Absence behaviour, turnover and disability: A study among city bus drivers in the Netherlands

Absenteeism, turnover and disability, and relationships between them have been studied among city bus drivers in the Netherlands. The theoretical framework for the study was a cumulative process model of work and health. Absenteeism among these drivers was two to three times as high as the national average, while the risk of disablement was more than twice as high as the risk for male Dutch civil servants in general. Bus drivers who had to leave their job for medical reasons did so at a younger age than other groups of civil servants. The main conditions leading to disablement related to the back, tendons and joints (35%), mental disorders (35%) and cardiovascular diseases (12%). It was shown that long-term absenteeism is a strong precursor of future disability. The research suggests a work-related process of progressive deterioration of health and well-being over a reasonably long period of time. Driving city buses seems to be an occupation with high risks for health and well-being.     

Evidence-based Medicine and Child Mental Health Services

There is increased focus on using research evidence to guide clinical practice in the provision of child mental health services, to allocate resources and to make policy decisions. Emphasis has been placed on randomised controlled trials, which are clearly vital. However, given the complexity of children's lives and the multiple systems relevant to their care, it is important to consider alternative research designs and to think creatively about outcomes. In the context of difficulties with random allocation a number of quasi-experimental designs are described that may more closely reflect actual clinical work. In the context of ecological theory, the importance of taking a systems level approach to evaluation is highlighted, with examples from the US. Finally, the ways in which qualitative outcomes measures can be used to sensitively describe the effects of treatment are outlined, and their potential for giving voice to children and families as consumers of mental health services. These suggestions aim to lessen the tension between the requirements of the scientific investigations of treatment effectiveness and the realities of clinicians' daily experiences.     

Cross national study of perceived service quality in long-term care facilities

This cross-national study of 306 nursing home residents in the United States and the United Kingdom examines the similarities and differences in their evaluation of service quality. Service quality was defined as the differences between expectations about the service and actual perceptions of the service delivered in terms of five dimensions: tangibles, assurance, empathy, reliability and responsiveness. The SERVQUAL instrument was used to measure service quality. The two groups differed in their expectations for quality and their perceptions of service quality: US residents' ratings were lower in all respects.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Household migration and the labor market position of married women

The present paper conceptualizes labor force participation among U.S. wives as both a determinant and consequence of household migration. A theoretical justification is provided for decomposing these relationships by occupational position of the wife. Applying log-linear models to data from the 1970 One-in-a-Thousand Public Use Sample, we corroborate previous research in that, on the average, the likelihood of interstate migration between 1965 and 1970 was greatest among families in which the wife was not employed prior to the move. However, among employed wives, those classified as professionals or managers were also found to accentuate the probability of household migration, particularly if the husband was not employed in 1965. The implication is that all types of employment by the wife need not limit family mobility as previous studies have suggested. Although migration was found to have a disrupting effect on the continuity of employment among most wives, this effect was most in evidence among wives employed in blue collar occupations. The data suggest the need for a careful reappraisal of traditional economic notions of migration, particularly as they apply to married women.     

Response Effects in Sex Surveys

Two potential problems in sex surveys—respondent refusalsand invalid reporting—are examined for national and areaprobability samples of males and females. Little support isfound for the contention that sexual topics constitute a sensitiveresearch area in terms of respondent cooperation and candor.It is found that (1) respondent cooperation, as indicated byrefusals and terminations, is neither more nor less problematicin sex research than in surveys on other topics; (2) respondentreports of sexual matters are not systematically related tointerviewer characteristics such as gender, sexual experience,or technical competence; (3) respondent candor, when self-reported,also is not associated systematically with either interviewercharacteristics or demographic and sexual characteristics ofrespondents. This analysis does identify, however, evidencethat (4) sexual matters often are sensitive topics for interviewersand principal investigators, leading both to interviewer turnoverand the creative construction of unobtrusive data collectionprocedures.