What’s keeping you awake at night? Challenges facing trainers in South Africa

Corporate Trainers experience many organizational challenges that require new skills. This qualitative study sought to determine the challenges faced by South African Education Training and Development university students employed as trainers in corporate roles. Findings suggest that trainers require contextual and generic soft skills to meet the requirements of their jobs and that the term trainer embraces a variety of roles of different focus and different status. While there appear to be a common set of problems facing trainers irrespective of location, the interventionist skills and employment policies of the South African government have an important influence on activity in the organization.     

Estimating and comparing adverse event probabilities in the presence of varying follow-up times and competing events

Safety analyses of adverse events (AEs) are important in assessing benefit–risk of therapies but are often rather simplistic compared to efficacy analyses. AE probabilities are typically estimated by incidence proportions, sometimes incidence densities or Kaplan–Meier estimation are proposed. These analyses either do not account for censoring, rely on a too restrictive parametric model, or ignore competing events. With the non-parametric Aalen-Johansen estimator as the “gold standard”, that is, reference estimator, potential sources of bias are investigated in an example from oncology and in simulations, for both one-sample and two-sample scenarios. The Aalen-Johansen estimator serves as a reference, because it is the proper non-parametric generalization of the Kaplan–Meier estimator to multiple outcomes. Because of potential large variances at the end of follow-up, comparisons also consider further quantiles of the observed times. To date, consequences for safety comparisons have hardly been investigated, the impact of using different estimators for group comparisons being unclear. For example, the ratio of two both underestimating or overestimating estimators may not be comparable to the ratio of the reference, and our investigation also considers the ratio of AE probabilities. We find that ignoring competing events is more of a problem than falsely assuming constant hazards by the use of the incidence density and that the choice of the AE probability estimator is crucial for group comparisons.     

Potential for Flexibility in EC Countries

Abstract. There are two economic reasons for supporting the Internal Market Programme of the EC by social policies: the fust argument refers to welfare theory, the second to policies of distribution. First, it could be possible that an economic integration without social completion will lead to welfare losses. Therefore, it could be necessary to correct market forces or to support them respectively because, due to market imperfections, they do not provide the best possible use of productive facilities. Second, it cannot be excluded that level and structure of social provisions will not be accepted because of superior aspects of policies of distribution. Market results could miss the aim of adjusting life and working conditions within the EC and developing them further. These two arguments mentioned above should be followed up in the discussion of the pros and cons of a harmonization of social systems in the EC. For the purposes of this paper these. rather fundamental considerations are applied to the following concrete items: dismissal protection, non-standard forms of employment, and working hours. These regulations influence numerical flexibility of enterprises, i.e. the possibilities of quantitative adjustments in staff use. The steadily growing competition in Europe will also increase the importance of flexibility potentials of enterprises in the different countries as a relevant factor for enterprise location. Extensive flexibility restrictions could prove to be competitive disadvantage in view of countries with more possibilities of flexibilization.Therefore, after the comparison of flexibility potentials in the EC-countries the implications for European laws (key-word: Social Charter) are to be discussed.     

Checking validity of monotone domain mean estimators

Estimates of population characteristics such as domain means are often expected to follow monotonicity assumptions. Recently, a method to adaptively pool neighbouring domains was proposed, which ensures that the resulting domain mean estimates follow monotone constraints. The method leads to asymptotically valid estimation and inference, and can lead to substantial improvements in efficiency, in comparison with unconstrained domain estimators. However, assuming incorrect shape constraints may lead to biased estimators. Here, we develop the Cone Information Criterion for Survey Data as a diagnostic method to measure monotonicity departures on population domain means. We show that the criterion leads to a consistent methodology that makes an asymptotically correct decision choosing between unconstrained and constrained domain mean estimators. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 315–331; 2019 © 2019 Statistical Society of Canada     

If all you have is a hammer,everything looks like a nail: Operationalization matters

Operationalization has been the focus of less research than many other methodological topics. In this article, we argue that considering operational decisions is particularly critical for those who study stratification, because measures of inequality often involve multiple layers of operationalization: researchers first decide how to assign individuals to social groups (e.g., race), which are then themselves used to construct measures of group‐level differences and inequality (e.g., racial segregation). We provide examples of this by drawing on contemporary debates about how to operationalize social groups based on class, race, gender, and religion. Then we discuss three examples (religion, racial segregation, and family type) of second layer operationalization decisions, focusing on the consequences of operational decisions for research findings. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of operational decisions, focusing particularly on issues of power and applications for policy makers.     

“I'm Not Supporting His Kids”: Nonresident Fathers' Contributions Given Mothers' New Fertility

The authors examined whether nonresident fathers provide informal support to their children and whether support stops if their ex‐partner goes on to have a child with a new man. A logistic regression analysis of longitudinal survey and administrative data for 434 women who received welfare in Wisconsin showed that fathers are less likely to provide informal support when their ex‐partner has a child with a new partner. Alternative models that control for unobserved characteristics suggest somewhat different results, providing stronger evidence of declines in support that can be shared across family members than in support that can be directed to a particular child.     

Ports modernization and its influence on trade unions

The restructuring of production resulting from the Port Modernization Law (Law 8.630/90) caused significant changes in work organization of Brazilian Ports. In the case of Mucuripe (Fortaleza, Ceará), in particular, the changes were very intense as Mucuripe is an old port that, before the Law, had labor regulation being governed by Trade Unions. This paper aims to present the perceptions of Union Representatives on the changes brought about by the Law on work organization in the port of Fortaleza, its influence in the organization and in the way the Unions deal with this new reality. Open and exploratory interviews were conducted with representatives of occasional labor workers registered in the Port of Fortaleza OGMO (Org?o Gestor de M?o de Obra, Labor Regulation Management). The analysis of the collected material in the interviews was based on the technique of content analysis proposed by Bardin (1979). Trade Unions have undergone a great loss of power and it has reflected in a relative inability to perform its function and to fight for the rights of the workers. The obvious Trade Unions weakness - a reduction of strikes and less unionized workers - reflects the dominating ideology of capital.     

Slope effect on pushing forces

In some occupations pushing forces are frequent when performed on horizontal ground and are standardized (ISO 2002). In special cases employees are obliged to grow container on slopes and the strains are poorly investigated. The objective of this work is to measure forces required to push garbage container on horizontal and inclined at 0, 4, 11 and 16 % grounds. Sudden and significant increases in heart rate reflect the possible risk of heart overload in long displacements. This study proposes realistic limits and provides a simple and protective tool for a group of employees without distinction of age or gender. These limits can even be reduced to a quasi-linear model where push 200 kg is the maximum for 0% slope and 60 kg for 10% slope.