Taxes and economic behavior: Some interview data on tax evasion in Sweden

The article describes a survey carried out with a sample of 426 Swedish male adults. In telephone interviews questions were asked on attitudes to taxation, attitudes to tax crimes, the respondent's economic situation, tax evasion in the sense of underreporting income and overstating deductions, black payments, and tax planning, i.e. attempts to reduce the tax burden by legal means. Multivariate analyses of the data indicated that younger age, more opportunity for tax evasion than people in general, more negative attitudes than the average, and lenient attitudes to tax crimes were significant factors for explaining tax evasion and black payments. Financial strain was not a significant factor, since those who admitted tax evasion judged their economic situation more favorably than the rest of the sample.     

Sense of coherence during unemployment

The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between different forms of hardship during unemployment and the sense of coherence (SOC). These hardships were considered in the framework of the finances–shame model, which has been developed to help provide a greater understanding of why unemployment is so painful to some whilst others are hardly affected by it. The hypothesis in this study was that the greater the financial hardships during unemployment and the more a person has been subjected to shaming by others because they are unemployed, the lower his or her SOC will be, and vice versa. The empirical data were collected by means of a cross-sectional survey of 1,249 unemployed people in a region in southern Sweden who at the time of the survey were engaged in some form of labour-market training or workfare programme. The dropout rate was 23%. The results from the study lent strong support to the finances–shame model. Among those who were exposed to a greater degree of financial hardship and also had more shaming experiences, the mean SOC score was 42.14 for women and 42.41 for men. The corresponding figures for those facing a lesser degree of financial hardship and with fewer shaming experiences were 67.10 and 66.66 respectively, i.e. figures which are on a par with or somewhat higher than for population studies covering the whole population.     

Childbearing among Polish migrant women and their descendants in Sweden: an origin-destination country approach

Journal of Population Research - This paper examines the childbearing behaviour of Polish migrant women and their descendants in Sweden. Also considering stayers in the country of origin, we rely...     

Comments on a simple test for new better than used in expectation1 by borges,proschan and rodrigues

Procedures and tables are givenfor construction and selection of continuous sampling plans of the type CSP-2 for a given pair of conditions.     

User Involvement in Therapy: Couples' and Family Therapists’ Lived Experiences with the Inclusion of a Feedback Procedure in Clinical Practice

User involvement in therapy includes some form of feedback from the clients. The feedback guides the therapist and the clients toward a best possible result through a best possible therapy process. In recent years many different procedures for collecting feedback have been developed. In a previous study presented in this journal we explored the expectations therapists had before including the comprehensive clinical feedback procedure, Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC), in their clinical practices. Our aim with this present study is to explore couples' and family therapists’ experiences with STIC from the perspective of user involvement. We found that the term ‘using STIC’ represented many different variations both between therapists and between the families each therapist worked with. Likewise user involvement, combined with a feedback procedure like STIC, was also a many faceted area. We discuss how therapists’ experiences may relate to the different aspects of user involvement in therapy.     

Gender Bias in Parental Leave: Evidence from Sweden

This paper estimates the effect of child gender on mothers’ and fathers’ parental leave using population-wide register data from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. The results showed that a first-born son increased fathers’ parental leave with 0.6 days (1.5 %) and decreased mothers’ leave by a similar amount. Both the sign and size of this effect is in line with previous research, showing that these types of biases exist also in a society with top ratings on gender equality. However, non-traditional families, with high maternal relative earnings and/or educational levels, showed even larger gender biases which suggest that it may be mothers, rather than fathers, that are the driving force behind this child gender bias.     

Pilot Study Sleepiness in physicians on night call duty

Little is known about how physicians' feelings of sleepiness and sleep patterns are affected by night call duties. In the present pilot study, the authors followed a group of staff (hospital) physicians during and following night call duties. They recorded feelings of sleepiness and sleep patterns every third hour. Results show measurable effects on the sleepiness scale with residual effects lasting up to two days after the actual night call duty. The authors suggest that increased attention should now be given to studies of the psychophysiological effects of both present and alternative work schedules for physicians.     

Attitudes towards the unemployed. An analysis of Swedish survey data

To be unemployed is often associated with being stigmatised by others. People may blame the unemployed themselves, insist that they could find a job if they tried harder, maintain that too little is demanded from recipients of unemployment benefits and consider differences in standard of living between the unemployed and the employed too small. This article is aimed at studying the prevalence of such negative attitudes and to examine the determinants behind them. In May 2000, questions were added on to a randomly selected subsample in the regular Swedish labour force survey. The results indicate that own unemployment experience and perceived risks of becoming unemployed make people less apt to blame the unemployed. Having family members or close friends with unemployment experience tends to have a similar impact. In contrast, young people more often express stigmatising attitudes. With respect to social class position the results are divided.     

Modelling and simulation to improve decision‐making in clinical development

Modelling and simulation are buzz words in clinical drug development. But is clinical trial simulation (CTS) really a revolutionary technique? There is not much more to CTS than applying standard methods of modelling, statistics and decision theory. However, doing this in a systematic way can mean a significant improvement in pharmaceutical research. This paper describes in simple examples how modelling could be used in clinical development. Four steps are identified: gathering relevant information about a drug and the disease; building a mathematical model; predicting the results of potential future trials; and optimizing clinical trials and the entire clinical programme. We discuss these steps and give a number of examples of model components, demonstrating that relatively unsophisticated models may also prove useful. We stress that modelling and simulation are decision tools and point out the benefits of integrating them with decision analysis. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.