Vocational rehabilitation of sole mothers who receive income support benefit

This evaluative research is intended to follow up an experimental project, conducted in Israel, which aims to encourage sole mothers to work and to cease receiving public support, and to take upon themselves the responsibility of earning a living, by providing them with vocational training. To this end, an experimental group of 400 divorced and single mothers was randomly sampled from four local branches of the National Insurance Institute in the centre of the country and was invited to participate in vocational training. The research goal was to evaluate the sole mothers'willingness to participate in the training and the effect of their acquiring a vocation on their actual going to work and, as a consequence, ceasing to receive income support benefit. It was found that immediately following the vocational training, there was a significantly higher percentage of women from the experimental group who worked (63 per cent) than that from the control group (37 per cent). No significant difference was found in the percentage of women who were working two years later. Accordingly no significant difference was found in the percentage of women from both groups who continued to receive income support benefit at this time     

Automobile gasoline consumption: A repeated survey

Understanding the factors contributing to household automobile gasoline consumption can assist decision-makers involved in energy management programs and energy demand forecasts. This article provides a predictive model of gasoline consumption and the results of regression analyses based on data collected from the same households at two different time periods.The analyses tested a range of explanatory variables and found that two variables, number of cylinders and commuting distances, were the major determinants of gasoline consumption. As well. a number of other variables were related to consumption. Further, it was found that one regression model could he used to explain consumption for the two different time periods. It was concluded that consumers, in this study, had not modified their driving patterns over the two time periods under investigation.     

A Dual-Source Indicator of Consumer Confidence

The objective of this paper is to improve the U.S. leading confidence indicator by combining its amended version with the Conference Board's equally well known Consumer Expectation Index . The resulting dual-source indicator provides a factorial structure in which survey items are nested. The results presented here show that this structure is not well fit by a generalized linear model. Hence a nonlinear model is invoked which provides differential logistic slopes for the survey items. This latter model is based on the work of McCullagh (1980). The effects estimated in this nonlinear structure provide the United States with a potential leading indicator that is richer and more informative than its current Index of Consumer Expectations . The suggested indicator prevents the mixed signals and inconsistencies that can occur when separately reporting results from our two most prominent sources of consumer perception.     

SAMPLE SIZE FOR TWO INDEPENDENT PROPORTIONS: A REVIEW

This paper reviews methods for determining sample sizes when inference is required on the difference between two proportions from independent samples. The sample sizes for Fisher's exact test are generally regarded as the desired values, but they are very tedious to calculate, so many approximations have been introduced. These are described and their relative merits assessed.     

Risk Communication and Foodborne Illness: Message Sponsorship and Attempts to Stimulate Perceptions of Risk

Foodborne illness represents a serious health hazard in the United States. Since foodborne illness can often be prevented by an individual's behavior, messages aimed at promoting safe food-handling behaviors should be a major tool to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness. This article argues that to achieve adoption of safe food-handling practices in the home, food-safety messages should both stimulate risk perceptions and promote self-efficacy, feelings that one can successfully enact recommended behaviors. A content analysis of nationally distributed food-safety messages questioned if messages incorporated these features. Since food-safety communicators operate in complex environments with multiple and sometimes competing objectives, this study also questioned if sponsorship of foodborne illness prevention messages was related to the amount of content designed to alter risk perceptions associated with foodborne illness. Results of the quantitative content analysis found that copywriters generally included content designed to stimulate risk perception about foodborne illness but virtually ignored self-efficacy needs of the audience. A marked difference in tendencies to stimulate risk perceptions was found based on sponsorship. Both in volume and proportion, results show that governmentally sponsored messages more aggressively attempted to heighten risk perceptions associated with foodborne illness than did messages sponsored by privately funded communicators.     

Lognormal Distributions for Fish Consumption by the General U.S. Population

The rate of fish consumption is a critical variable in the assessment of human health risk from water bodies affected by chemical contamination and in the establishment of federal and state Ambient Water Quality Criteria (AWQC). For 1973 and 1974, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) analyzed data on the consumption of salt-water finfish, shellfish, and freshwater finfish from all sources in 10 regions of the United States for three age groups in the general population: children (ages 1 through 11 years), teenagers (ages 12 through 18 years), and adults (ages 19 through 98 years). Even though the NMFS data reported in Ref. 14 are 20 years old, they remain the most complete data on the overall consumption of all fish by the general U.S. population and they have been widely used to select point values for consumption. Using three methods, we fit lognormal distributions to the results of the survey as analyzed and published in Ref. 14. Strong lognormal fits were obtained for most of the 90 separate data sets. These results cannot necessarily be used to model the consumption of fish by sport or subsistence anglers from specific sites or from single water bodies.     

Subjectively weighted linear utility

An axiomatized theory of nonlinear utility and subjective probability is presented in which assessed probabilities are allowed to depend on the consequences associated with events. The representation includes the expected utility model as a special case, but can accommodate the Ellsberg paradox and other types of ambiguity sensitive behavior, while retaining familiar properties of subjective probability, such as additivity for disjoint events and multiplication of conditional probabilities. It is an extension, to the states model of decision making under uncertainty, of Chew's weighted linear utility representation for decision making under risk.