The "quality " of early care and education settings: definitional and measurement issues

There is a widespread belief that high-quality early care and education can improve children's school readiness. However, debate continues about the essential elements of a high-quality experience, about whether quality means the same things across different types of care settings, about how to measure quality, and about the level of quality that might make a meaningful difference in outcomes for children. Are the aspects of the child care environment that researchers measure the ones that are most strongly related to children's development? This article argues that the ways in which researchers currently measure early care environments are flawed and that the conclusions drawn about the relationship between these measures and outcomes for children are frequently incorrect or overstated. The article addresses four questions: How is the quality of the child care environment commonly defined and measured? Do the most commonly used measures capture the child's experience? Do they work well across all settings? Are researchers drawing the correct conclusions from studies that relate the child care environment to child outcomes? Finally, the article discusses some possible directions for future research.     

Preceptorship: a shared journey between practice & education

Creative new approaches must be developed to attract new graduate and transitioning nurses to psychiatric-mental health nursing. In this article, we present a collaborative nurse preceptor program between a clinical practice agency and a university college of nursing faculty group. The preceptorship was designed to facilitate recruitment and retention of new graduate and transitioning nurses into a community-based, psychiatric-mental health agency. This process could be applied in any practice setting to address issues of recruitment and retention. Over the course of more than 2 years, the program has resulted in a 70% retention rate of new and transitioning nurses in the agency; of particular note is the 100% retention of new baccalaureate graduates. This program has positively affected the agency, the nurse preceptors, and the new graduate and transitioning nurse preceptees. We describe the collaborative development and implementation of the preceptor program designed to enhance recruitment and retention of new graduate nurses and nurses transitioning from other specialty areas into community-based psychiatric-mental health nursing practice.     

Stimulant medication use, misuse, and abuse in an undergraduate and graduate student sample

In this study, the authors investigated the characteristics of use, misuse, and abuse of stimulant medication (primarily methylphenidate and variants) among students at a northeastern US university. Researchers sent an invitation to take an Internet survey to student e-mail addresses and passed 150 paper surveys in undergraduate classes, analyzing 1,025 (975 electronically) returned surveys. Sixteen percent of respondents reported abusing or misusing stimulant medication. Ninety-six percent of respondents who specified a medication preferred to abuse or misuse Ritalin. Men and women reported similar use patterns. Most respondents who abused or misused stimulant medication swallowed pills; 40% used intranasally. Reasons for abusing or misusing stimulant medication included improving attention, partying, reducing hyperactivity, and improving grades. Consistent with previous studies, results suggest that abuse of stimulant medication is a concern on college campuses. The results point to various reasons for and methods of abusing and misusing stimulant medication that may direct future research, prevention, and intervention.     

Dempster's combination rule and sufficient statistics

In his articles (1966-1968) concerning statistical inference based on lower and upper probabilities, Dempster refers to the connection between Fisher's fiducial argument and his own ideas of statistical inference. Dempster's main concern however focuses on the “Bayesian” aspects of his theory and not on an elaboration of the relation between Fisher's and his ideas. This article attempts to work out the connection between those two approaches and focuses primarily on the question, whether Dempster's combination rule, his upper and lower probabilty based on sufficient statistics and inference based on sufficient statistics in Fisher's sense are consistent. To be adequate to Fisher's reasoning, we deal with absolutely continuous, one parametric families of distributions.This is certainly not the usual assumption in context with Dempster's theory and implies a normative but straightforward definition concerning the underlying conditional distribution; this definition however is done in Dempster's spirit as can be seen from his articles, (1966, 1968,a,b). Under those assumptions it can be shown that - similar to Lindley's results concerning consistency in fiducial reasoning (1958) - the combination rule, Dempster's procedure based on sufficient statistics and fiducial inference by sufficient statistics agree iff the parametric family under consideration can be transformed to location parameter form.     

2008 North American Serials Interest Group Conference: Taking the Sting out of Serials!

Abstract

The twelfth annual MOBIUS Conference was held June 7–9, 2011, at the Holiday Inn Executive Center in Columbia, Missouri. The MOBIUS consortium of Missouri is currently composed of fifty-nine academic libraries, two public libraries, and the Missouri State Library. The conference offered various opportunities, including a keynote address by Meredith Farkas and a networking dessert session on the first night. The second day featured six concurrent sessions, each having six different presentations, along with delicious food, generous door prizes, and the chance to meet with vendors. The third day consisted of four different four-hour post-conference training sessions. Presentations are available for download from the conference Web site.¹     

A Semiparametric Bayesian Model for Circular-Linear Regression

Circular data are observations that are represented as points on a unit circle. Times of day and directions of wind are two such examples. In this work, we present a Bayesian approach to regress a circular variable on a linear predictor. The regression coefficients are assumed to have a nonparametric distribution with a Dirichlet process prior. The semiparametric Bayesian approach gives added flexibility to the model and is useful especially when the likelihood surface is ill behaved. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are used to fit the proposed model and to generate predictions. The method is illustrated using an environmental data set.     

Parenting and child-caretaking among black men who have sex with men and associated sexual and reproductive health factors: a brief report

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the prevalence of parenting and child-caretaking among a sample of black men who have sex with men (MSM), as well as associations between parenting roles and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) factors. Parenting and SRH data were derived from a survey of 199 black MSM. Nearly half of the sample reported being a father or father-figure (44.4%), almost a third indicated serving as caretaker of a child (29.1%), and one in five have a biological child (20.1%). Over half of the sample reported at least one of these three parenting/child-caretaking roles (52.5%). Two significant differences were observed for sexual health variables: men with biological children were significantly more likely to report using condoms inconsistently (55.0% vs. 35.7%, p = .026) and engaging in transactional sex work (36.8% vs. 21.0%, p = .041). Given the observed prevalence, parenting and child-caretaking among black MSM warrant further inquiry as factors that may influence SRH outcomes and care utilization. Services and interventions tailored to black MSM should consider these men’s potential roles and responsibilities as parents and caretakers of children.     

Value drivers of social businesses: A business model perspective

Hybrid organizational forms that combine commercial and welfare institutional logics play an increasingly important role in addressing the grand societal challenges we face today. Building on the literatures on hybrid organizations and social business models, we explore the characteristics of social businesses from a business model perspective. This study seeks to better understand the particularities and value drivers of hybrid social purpose in contrast to purely commercial business models. We follow a grounded theory approach and our findings are based on interview data from 17 social business firms. Building on social businesses' identified particularities, we propose four value drivers of social business models: 1) responsible efficiency, 2) impact complementarities, 3) shared values, and 4) integration novelties. We link our findings to the literature, contributing new insights into social businesses models and implications for practitioners.