A Collaborative Model for Organizational Transformation

The purpose of this study was to develop a collaborative learning and communication model for higher education. On a university campus there are various psycho-social and organizational barriers to collaboration inside and outside of the classrooms. Scholars have stated that teachers rarely talk with each other about their teaching, there is little multi-disciplinary research and studies have shown that there is little or no collaboration in meetings and forums outside of university classrooms. So, what are the barriers to collaborative communication and learning and how can these barriers be removed through collaborative strategies? These are the questions that this study explored. Through the understanding of the psycho-social and organizational barriers to collaboration, strategies began to unfold and a new model for collaborative learning and communication was developed. This model reflects a high synergy, totally integrated social and cognitive system for individual and organizational transformation.     

Estimating the transmission probability of human immunodeficiency virus in injecting drug users in Thailand

We estimate the transmission probability for the human immunodeficiency virus from seroconversion data of a cohort of injecting drug users (IDUs) in Thailand. The transmission probability model developed accounts for interval censoring and incorporates each IDU's reported frequency of needle sharing and injecting acts. Using maximum likelihood methods, the per needle sharing act transmission probability estimate between infectious and susceptible IDUs is 0.008. The effects of covariates, disease dynamics, mismeasured exposure information and the uncertainty of the disease prevalence on the transmission probability estimate are considered.     

Attachment Themes in the Family Narratives of Preschool Children: A Qualitative Analysis

The family narratives of two preschool children (male and female) rated extremely high in social competence were compared to the narratives of two other children (also male and female) rated extremely low in social competence for differences in qualities of parent-child relationships and narrative structure. The children were participants in a larger study of parent-child relationships in post-divorce families. Three narratives of the ten-narrative Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised were analyzed qualitatively. Differences between children rated high and low in social competence were observed in areas such as the representation of problem resolutions, narrative coherence, predictable consequences for behavior, role modeling, responsiveness of parents to children's needs, emotional expression, children's ambivalence for caregivers, and family integrity. Implications for further research involving representations of attachment security in narrative play are discussed.     

The impact of migration on the nonmetropolitan population age structure, 1960–1990

In this paper we examine the short-run impact of migration on the age composition of nonmetropolitan areas. Changes in age structure can have important consequences at the local level, and the influence of migration is particularly notable because it is highly age-graded, with different migration patterns found in various types of nonmetropolitan communities. Here we compare the impact of migration on age structures in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas across the last three decades. Within nonmetropolitan areas we also compare counties with colleges, commuting counties, agricultural counties and retirement counties. We conclude that several factors influence the impact of migration on age structure. Impacts will be greater in smaller than in larger population groups, and in areas that specialize in economic functions that impinge on a particular age group. But in general, migration adds young people to metropolitan areas and older people to nonmetropolitan areas. Differential impacts may be lessened in periods, such as 1970–80, when substantial population redistribution was underway. Nevertheless, prior and present fertility and mortality trends, and the cumulative history of migration well exceed the impact of migration on age in any ten-year interval.Abbreviations Metro Metropolitan - Nonmetro Nonmetropolitan An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Western Regional Science Association, Wailea, Hawaii, 22 February 1993.     

Are Parents Investing Less Time in Children? Trends in Selected Industrialized Countries

Trends in parental time invested in children since the 1960s are examined in 16 industrialized countries using time-use survey data. Despite the time pressures that confront today's families, parents appear to be devoting more time to children than they did 40 years ago. Results also suggest that mothers continue to devote more time to childcare than fathers, but the gender gap has been reduced. The consistency of these results across countries suggests a global trend toward an increase in parental time investment in children. Multivariate analysis of trends in parental time by type of activity was undertaken for Canada. It revealed a significant increase in parental time even after controlling for changes in the demographic composition of the population during the past few decades.     

Governance for reconstruction in Africa: challenges for policy communities and coalitions

This article seeks to advance analyses and responses to conflict prevention and reconstruction in Africa that go beyond state‐centric perspectives to include a range of non‐state players. Drawing on examples from both Uganda and Canada, it focuses on the activities of NGOs that have ‘partnered’ with state‐based actors in various peacekeeping and peace‐building operations as well as on the increasingly important role played by think‐tanks. The latter have emerged in Africa as major contributors to the proliferating literature on the political economy of violence, an approach that recognizes that African conflict reflects imperatives of production and consumption in relations that juxtapose Africa’s political institutions and cultures with international and global political economies. The article argues that novel forms of ‘security communities’ are emerging from the non‐state/state/international partnerships and coalitions that have developed around contemporary issues like ‘blood’ diamonds, small arms, debt and HIV/AIDS, thus drawing attention to connections between conflict and development.     

What do we know about the timing of fertility transitions in europe?

The Princeton project on the decline of fertility in Europe (the European Fertility Project) suggested that this historical fertility transition occurred virtually simultaneously in a wide variety of economic and social environments. This finding has been cited widely as evidence for an innovation/diffusion view of fertility transitions. We demonstrate that the demographic methods used to date the fertility transition in Europe—primarily I_g, and (to a lesser extent) the Coale-Trussell M&m indices—may fail to detect the initial stages of a fertility transition and therefore cannot be used as the basis for strong statements about the timing of transitions. We review these measurement problems and their implications for the current understanding of the European fertility transition.     

Efficiency bounds for a generalization of ranked-set sampling

Abstract

Partially rank-ordered set sampling (PROSS) is a generalization of ranked-set sampling (RSS) in which the ranker is not required to give a full ranking in each set. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of the sample mean as an estimator of the population mean under PROSS, RSS, and simple random sampling (SRS). We find that for fixed set size and total sample size, the efficiency of PROSS falls between that of SRS and that of RSS. We also develop a method for finding a sharp upper bound on the efficiency of PROSS relative to SRS for a particular design.