Living arrangements of elderly women and men in Chinese cities

Based on data from the 1988 Nine‐City Survey of the Elderly Aged 60 and Over, this study uses multivariate technique to examine how and to what extent demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the elderly may motivate or discourage coresidence with married children. Focusing on seniors who have at least one married child, it contrasts two outcomes: living with married children and not living with married children. The analysis shows that being married and healthy significantly reduces coresidence with married children, whereas being financially dependent significantly increases the probability of coresidence. In addition, in contrast to the situations found in other Asian societies, gender is shown to have significant effect on coresidence, even after other variables are controlled.     

The coming colonization of Hong Kong cyberspace: government responses to the use of new technologies by the umbrella movement

Governments are increasingly playing catch-up and sometimes even leapfrogging ahead of social movements in the use of digital tactics; government responses to new technologies include surveillance, censorship and demonization of foreign influence. This development has implications for the emancipatory potential of new technologies, in particular for the anonymous, decentralized and autonomous character of the Internet.     

A Semiparametric Regression Method for Interval-Censored Data

In many medical studies, event times are recorded in an interval-censored (IC) format. For example, in numerous cancer trials, time to disease relapse is only known to have occurred between two consecutive clinic visits. Many existing modeling methods in the IC context are computationally intensive and usually require numerous assumptions that could be unrealistic or difficult to verify in practice. We propose a flexible and computationally efficient modeling strategy based on jackknife pseudo-observations (POs). The POs obtained based on nonparametric estimators of the survival function are employed as outcomes in an equivalent, yet simpler regression model that produces consistent covariate effect estimates. Hence, instead of operating in the IC context, the problem is translated into the realm of generalized linear models, where numerous options are available. Outcome transformations via appropriate link functions lead to familiar modeling contexts such as the proportional hazards and proportional odds. Moreover, the methods developed are not limited to these settings and have broader applicability. Simulations studies show that the proposed methods produce virtually unbiased covariate effect estimates, even for moderate sample sizes. An example from the International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG) Trial VI further illustrates the practical advantages of this new approach.     

Response model analysis for robust design experiments

Taguchi's robust design technique, also known as parameter design, focuses on making product and process designs insensitive (i.e., robust) to hard to control variations. In some applications, however, his approach of modeling expected loss and the resulting “product array” experimental format leads to unnecessarily expensive and less informative experiments. The response model approach to robust design proposed by Welch, Ku, Yang, and Sacks (1990), Box and Jones (1990), Lucas (1989), and Shoemaker, Tsui and Wu (1991) offers more flexibility and economy in experiment planning and more informative modeling. This paper develops a formal basis for the graphical data-analytic approach presented in Shoemaker et al. In particular, we decompose overall response variation into components representing the variability contributed by each noise factor, and show when this decomposition allows us to use individual control-by-noise interaction plots to minimize response variation. We then generalize the control-by-noise interaction plots to extend their usefulness, and develop a formal analysis strategy using these plots to minimize response variation.     

Community availability of contraceptives and family limitation

This study examines the impact of contraceptive service availability on contraceptive use in Korea, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Using World Fertility Survey Data on once-married females and their communities of residence, the mutivariate analysis finds that the community level of contraceptive availability directly affects the likelihood of current use, net of the effects of community development, education, parity, and marital duration. The results are supportive of the recent policy emphasis on maximizing the geographic availability of contraceptive services.     

Changing living arrangements: A hazard model of transitions among household types

This paper analyzes movements among household types. Persons in one household may join another type. Correspondingly, a household’s structure may change when someone joins it. Data are from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, spanning 1968–1980. The individuals followed in the survey generated spells analyzed with a multivariate competing risk hazard model. We develop a map of the flow among household types and of the economic and demographic profiles of individuals making the transitions. We find wide variability in the stability of household types and marked racial differences in the relative stability and pattern of destination choices.     

Using review articles to address societal grand challenges

We introduce a special issue of International Journal of Management Reviews that demonstrates how to use review articles to address societal grand challenges—complex, large-scale issues facing humankind, such as climate change, inequality and poverty. First, we argue that review articles possess unique features that make them particularly useful for addressing societal grand challenges. Second, we discuss three distinct but related roles of review articles in addressing societal grand challenges: (1) advancing theoretical knowledge; (2) advancing methodological knowledge; and (3) advancing practical knowledge. We conclude by providing future directions to enhance contributions of review articles for addressing societal grand challenges further by: (a) spanning disciplinary boundaries; (b) engaging practitioners; and (c) using alternative review approaches.     

Multidimensional inequality and multidimensional generalized entropy measures: An axiomatic derivation

This paper generalizes the axiomatic approach to the design of income inequality measures to the multiattribute context. While the extension of most axioms considered desirable for inequality indices is straightforward, it is not entirely clear when a situation is more unequal than another when each person is characterised by a vector of attributes of well-being. We explore two majorization criteria which are partial orders ranking distributions of attributes by their degree of inequality. The two criteria are motivated by the Pigou-Dalton Transfer Principle in the unidimensional context and its equivalent formulation. These criteria gauge inequality loosely speaking with respect to the dispersion of the multidimensional distribution of the attributes. They, however, fail to address a different dimension of multivariate inequality pertaining to an increase in the correlation of the attributes. In this connection, this paper introduces a correlation-increasing majorization criterion proposed by Boland and Proschan (1988). Finally, in conjunction with other axioms commonly invoked in the literature on inequality, the majorization criteria lead inexorably to the class of multidimensional generalized entropy measures. Received: 15 June 1995 / Accepted: 30 September 1997     

The family formation process among U.S. marriage cohorts

The family formation process is viewed as the progression of women through first marriage, first, subsequent, and last births and is examined for differential patterns of timing in 1930–1969 marriage cohorts. Based on the childbearing histories of approximately 17,000 white women once and still married, extracted from the June 1975 Current Population Survey, the study uses a dynamic model to show the varying importance across cohorts of the first birth interval as an important indicator of the total time spent in childbearing, social background effects in differentiating the timing of the first two births, and of prior birth transitions as affecting subsequent ones.     

Efficient Stratified Testing Procedure for a False Discovery Rate

The false discovery rate (FDR) has become a popular error measure in the large-scale simultaneous testing. When data are collected from heterogenous sources and form grouped hypotheses testing, it may be beneficial to use the distinct feature of groups to conduct the multiple hypotheses testing. We propose a stratified testing procedure that uses different FDR levels according to the stratification features based on p-values. Our proposed method is easy to implement in practice. Simulations studies show that the proposed method produces more efficient testing results. The stratified testing procedure minimizes the overall false negative rate (FNR) level, while controlling the overall FDR. An example from a type II diabetes mice study further illustrates the practical advantages of this new approach.