Mothers’ health knowledge for children with diarrhea: who you are or who you know?

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper explores the relationship among Indian mothers’ health knowledge regarding proper treatment of diarrhea in children and caste, religion and...     

Group work over a digital platform: Understanding middle-class struggle in pandemic

ABSTRACT

This narrative is about how a WhatsApp friendship group was turned into a process reminiscent of social group work and how it became a promising practice for its group members during the coronavirus pandemic. The narrative portrays the struggles of middle-class families of Indian society in this crisis situation and how some of their issues were addressed using the digital platform in a group context.     

Estimating the Prevalence of Sexual Function Problems: The Impact of Morbidity Criteria

Establishing the clinical significance of symptoms of sexual dysfunction is challenging. To address this, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) introduced two new morbidity criteria (duration and symptom severity) to the existing criteria of distress. This study sought to establish the impact of these three criteria on the population prevalence of sexual function problems. The data come from a national probability survey (Natsal-3) and are based on 11,509 male and female participants aged 16–74, reporting at least one sexual partner in the past year. The key outcomes were: proportion of individuals reporting proxy measures of DSM-5 problems, and the proportion of those meeting morbidity criteria. We found that among sexually active men, the prevalence of reporting one or more of four specific sexual problems was 38.2%, but 4.2% after applying the three morbidity criteria; corresponding figures for women reporting one or more of three specific sexual problems, were 22.8% and 3.6%. Just over a third of men and women reporting a problem meeting all three morbidity criteria had sought help in the last year. We conclude that the DSM-5 morbidity criteria impose a focus on clinically significant symptoms.     

Connecting cultures: rethinking Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘ideals of education’

In 1917, Rabindranath Tagore declared, ‘There is only one history – the history of man’ [Tagore, R. (1917/2009). Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin, p. 65]. This concept of ‘one-history’, and by extension ‘one-world’ is at the heart of his conceptualisation of what I call, education-sans-boundaries and, as I see it, one of the ways to bring a glocal unity. His goal was to establish the dignity of human relationships across boundaries. Thus, for him, local education and global education should not be two ends of a spectrum but overlapping categories instead. Moreover, the education-sans-boundaries should help in restoring the balance and harmony between man and society, knowledge and knowledge, and nation and nation. In this paper, I will explore Tagore’s relevant writings on education, with a focus on his concerted educational efforts to negotiate the boundaries of nation and geography to restore the lost rhythm. In the highly fractured times in which he lived, Tagore saw education in India was in a double-layered crisis under colonialism and growing nationalism. His was a non-dogmatic defence of harmony and principles of unity, and he tried to achieve this in his education models by going beyond the realms of collapsing of cultural differences and without sacrificing local/individual ties and that admits to no artificial boundaries – political, ideological or geographic. The present attempt, therefore, engages with Tagore’s distinct conceptualisation of open-ended education models by looking at his scholarly-and-practical efforts. It suggests that transmission of cultures has provided a ‘broad-basis’ of education in India and can offer healthy conditions for, and directions towards, building transnational/international solidarities.     

Challenges Faced by Young Mothers with a Care History and Views of Stakeholders About the Potential for Group Family Nurse Partnership to Support Their Needs

Women with experience of being ‘looked after’ are more likely than their peers to become young mothers. There has been limited research investigating support for their needs. This study, embedded in a randomised trial of Group Family Nurse Partnership (gFNP), involved interviews with young mothers with care experience, Family Nurses delivering group gFNP, and health and social care professionals. This first qualitative study to explore the views of these varied stakeholders found consensus regarding young mothers’ social isolation and lack of trusting relationships but diversity in views about the potential of gFNP to meet their needs.     

Does mother know best? Parental discrepancies in assessing child behavioral and educational outcomes

We investigate the degree of correspondence between parents’ reports on child behavioral and educational outcomes using wave four of a rich Danish longitudinal survey of children (the DALSC). All outcomes are measured at age 11 when the children are expected to be in fifth grade. Once discrepancies are detected, we analyze whether they are driven by noisy evaluations or by systematic bias, focusing on the role of parental characteristics and response heterogeneity. We then explicitly assess the relative importance of the mother’s versus the father’s assessments in explaining child academic performance and diagnosed mental health to investigate whether one parent is systematically a better informant of their child’s outcomes than the other. Our results show that parental psychopathology, measured as maternal distress, is a source of systematic misreporting of child functioning, that the parent–child relationship matters, and that mothers are not necessarily a better informant of child functioning than fathers. This last finding should not only be valid for Denmark but also for many other countries, where the father’s role in childcare has been growing.     

Estimating the mean life time using right censored data

Estimation of the population mean based on right censored observations is considered. The naive sample mean will be an inconsistent and asymptotically biased estimator in this case. An estimate suggested in textbooks is to compute the area under a Kaplan–Meier curve. In this note, two more seemingly different approaches are introduced. Students’ reaction to these approaches was very positive in an introductory survival analysis course the author recently taught.     

Pitman closeness for hierarchical bayes predictors in mixed linear models

The present article considers the Pitman Closeness (PC) criterion of certain hierarchical Bayes (HB) predictors derived under a normal mixed linear models for known ratios of variance components using a uniform prior for the vector of fixed effects and some proper or improper prior on the error variance. For a generalized Euclidean error, simultaneous HB predictors of several linear combinations of vector of effects are shown to be the Pitman-closest in the frequentist sense in the class of equivariant predictors for location group of transformations. The normality assumption can be relaxed to show that these HB predictors are the Pitman-closest for location-scale group of transformations for a wider family of elliptically symmetric distributions. Also for this family, the HB predictors turn out to be Pitman-closest in the class of all linear unbiased predictors (LUPs). All these results are extended for the HB predictor of finite population mean vector in the context of finite population sampling.     

On expected volumes of multidimensional confidence sets associated with the usual and adjusted likelihoods

We consider a general multiparameter set-up, where both the interest and the nuisance parameters are possibly vector valued. We derive an explicit higher order asymptotic formula to compare the expected volumes of confidence sets given by likelihood ratio statistics arising from the usual profile likelihood and various adjustments thereof. Our general framework also allows us to include highest posterior density regions, with approximate frequentist validity, in the study. The fact that our interest parameter is possibly vector valued complicates the derivation and warrants the development of special tools and techniques.     

Bayesian Modeling of MPSS Data: Gene Expression Analysis of Bovine Salmonella Infection

Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) is a high-throughput counting-based technology available for gene expression profiling. It produces output that is similar to Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) and is ideal for building complex relational databases for gene expression. Our goal is to compare the in vivo global gene expression profiles of tissues infected with different strains of Salmonella obtained using the MPSS technology. In this article, we develop an exact ANOVA type model for this count data using a zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution, different from existing methods that assume continuous densities. We adopt two Bayesian hierarchical models-one parametric and the other semiparametric with a Dirichlet process prior that has the ability to "borrow strength" across related signatures, where a signature is a specific arrangement of the nucleotides, usually 16-21 base-pairs long. We utilize the discreteness of Dirichlet process prior to cluster signatures that exhibit similar differential expression profiles. Tests for differential expression are carried out using non-parametric approaches, while controlling the false discovery rate. We identify several differentially expressed genes that have important biological significance and conclude with a summary of the biological discoveries.