Declines in Health and Support Between Parents and Adult Children: Insights from Diabetes

Population Research and Policy Review - We investigate associations between a diabetes diagnosis and financial and instrumental transfers between parents and adult children. Data are from...     

Strategic planning and consensus building for external relations— Five cases

This article examines relationships between strategic planning and consensus building with external groups and constituencies. Methods for consensus building with external groups during strategic planning and implementation are discussed and five cases from different economic and political sectors are examined in conjunction with the principles considered.     

Success or failure? Interpreting and understanding the impact of interventions in four similar worksites

While many studies of interventions have focused on their content and immediate effects, less research has focused on the processes that may explain these effects. The purpose of this study was to show how process evaluation can be used to interpret the results of an intervention study in four industrial canteens in Denmark. Two canteens acted as intervention groups and two as comparison groups. Effects were measured by surveys before and after interventions, and observations and interviews were conducted to provide an in-depth understanding of processes. Analyses were conducted based on the responses from 118 employees. Results showed, contrary to expectations, improvements in working conditions and well-being in one intervention group and in one comparison group, whereas no improvements were found in the two remaining groups. Data from the process evaluation enabled a meaningful interpretation of these results, raising the possibility programme failure rather than theory failure, and thereby constituting an example of how process evaluation can shed light over the factors that may influence outcomes in controlled intervention studies.     

How Do Individuals Apply Risk Information When Choosing Among Health Care Interventions?

A sample of 3,201 Danes was subjected to personal interviews in which they were asked to state their preferences for risk-reducing health care interventions based on information on absolute risk reduction (ARR) and relative risk reduction (RRR). The aim of the study was to measure the relative weighting of different types of risk information under various circumstances. The effect of presenting questions, and of explicitly formulating RRR, was analyzed. A preference for increases in RRR was demonstrated. There was a stronger inclination to choose the intervention that offered the highest RRR if RRR was explicitly stated. Individuals with more than 10 years of schooling also demonstrated a preference for increased ARR, but only when facing individually framed choices. In a social choice context, preferences for RRR remained intact, but the magnitude of ARR had no impact on choices. Results imply that social framing may induce a propensity to prefer interventions that target high-risk populations. Those respondents who had received < or = 10 years of schooling demonstrated preferences for RRR but not ARR, and no impact of social framing was observed.     

THE ANALYSIS OF MULTISTRATA DESIGNED EXPERIMENTS WITH INCOMPLETE DATA

Building upon early work of E. A. Cornish we show that G. N. Wilkinson's version of Yates' approach to the analysis of designed experiments with a single error stratum carries over completely to designs with an arbitrary non-singular covariance matrix, initially assumed known. We show that the equations, corrections, adjustments and algorithms all have their more general analogues and that these can be solved, computed or executed quite readily if the design has orthogonal block structure and satisfies Nelder's condition of general balance. The results are illustrated with a split-plot and a simple (square) lattice design.     

Family Trends and Transracial Adoption in the United States

Several demographic trends have changed family formation in the United States resulting in fewer babies being made available for adoption. At the same time the number of transracial adoptions appears to be increasing. We use the 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the 2000 census and the National Survey of Adoptive Parents to examine the social and demographic characteristics of those who adopt transracially. Transracial adoption of Hispanic and Asian children, but not Black children, is associated with higher income and education levels. It is less likely in the South, but more likely among those who have had military experience.     

Young Adult Daughters' Relationships With Their Fathers: Review of Recent Research

In “Something More”: The Meanings of Marriage for Religious Couples in America, Dollahite, Hawkins and Parr (2012) present a qualitative study that includes interviews with religiously observant married couples to investigate marriage. The current paper reviews the aforementioned study with respect to its trustworthiness, through dependability, credibility, confirmability and transferability, to encourage the elevation of qualitative work in our field. We discuss a number of challenges in the study design, methods, interpretation, and conclusions. In sum, our reading of the study left us wanting “something more” scholarly rigorous for the field of marriage research and qualitative work.     

The relationship between transformational leadership and follower sickness absence: the role of presenteeism

The impact of transformational leaders on employee health and well-being has received much attention. Less research has focused on the relationships between transformational leaders and followers’ sickness absenteeism. Transformational leaders promote a group climate that may lead to absenteeism, especially among vulnerable employees (those with high levels of presenteeism). In the present study we examined the relationships between presenteeism, group-level transformational leadership and sickness absence rates in a three-year longitudinal study of postal workers and their leaders in Denmark (N?=?155). Group-level transformational leadership in year 1 predicted sickness absenteeism in year 2, but not in year 3. In examining conditions under which transformational leadership may be linked to higher levels of sickness absenteeism, we found that presenteeism in year 1 moderated the link between transformational leadership in year 1 and sickness absenteeism in year 3, such that followers working in groups with a transformational leader and who were high in presenteeism reported higher levels of sickness absenteeism. Our results suggest a complex picture of the relationship between transformational leadership and sickness absenteeism; transformational leaders may promote self-sacrifice of vulnerable followers by leading them to go to work while ill, leading to increased risks of sickness absence in the long term.     

Are national levels of employee harassment cultural covariations of climato-economic conditions?

Conflict in a workgroup turns into harassment if a group member is persistently confronted with negative acts with few possibilities to retaliate. Cross-national differences in such intragroup harassment are considerable but wait to be understood. In this study, survey data from 44,836 employees in 44 countries revealed that a cultural in-group orientation was associated with lower employee harassment. In addition, and in agreement with Van de Vliert's climato-economic theory of culture, workforces reported more harassment in poorer countries with more demanding climates of colder-than-temperate winters, hotter-than-temperate summers, or both. Finally, it was found that the impact of climato-economic hardships on harassment suppressed the impact of cultural in-group orientation on harassment. Using the regression equation obtained for the sample of 44 countries, national levels of employee harassment for a broader pool of 103 countries were estimated and scrutinized for their validity for future research. Data from the World Values Surveys were used to validate the estimations. The results provide the basis for a further hypothesis, that employee harassment is more prevalent in countries with either survival or self-expression cultures than in countries with cultures that are intermediate between those two extremes. The results have implications for prevention and remedial measures.     

How would you like your gain in life expectancy to be provided? An experimental approach

This paper reports the results of an empirical study investigating people’s preferences over three different types of perturbation to their survival function, each perturbation generating the same gain in life expectancy. Preferences over the three different perturbations were found to be distributed more or less evenly across the subject pool. Use of a novel experimental methodology generated economically consistent and intuitively plausible responses to (necessarily) hypothetical questions concerning improvements in life expectancy by first allowing respondents to gain experience while making similar choices in an incentivized setting involving financial risk. The results demonstrate the potential for economic experiments to contribute to the development of more robust methods for policy evaluation in domains where physical risk is an important factor.