with a triangulation of ethnographical methods such as observation, in‐depth interviews, case file analysis, and multistakeholder focus groups. We illustrate how, in a context of managerialism and transactional leadership, social workers find themselves in a continuous tension between complying with the expectations of their social organization and “tuning in” with the service users. This jeopardizes the working alliance between a social worker and a family. Consequences for research, practice, and policy regarding family preservation interventions are discussed.