Wula (Voices) of Aboriginal women on barriers to accepting smoking cessation support during pregnancy: Findings from a qualitative study

Aim

To gather Aboriginal women’s stories of smoking and becoming pregnant to identify the barriers in accepting smoking cessation support during pregnancy.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Insights about Health-Care Trends Gained through Open Health Data

ABSTRACT

The open data movement constitutes an approach to achieving accountability for government organizations. Government agencies at the Federal and State levels have released open health data consisting of de-identified patient outcomes, costs and ratings. We applied big data analytics to understand patterns and trends in open health data. We envision the use of this data by concerned citizens to understand trends in health expenditures. We have built an open-source tool, BOAT (Big Data Open Source Analytics Tool, https://github.com/fdudatamining) to facilitate analytical exploration of open health data sets. We used BOAT to analyze data from the New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System and determined that there has been a significant increase (40 percent) in the incidences of mental health issues amongst adolescents from 2009–2014. We analyzed costs for hip replacement surgery for 168,676 patients is in New York State, and showed that 88% of these patients had surgery costs of less than $30,000. This figure helps in understanding the decision by The California Public Employees’ Retirement System to cap hip replacement reimbursements at $30,000, resulting in significant savings. Our tool could enable researchers, hospitals, insurers and citizens to obtain an unbiased view on health-care expenditures, costs and emerging trends.     

Is “Sexual Competence” at First Heterosexual Intercourse Associated With Subsequent Sexual Health Status?

The timing of first sexual intercourse is often defined in terms of chronological age, with particular focus on “early” first sex. Arguments can be made for a more nuanced concept of readiness and appropriateness of timing of first intercourse. Using data from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3), conducted in 2010–2012, this study examined whether a context-based measure of first intercourse—termed sexual competence—was associated with subsequent sexual health in a population-based sample of 17-to 24-year-olds residing in Britain (n = 2,784). Participants were classified as “sexually competent” at first intercourse if they reported the following four criteria: contraceptive protection, autonomy of decision (not due to external influences), that both partners were “equally willing,” and that it happened at the “right time.” A lack of sexual competence at first intercourse was independently associated with testing positive for human papillomavirus (HPV) at interview; low sexual function in the past year; and among women only, reported sexually transmitted infection (STI) diagnosis ever; unplanned pregnancy in the past year; and having ever experienced nonvolitional sex. These findings provide empirical support for defining the nature of first intercourse with reference to contextual aspects of the experience, as opposed to a sole focus on chronological age at occurrence.     

CUMULATIVE ADVERTISING EFFECTS: THE ROLE OF SERIAL CORRELATION; A REPLY

In a recent paper, Houston and Weiss applied a non-linear estimation procedure to a serial correlation model of advertising effect. Although the methodology is interesting, their conclusions, based on the annual Lydia Pinkham data, are in error. This paper locates the source of the error and corrects the conclusions. It also applies the Houston and Weiss methodology to the monthly Lydia Pinkham data with interesting results.     

“Not Hiding,Not Shouting,Just Me”: Gay Men Negotiate Their Visual Identities

This study explored how British gay men make sense of their appearance and clothing practices and the pressures and concerns they attend to in discursively negotiating their visual identities. A convenience sample of 20 mostly young, White, and middle-class self-identified gay men responded to a qualitative survey on dress and appearance. The participants clearly understood the rules of compulsory heterosexuality and the risks of looking “too gay.” In the data, there was both a strong resistance to the notion of gay as a “master status” and an orientation to the “coming out” imperative in gay communities. The analysis revealed the overriding importance of discourses of authentic individuality for making sense of visual identity and the reported cultivation of appearance and clothing practices that communicate the message that: “I’m not hiding (too closeted), I’m not shouting (too gay), I’m just me (an authentic individual who just happens to be gay).”     

Getting is Giving: Time Banking as Formalized Generalized Exchange

This article applies principles of the social exchange framework of social psychology to the social phenomenon of time banking. A “time bank” is an organization that facilitates the giving and receiving of services among its members by allowing them to provide a service, such as an hour of tutoring, in exchange for a “time credit,” which can then be redeemed for receipt of a service, such as an hour of yard work. Empirical research on time banking has focused on its ability to build community and its place within the sharing economy as a form of “connected consumption.” We build on these lines of thought by examining the practice of time banking as a formalized version of generalized exchange. Generalized exchange is a prosocial type of social exchange in which benefits are repaid indirectly, sometimes referred to as “paying it forward.” We discuss how two of time banking's most commonly cited benefits, building social capital and empowering members, can be better understood through this lens of generalized exchange. We then identify two specific motivational issues that time banks face and use a social exchange perspective to propose a possible solution under a framework we refer to as getting is giving.     

Bias-variance trade-off for prequential model list selection

The prequential approach to statistics leads naturally to model list selection because the sequential reformulation of the problem is a guided search over model lists drawn from a model space. That is, continually updating the action space of a decision problem to achieve optimal prediction forces the collection of models under consideration to grow neither too fast nor too slow to avoid excess variance and excess bias, respectively. At the same time, the goal of good predictive performance forces the search over good predictors formed from a model list to close in on the data generator. Taken together, prequential model list re-selection favors model lists which provide an effective approximation to the data generator but do so by making the approximation match the unknown function on important regions as determined by empirical bias and variance.     

Allowing for non-ignorable non-response in the analysis of voting intention data

We apply some log-linear modelling methods, which have been proposed for treating non-ignorable non-response, to some data on voting intention from the British General Election Survey. We find that, although some non-ignorable non-response models fit the data very well, they may generate implausible point estimates and predictions. Some explanation is provided for the extreme behaviour of the maximum likelihood estimates for the most parsimonious model. We conclude that point estimates for such models must be treated with great caution. To allow for the uncertainty about the non-response mechanism we explore the use of profile likelihood inference and find the likelihood surfaces to be very flat and the interval estimates to be very wide. To reduce the width of these intervals we propose constraining confidence regions to values where the parameters governing the non-response mechanism are plausible and study the effect of such constraints on inference. We find that the widths of these intervals are reduced but remain wide.     

Experiencing Civil Unrest: Elder Voices on Ferguson

ABSTRACT

Ferguson, Missouri became the center of the nation’s attention when an unarmed African American teenager was killed by a Caucasian police officer. Civic unrest continued for weeks. The aim of this study was to learn how older adults experienced the social unrest. Ten focus groups were conducted with 73 participants. Eight themes were identified. Issues related to safety were most commonly discussed. Participants reported a breakdown in intergenerational communications and expressed a desire for more exchange. Findings are being discussed with relevant organizations to increase the involvement of older adults in on-going community development efforts and to provide opportunities for intergenerational dialogue.