Self-Help:

The Strengthening the Informal Support System of the Hispanic Elderly, a project designed to supply the Hispanic adult caregiver, i.e., relatives, friends and neighbors, with information and social support through a self-help group approach offered experiential learning and facilitated the formation of an informal network in which the participants explored their personal feeling towards the caregiving role, shared problems and concerns and engaged in mutual problem-solving activities. The project was conducted with fifty-eight persons who were the major caregivers of Hispanic elderly residing in four selected sites throughout New York City.     

Système de soins et mortalité régionale: une analyse causale

Nous examinons l'impact du système de soins sur les différences régionales de mortalité adulte en Espagne, en distinguant l'offre et la demande de soins. Nous avons utilisé un modèle d'analyse des covariances, ajusté aux données par le logiciel LISREL 7. La distinction faite entre l'offre et la demande de soins conduit à observer un impact spatial significatif de l'utilisation du système de soins sur la mortalité des adultes. Hormis le cas des accidents, le signe de la relation est toutefois opposé à celui prévu! Une meilleure spécification du modèle permettrait peut-être de modifier cette conclusion.We examine the impact of the health care system on regional adult mortality differences in Spain, distinguishing between the demand and supply of health care. We have used a covariance analysis model, fitted to the data using LISREL 7. The distinction made between supply and demand of medical care leads to a significant spatial impact of the use of the health care system on adult mortality. Except for accidents, however, the sign of the relation is opposite to what is expected! Better specification of the model could possibly reverse this conclusion.     

Evaluation of the implementation of a socio-educational program with immigrant families: a case study

There exist an increasing number of studies that demonstrate the necessity to evaluate the processes which characterize a program and guarantee its implementation and evaluation. This paper deals with the implementation of a program designed to improve the acculturation of immigrant families in Spain (EU). Implementation followed a process that has proved successful in other settings, but is being applied here for the first time. Qualitative and quantitative measures are employed to assess each stage of implementation, with a particular emphasis on fidelity to program design. The intent was to guide effective revision of the program, and to establish it in a form that can be implemented on a larger scale.     

Migration and Citizenship Law in Spain: Path‐dependency and Policy Change in a Recent Country of Immigration

This article analyzes the links between migratory processes and the evolution of nationality legislation in Spain. We argue that this case challenges the theoretical models that link immigration to liberalizing reforms in citizenship law. Despite large‐scale immigration experienced over the last two decades, Spanish nationality law has remained strongly focused on keeping ties with Spanish communities abroad. To account for the high degree of stability of Spanish citizenship law we structure our analysis along three basic lines: the historical conceptions derived from Spain's past as a colonial power, as well as its tradition as a country of emigration; the lack of incentives for political actors to introduce the reform of citizenship law in the political agenda; and the strategies adopted by those political actors in relation to the politicization of immigration.     

$${\mathcal{L}}_p$$ loss functions: a robust bayesian approach

In bayesian inference, the Bayes estimator is the alternative with the minimum expected loss. In most cases, the loss function shows the distance between the alternative and the parameter. Therefore, any distance can lead to a loss function. Among the best known distance functions is L _p one, where the choice of value p may be difficult and arbitrary. This paper examines robust models where the loss function is modelled by family L _p . Our solution concept is the non-dominated alternative. We characterize the non-dominated set by having the posterior distribution function satisfy a particular asymmetry property. We also include an example to illustrate the methodology described.     

Small-sample comparisons for powerdivergence goodness-of-fit statistics for symmetric and skewed simple null hypotheses

Power-divergence goodness-of-fit statistics have asymptotically a chi-squared distribution. Asymptotic results may not apply in small-sample situations, and the exact significance of a goodness-of-fit statistic may potentially be over- or under-stated by the asymptotic distribution. Several correction terms have been proposed to improve the accuracy of the asymptotic distribution, but their performance has only been studied for the equiprobable case. We extend that research to skewed hypotheses. Results are presented for one-way multinomials involving k = 2 to 6 cells with sample sizes N = 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 and nominal test sizes f = 0.1, 0.05, 0.01 and 0.001. Six power-divergence goodness-of-fit statistics were investigated, and five correction terms were included in the study. Our results show that skewness itself does not affect the accuracy of the asymptotic approximation, which depends only on the magnitude of the smallest expected frequency (whether this comes from a small sample with the equiprobable hypothesis or a large sample with a skewed hypothesis). Throughout the conditions of the study, the accuracy of the asymptotic distribution seems to be optimal for Pearson's X² statistic (the power-divergence statistic of index u = 1) when k > 3 and the smallest expected frequency is as low as between 0.1 and 1.5 (depending on the particular k, N and nominal test size), but a computationally inexpensive improvement can be obtained in these cases by using a moment-corrected h² distribution. If the smallest expected frequency is even smaller, a normal correction yields accurate tests through the log-likelihood-ratio statistic G² (the power-divergence statistic of index u = 0).     

Linguistic competence/language access services (LAS) in end-of-life and palliative care: a social work leadership imperative

Despite the mandated and moral imperative to advance linguistic competence in all health care contexts, leadership that addresses this area of practice and study in end-of-life and palliative care is not readily obvious. Because social work is ideally suited to lead efforts to advance linguistically-accessible end-of-life and palliative care, social workers are encouraged to assume the challenge. This article focuses on topics that are elementary yet central to discussions on language diversity and leadership initiatives to advance language access in end-of-life and palliative care contexts: importance and function of language, extent of language diversity, inequity related to language diversity, mandates and standards related to language access, and approaches and competencies that contribute positively to language access.     

Religiosity as a mediator of caregiver well-being: does ethnicity make a difference?

This study used an adaptation of the stress and appraisal model to examine the mediating effects of religiosity on caregiving strain and gain with an ethnically diverse sample of 384 Alzheimer's disease caregivers. While the regression analysis indicated that religiosity did not mediate the stress of providing care for the entire sample, there were significant differences in the use of religiosity depending on the ethnicity (African American, Hispanic, and White non-Hispanic) of the caregiver, as well as significant differences between the three cohorts in the levels of caregiving strain (depression) and gain (self-acceptance). Implications for the use of religiosity as a protective factor for AD caregivers are discussed.