How to be Resilient? Local Philanthropy as a Collective Response to Natural Disasters

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - When communities are struck by natural disasters, human service organizations play an important role in supplementing...     

Joint modelling of longitudinal binary data and survival data

The medical costs in an ageing society substantially increase when the incidences of chronic diseases, disabilities and inability to live independently are high. Healthy lifestyles not only affect elderly individuals but also influence the entire community. When assessing treatment efficacy, survival and quality of life should be considered simultaneously. This paper proposes the joint likelihood approach for modelling survival and longitudinal binary covariates simultaneously. Because some unobservable information is present in the model, the Monte Carlo EM algorithm and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm are used to find the estimators. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed model based on the accuracy and precision of the estimates. Real data are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.     

The Short-Term Impact of Involuntary Migration in China’s Three Gorges: A Prospective Study

The aim of this study is to measure the short-term impact of involuntary migration resulting from China’s Three Gorges Dam project on the 1.3 million persons being displaced. We focus on the social, economic, and mental and physical health impact using three sets of indicators. Using a prospective research design, we gathered information about these indicators from a sample of migrants first before they moved and then again after they moved. Changes in the migrants’ wellbeing during the period, when benchmarked to corresponding changes computed for a control group of non-migrants, are attributed to the impact of involuntary migration. Our results showed that although the displaced have enjoyed a relative gain in housing quality, most of the changes were in the negative direction and many of such negative changes were statistically significant.     

Honourable Sacrifice: A Visual Ethnography of the Family Lives of Korean Children with Autistic Siblings

Literature on the siblings of disabled children has been dominated by western psychosocial theories that focus on stresses associated with being a ‘young carer’ or on children as active agents realising their ‘rights’ rather than as the victims of familial expectations. This article presents the findings of a visual ethnographic study exploring the lives of nine children living with an autistic sibling in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Despite personal challenges and family tensions, experiences of ‘being’ a sibling were strongly influenced by Confucian familist cultural values in which sacrifice plays a central role in achieving honourable and harmonious family life.     

Evaluations of FDR-controlling procedures in multiple hypothesis testing

Many exploratory experiments such as DNA microarray or brain imaging require simultaneously comparisons of hundreds or thousands of hypotheses. Under such a setting, using the false discovery rate (FDR) as an overall Type I error is recommended (Benjamini and Hochberg in J. R. Stat. Soc. B 57:289–300, 1995). Many FDR controlling procedures have been proposed. However, when evaluating the performance of FDR-controlling procedures, researchers are often focused on the ability of procedures to control the FDR and to achieve high power. Meanwhile, under the multiple hypotheses, it may be also likely to commit a false non-discovery or fail to claim a true non-significance. In addition, various experimental parameters such as the number of hypotheses, the proportion of the number of true null hypotheses to the number of hypotheses, the samples size and the correlation structure may affect the performance of FDR controlling procedures. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the performance of some existing FDR controlling procedures in terms of four indices, i.e., the FDR, the false non-discovery rate, the sensitivity and the specificity. Analytical results of these indices for the FDR controlling procedures are derived. Simulations are also performed to evaluate the performance of controlling procedures in terms of these indices under various experimental parameters. The result can be used to summarize as a guidance for practitioners to properly choose a FDR controlling procedure.     

Unfinished modernity or another modernity? The South Korean case

South Korea has experienced “compressed capitalist development” over the last five decades, characterized by unprecedented levels of industrialization and democratization, with other distinctive features. This development experience causes some scholars to view the country as a site for a new modernity, following the Western prototype. Concerning the underlying nature of emerging modernity in South Korea, however, there have been controversial insights: some scholars argue that the country is now experiencing a Western type of modernity, and others refute this, saying that it has not at all been modernized. This paper investigates the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist development in South Korea from a perspective of vertical modernization. It considers the origins, process, and outcomes of modernization mainly in terms of democracy, economic growth, and welfare. We assume that there are “different sites and forms of modernity” in the world, and that South Korea would be a good candidate to examine for non-Western modernity. Yet it is our contention that the country’s modernity has been distorted and unbalanced in the development of society, culture, politics, and economy. Historically, South Korea has progressed through traditional unmodernity, colonial undermodernity, and Western modernity. A clear examination of the country’s development experience reveals to no small degree the complex nature of modernity, in that tradition, modernity, and postmodernity coexist in the present time. We conclude that South Korean modernity is an incomplete project still in progress.     

Culture‐Inclusive Theories of Self and Social Interaction: The Approach of Multiple Philosophical Paradigms

In view of the fact that culture‐inclusive psychology has been eluded or relatively ignored by mainstream psychology, the movement of indigenous psychology is destined to develop a new model of man that incorporates both causal psychology and intentional psychology as suggested by Vygotsky (1927). Following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many mentalities” (Shweder et al., 1998), the Mandala Model of Self (Hwang, 2011a,b) and Face and Favor Model (Hwang, 1987, 2012) were constructed to represent the universal mechanisms of self and social interaction that can be applied to any culture; both models can be used as conceptual frameworks for analyzing mentalities of people in any given culture. Taking research works from Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relation as exemplars (Hwang, 2012), this article illustrates how to construct culture‐inclusive theories of Confucianism by multiple philosophical paradigms. The mechanism of culture‐inclusive theory can be applied to explain qualitative research findings on lifeworld events of people in a particular society. It can also be utilized to predict results of quantitative research conducted to verify theoretical propositions in the scientific microworld by empirical methods.     

Understanding predictive information criteria for Bayesian models

We review the Akaike, deviance, and Watanabe-Akaike information criteria from a Bayesian perspective, where the goal is to estimate expected out-of-sample-prediction error using a bias-corrected adjustment of within-sample error. We focus on the choices involved in setting up these measures, and we compare them in three simple examples, one theoretical and two applied. The contribution of this paper is to put all these information criteria into a Bayesian predictive context and to better understand, through small examples, how these methods can apply in practice.     

A survey on nonadaptive group testing algorithms through the angle of decoding

Group testing, sometimes called pooling design, has been applied to a variety of problems such as blood testing, multiple access communication, coding theory, among others. Recently, screening experiments in molecular biology has become the most important application. In this paper, we review several models in this application by focusing on decoding, namely, giving a comparative study of how the problem is solved in each of these models.     

The Effect of Twitter Use on Politicians’ Credibility and Attitudes toward Politicians

This study examined how Korean young adults evaluate the use of Twitter by Korean politicians, perceive politicians’ credibility, and evaluate politicians who use Twitter, and the relationships among these 3 variables. Although respondents gave slightly positive, but nearly neutral, answers to questions regarding Twitter use, perceived credibility, and overall evaluation of politicians, the model represented by these 3 variables fits the responses of young Korean voters. In other words, this study shows that attitudes toward the use of Twitter by Korean politicians positively influenced perceived credibility, which, in turn, positively influenced attitudes toward Twitter-using politicians. In addition, attitudes toward Twitter use directly influenced attitudes toward politicians in a positive way. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in this article.