A Validity and Reliability Study of the Multidimensional Trust in Health-Care Systems Scale in a Turkish Patient Population

The importance of trust within health care is widely acknowledged. Measuring patients’ trust in health care systems may contribute to plans for the financing, delivery, and outcomes of health services. Although many scales are available to measure patient trust, less attention has been paid to the multidimensional nature of trust in health care systems. The purpose of this methodological study was to adapt the Multidimensional Trust in Health-Care Systems Scale into Turkish and to evaluate its psychometric properties for a Turkish patient population. The scale was adapted into Turkish through a translation and back-translation process. The content validity of the scale was assessed using expert approval. The psychometric properties of the scale were investigated by collecting data from 232 hospitalised patients in Ankara during theperiod of 1 January–30 December 2010. An exploratory factor analysis identified that the eigenvalues for the three factors of the scale were 7.30, 2.61, and 1.21; these three factors explained 65 % of the variance. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated a sufficient model fit for the construct validity of the scale. Cronbach’s α for the total scale was 0.87, as well as 0.91, 0.82, and 0.61 for the three subscales; the Spearman-Brown split half reliability coefficient was 0.67. Despite the low internal consistency of the subscale 3, evidence from this study supports the validity and reliability of the Multidimensional Trust in Health-Care Systems Scale. This instrument can be used to measure multiple aspects of trust in the health care system; however, as trust is a contextual phenomenon, further work is needed to test the psychometric properties of this scale both in Turkish and different cultures.     

论伪满时期日本对无籍朝鲜人的就籍措施

1937年日本宣布在伪满洲国"撤销"治外法权,给东北朝鲜族社会,特别是给占有很大比例的所谓无籍朝鲜人造成了很大的冲击.日本为了稳定东北的社会治安,让无籍朝鲜人就籍,而其效果微乎其微.     

Islamophobia in the media: a response from multicultural education 1

This paper looks at the media in Germany and Australia in order to focus on the question of how Islam is accepted in both countries, and the extent to which Islamophobia exists. It was discovered that, for the most part, the media in both countries present a somewhat biased view of Muslims and Islam. However, there were some significant differences: (1) a higher acceptance of multiculturalism in the Australian media, which is revealed in the greater number of articles on ordinary, everyday multicultural life; (2) differences in the portrayal of migrants’ roles; and (3) the terminology used to refer to migrants. The paper concludes by outlining the ways in which multicultural education could contribute to a reduction of Islamophobia.     

Geographies of a silent transition: a geographically weighted regression approach to regional fertility differences in Turkey

The fertility decline that Turkey has gone through in the last few decades is characterised by sharp regional inequalities, with western regions representing patterns akin to developed countries and those in the east resembling “third-world” countries, while central regions represent an in-between case. With the help of geographically weighted regression (GWR), this article is an attempt to set up a model of causal relationships that could account for the regional fertility differentials. The results indicate that the fertility decline is not a single and all-embracing process covering all regions. On the contrary, there are regions differentiated qualitatively from each other in terms of the underlying causes of the existing fertility levels.     

Ensuring Pareto Optimality by Referendum Voting

We consider a society confronting the decision of accepting or rejecting a list of (at least two) proposals. Assuming separability of preferences, we show the impossibility of guaranteeing Pareto optimal outcomes through anonymous referendum voting, except in the case of an odd number of voters confronting precisely two proposals. In this special case, majority voting is the only anonymous social choice rule which guarantees Pareto optimal referendum outcomes.     

Note on the Cramér-Rao inequality in the nonregular case: the family of uniform distributions

We consider the family of uniform distributions with range of unit length. The main result of this note asserts that the average variance of any unbiased estimator of the midpoint of the range is not less than (2(n+1))(n+2))^-1 and this lower bound is sharp. The proof is based upon a nonregular version of the Cramér-Rao inequality.     

Nonparametric Entropy-Based Tests of Independence Between Stochastic Processes

This article develops nonparametric tests of independence between two stochastic processes satisfying β-mixing conditions. The testing strategy boils down to gauging the closeness between the joint and the product of the marginal stationary densities. For that purpose, we take advantage of a generalized entropic measure so as to build a whole family of nonparametric tests of independence. We derive asymptotic normality and local power using the functional delta method for kernels. As a corollary, we also develop a class of entropy-based tests for serial independence. The latter are nuisance parameter free, and hence also qualify for dynamic misspecification analyses. We then investigate the finite-sample properties of our serial independence tests through Monte Carlo simulations. They perform quite well, entailing more power against some nonlinear AR alternatives than two popular nonparametric serial-independence tests.     

McDonald's ωt,Cronbach's α, and Generalized θ for Composite Reliability of Common Factors Structures

In the common factor model for subtest scores, several reliability coefficients, including Cronbach's α, have been found to be biased. In this article, we introduce a new coefficient, θ_G, or Generalized θ, which is a generalized version of Armor's θ coefficient and is equal to the true reliability when the dimensions are orthogonal and the measures are parallel. We assessed the McDonald's ω_t, α, and θ_G in terms of mean bias, efficiency, and precision using a Monte Carlo simulation. θ_G outperformed ω_t when the factors were orthogonal or nearly orthogonal with low correlations between them.     

Goodness-of-Fit Tests for Multivariate Distributions

We propose three new statistics, Z _p , C _p , and R _p for testing a p-variate (p ≥ 2) normal distribution and compare them with the prominent test statistics. We show that C _p is overall most powerful and is effective against skew, long-tailed as well as short-tailed symmetric alternatives. We show that Z _p and R _p are most powerful against skew and long-tailed alternatives, respectively. The Z _p and R _p statistics can also be used for testing an assumed p-variate nonnormal distribution.     

Heterogeneous data modeling with two-component Weibull–Poisson distribution

The mixture distribution models are more useful than pure distributions in modeling of heterogeneous data sets. The aim of this paper is to propose mixture of Weibull–Poisson (WP) distributions to model heterogeneous data sets for the first time. So, a powerful alternative mixture distribution is created for modeling of the heterogeneous data sets. In the study, many features of the proposed mixture of WP distributions are examined. Also, the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is used to determine the maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters, and the simulation study is conducted for evaluating the performance of the proposed EM scheme. Applications for two real heterogeneous data sets are given to show the flexibility and potentiality of the new mixture distribution.