The interaction effects of scheduling control and work–life balance programs on job satisfaction and mental health

Jang SJ, Park R, Zippay A. The interaction effects of scheduling control and work–life balance programs on job satisfaction and mental health Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 135–143 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. The demands of balancing employment and family responsibilities strain the health and welfare of many employees worldwide, and social welfare policy analysts are increasingly attending to the factors that can alleviate such stress. The present study examined associations between the availability of work–life balance programs, employees' authority to arrange their own work hours, job satisfaction, and mental health among 1,293 employees in 50 companies in South Korea. The study is unique in its use of multilevel analysis in examining individual‐ and company‐level variables. The results add to the evidence regarding the positive relationship between the availability of scheduling control and work–life balance policies on the one hand, and job satisfaction and mental wellbeing, on the other.     

Block thresholding wavelet regression using SCAD penalty

This paper concerns wavelet regression using a block thresholding procedure. Block thresholding methods utilize neighboring wavelet coefficients information to increase estimation accuracy. We propose to construct a data-driven block thresholding procedure using the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty. A simulation study demonstrates competitive finite sample performance of the proposed estimator compared to existing methods. We also show that the proposed estimator achieves optimal convergence rates in Besov spaces.     

Understanding the Role of Individual Innovativeness in the Acceptance of IT‐Based Innovations: Comparative Analyses of Models and Measures*

As new technological innovations are rapidly introduced and changed, identifying an individual characteristic that has a persistent effect on the acceptance decisions across multiple technologies is of substantial value for the successful implementation of information systems. Augmenting prior work on individual innovativeness within the context of information technology, we developed a new measure of adopter category innovativeness (ACI) and compared its effectiveness with the existing measure of personal innovativeness in IT (PIIT). Further, we examined two alternative models in which the role of individual innovativeness was theorized differently—either as a moderator of the effects the perceived innovation characteristics of usefulness, ease of use, and compatibility have on future use intention (moderator model) or as a direct determinant of the innovation characteristics (direct determinant model). To ensure the generalizability of the study findings, two field studies (N= 634) were conducted, each of which examined the two models (moderator and direct determinant) and measured individual innovativeness using the two measures (ACI and PIIT). Study 1 surveyed the online buying practices of 412 individuals, and Study 2 surveyed personal digital assistant adoption of 222 healthcare professionals. Across the markedly different adoption contexts, the study results consistently show that individual innovativeness is a direct determinant of the innovation characteristics, and the two measures share many commonalities. The new measure offers some additional utilities not found in the PIIT measure by allowing individuals to be directly classified and mapped into adopter categories. Implications are drawn for future research and practice.     

Models, assumptions and model checking in ecological regressions

Ecological regression is based on assumptions that are untestable from aggregate data. However, these assumptions seem more questionable in some applications than in others. There has been some research on implicit models of individual data underlying aggregate ecological regression modelling. We discuss ways in which these implicit models can be checked from aggregate data. We also explore the differences in applications of ecological regressions in two examples: estimating the effect of radon on lung cancer in the United States and estimating voting patterns for different ethnic groups in New York City.     

Referent Networks Predict Just Rewards

This study introduces the referent network, the set of relations defined by knowing others reward levels, and makes initial predictions about how the structure of that network shapes perceptions of income fairness. Previous research recognizes that justice assessments are driven by social comparisons; yet there is a paucity of research on how the structure of interpersonal contacts shapes justice assessments. Using a social networks perspective, the arguments here suggest that the referent network affects social comparisons, which in turn affect justice assessments of rewards. This reasoning is also integrated with the notion that people make both local and referential comparisons when determining their just rewards. An experiment evaluates these arguments. Results show support for the argument linking network structures to justice assessments and partial support for the extension to local and referential comparisons. Supplemental analyses show how reward levels qualify the arguments. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Understanding Public Sector Debt: Financial Vicious Circle under the Soft Budget Constraint

The article explains why debt of public sector organizations grows beyond the sustainable level by focusing on the principal-agent relationship under the soft budget constraint. Specifically, this article explores the extent to which factors affect the level of public sector debt in the context of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) in Korea over the past two decades (1993–2012). The findings from the panel data analysis suggest that the level of public sector debt increases as an outcome of the financial vicious circle created by the soft budget constraint: a knock-on effect of the moral hazard of quangos as well as the opportunistic behavior of political principals. Public sector debt is positively associated with agency-specific factors as well as the factors related to the political incentives such as policy preferences and electoral considerations. However, macroeconomic factors made little difference to the general pattern of the evidence.     

Evaluation of the treatment time-lag effect for survival data

Medical treatments often take a period of time to reveal their impact on subjects, which is the so-called time-lag effect in the literature. In the survival data analysis literature, most existing methods compare two treatments in the entire study period. In cases when there is a substantial time-lag effect, these methods would not be effective in detecting the difference between the two treatments, because the similarity between the treatments during the time-lag period would diminish their effectiveness. In this paper, we develop a novel modeling approach for estimating the time-lag period and for comparing the two treatments properly after the time-lag effect is accommodated. Theoretical arguments and numerical examples show that it is effective in practice.