Improving family planning services to rural adolescents

A longitudinal study conducted among young women and family planning service providers in 3 rural New York counties underscored the need to pay attention to individual differences among the clients served. Barriers to family planning acceptance in these counties included factors such as poor public transportation, long distances to clinic, and no telephone in many households that the urban population does not confront. The 900 young women in the sample were categorized as unserved, underserved, adequately served, or well served with regard to their family planning needs. A comparison of psychometric and survey data from these respondents indicated that clinic clients tended to be unmarried, to have a higher personal income, and have fewer children than their counterparts who were contraceptive nonusers. In addition, nonacceptors who completed the Future Events Test expected more positive events never to happen and made less use of planning for the future than the young women who were clients of the family planning clinic in their county. Although qualitative evaluation and participant-observation revealed significant differences between the 3 counties in terms of their family planning services, the distribution of women in the 4 categories did not differ among counties. Overall, these findings indicate that personality characteristics rather than situational variables are the best predictors of success or failure in taking steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. For young women who are assessed at intake as lacking sufficient motivation to follow through on contraception, clinic personnel should develop an individualized plan aimed at providing education and raising self-esteem and optimism about control over future events.     

Reductions in unwanted complications and lengths of inpatient stay by use of "dynamic guidelines"

A literature survey was used to identify pre-operative risks that commonly result in unwanted post-operative complications in the elderly. By adapting these risk conditions into a pre-operative survey, seniors who might have these complications were identified. Practitioners were notified of these risk factors. Elective surgery was postponed, when necessary, to have patients stop smoking and to gain training in pulmonary toilet. When in the inpatient setting, the patients were followed by both the surgeon and the appropriate specialist to reduce complications rates. By developing and employing this approach, a 25 percent decrease in unwanted complications was experienced, mostly due to reduction in pulmonary events. This resulted in an associated 58 percent drop in unwanted length-of-stay days in the hospital per 1,000 senior patients. Outcomes were improved, while inpatient utilization was reduced.     

Merit and Gender: Organisations and the Mobilisation of Masculine Bias

Within work organisations, perceptions of gender-based competencies and inclinations affect assignment and other practices and thus the distribution of women and men among different opportunity structures. Five illustrations are provided to support the view that ideas about masculinity and femininity are embedded in organisational arrangements. The opportunity to accumulate merit and the attribution of merit appear to be structured along gender lines.     

Internal barriers to help seeking for middle-aged and older women who experience intimate partner violence

There has been relatively little qualitatively or quantitatively published research to guide the field in identifying and addressing barriers to seeking help for older women who experience domestic violence. Women over the age of 45 have seldom been participants in research on domestic violence. This paper describes results from a qualitative study that focused on reactions to and internalization of abusive behaviors of an intimate partner. Twenty-one focus groups were conducted with 134 middle- aged and older women. Analysis of the data identified six factors that describe reactions to abusive behavior that become barriers to help seeking, including self-blame, powerlessness, hopelessness, the need to protect family, and the need to keep such abuse secret from others. These.     

Elites and Collective Protest*

Efforts to explain collective protest have increasingly stressed the causal significance of elite structure and behavior. This trend is an unexamined manifestation of the broader and widely discussed trend away from “pluralistic” theories and toward “political” theories. But thus far, applications of the elite concept have been largely ad hoc, with little attention paid to its theoretical status or to developing it as an analytical tool. This problem can be rectified by turning to the neoelitist paradigm on which a number of scholars have been working in recent years. In particular, the neoelitist paradigm provides a conceptualization of unified and disunified elites which is theoretically and empirically grounded, capable of operationalization, generally applicable, and which plausibly helps account for variations in political conflict. It therefore complements and carries forward recent developments in the collective protest literature. This implies that the neoelitist paradigm merits serious attention alongside pluralist and Marxist paradigms as a guiding framework for macro social and political analysis.     

Propensity to consent to data linkage: experimental evidence on the role of three survey design features in a UK longitudinal panel

When performing data linkage, survey respondents need to provide their informed consent. Since not all respondents agree to this request, the linked data-set will have fewer observations than the survey data-set alone and bias may be introduced. By focusing on the role that survey design features play in gaining respondents’ consent, this paper provides an innovative contribution to the studies in this field. Analysing experimental data collected in a nationally representative household panel survey of the British population, we find that interview features such as question format (dependent/independent questions) and placement of the consent question within the questionnaire have an impact on consent rates.     

Do the DSM-5 diagnostic revisions affect the psychometric properties of the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen?

Several significant changes in the diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder occurred with the newest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The changes aim to simplify and streamline the diagnosis without compromising its validity. Yet many of the tools used to screen and diagnose the disorder are based upon the prior fourth edition of the DSM, and it is unclear how they perform with the revised diagnostic criteria. The aim of this study is to examine the psychometric properties of a common pathological gambling screen, the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS; Gebauer, LaBrie, & Shaffer, 2010), in the context of DSM-5 criteria within a help-seeking sample. Gamblers calling a helpline (N = 2750) completed a semi-structured interview assessing DSM-IV past-year pathological gambling criteria with a trained clinician. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and differences by sex were examined. The BBGS had high sensitivity as well as positive and negative predictive values. In light of the revisions made to the diagnostic criteria in DSM-5, the BBGS remains a psychometrically supported instrument for gambling disorder.     

Creating culturally sustainable agri-environmental schemes

Evidence is emerging from across Europe that contemporary agri-environmental schemes are having only limited, if any, influence on farmers’ long-term attitudes towards the environment. In this theoretical paper we argue that these approaches are not ‘culturally sustainable’, i.e. the actions are not becoming embedded within farming cultures as part of conventional ‘good farming’ practice. We propose (following Bourdieu) that, in order to culturally embed the environmental values, beliefs and knowledges that underlie such schemes, policy-makers need to devise approaches that allow the creation of cultural and social capital within farming communities - rather than simply compensating for economic capital lost. We outline the theoretical basis of our position and discuss how the contemporary agri-environmental approach of paying for specified environmental management services restricts the ability of such schemes to generate cultural and, thereby, social capital. Finally, we outline two possible ways of accounting for cultural capital in scheme creation: either through the development of measures of cultural capital that enable its incorporation into contemporary economic models or through a major revision to the way we construct and apply agri-environmental schemes.     

Problems with the Federal Economic Statistical System and Some Alternatives for Improvement

This article identifies four problems with the present federal statistical system for economics: (1) lack of comparability of data series; (2) fragmentation and poor data quality; (3) nonoptimal funding patterns; and (4) susceptibility of the system to politicization. Full centralization of the system appears to be both impractical and undesirable as a solution; however, considerable consolidation in the statistics collection process and a substantial increase in the number and professional quality of personnel devoted to planning, developing, and coordinating the federal statistical system are recommended.