Environmental concern and fertility intentions among Canadian university students

Little is known about how environmental concern in young adulthood may shape childbearing attitudes and intentions. Here, we examine the relationship between individual environmental concern, fertility intentions, and attitudes toward reproduction in a sample of Canadian university students, N?=?139. General environmental concern and pollution-related health concerns both predicted a less positive attitude toward having children. Further, attitude toward having children mediated the negative relationship between pollution-related health concerns and personal fertility intentions. This study offers an important early step in empirical examination of the association between environmental concern and fertility.     

Honouring identity through mealtimes in families living with dementia

This paper reports the findings from the first year of a longitudinal grounded theory study examining the experience and meaning of mealtimes for persons living with dementia and their family partners in care. Dyad and individual active interviews were conducted with 27 families in the early to mid stages of dementia. Mealtimes provided a window for us as researchers into the broader lives of families living with dementia, reflecting the essence of “who they are”. Families experiencing dementia used mealtimes as a way of honouring identity, being connected, and adapting to and accepting an evolving life. This paper focuses on the theme of honouring identity and the role that mealtimes play in that process. Our findings suggest that individual and family identity are honoured through protecting dignity while struggling for autonomy, having meaningful roles, and reaffirming a sense of self in the world. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Pathologizing behavior: Meanings of behaviors in dementia care

Deficit and problem-based approaches to behavior stigmatize persons with dementia and cause great unnecessary suffering. In order to reduce the harm caused to persons misunderstood, it is important to understand the process by which staff attach meaning to behaviors and how those meanings ultimately influence how staff respond to behaviors. To this end, this research sought to examine the perceptions and meanings that staff attach to behaviors, how staff experience these behaviors, and the role that meanings and experiences have in staff actions and responses to specific behaviors. This paper focuses on one sensitizing concept that emerged from our study — pathologizing behavior — that reflects how behaviors become pathologized and problematized in the long-term care context. Conducted as part of a larger interpretive grounded theory study, active interviews were conducted with 48 staff members working in a range of positions in long-term care homes in Ontario, Canada. All staff interpreted and placed residents' behaviors in context through a complex process that started with the process of filtering behavior through the lens of pathology, and guided how staff then assigned meaning to the behaviors, how they characterized behaviors as “challenging”, and ultimately reacted through crisis management. The findings demonstrate the impact biomedical discourses have on meanings attached to behaviors and responses to behaviors and point to the need for alternative discourses that emphasize understanding meanings of actions using multidimensional lenses.     

A hybrid estimator for generalized pareto and extreme-value distributions

The methods of moments and probability-weighted moments are the most commonly used methods for estimating the parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution and generalized extreme-value distributions. These methods, however, frequently lead to nonfeasible estimates in the sense that the supports inferred from the estimates fail to contain all observations. In this paper, we propose a hybrid estimator which is derived by incorporating a simple auxiliary constraint on feasibility into the estimates. The hybrid estimator is very easy to use, always feasible, and also has smaller bias and mean square error in many cases. Its advantages are further illustrated through the analyses of two real data sets.     

Robust weighted likelihood estimators with an application to bivariate extreme value problems

The authors achieve robust estimation of parametric models through the use of weighted maximum likelihood techniques. A new estimator is proposed and its good properties illustrated through examples. Ease of implementation is an attractive property of the new estimator. The new estimator downweights with respect to the model and can be used for complicated likelihoods such as those involved in bivariate extreme value problems. New weight functions, tailored for these problems, are constructed. The increased insight provided by our robust fits to these bivariate extreme value models is exhibited through the analysis of sea levels at two East Coast sites in the United Kingdom.     

A multidimensional and contextual framework for understanding diverse family members' roles in long-term care facilities

Very few studies have explicitly examined the roles of family members in institutionalized settings and how these roles are developed. The most widely used theoretical framework employed in the studies that do exist is Litwak's structural-functionalist framework—the theory of shared functions and balanced coordination. Although Litwak's theory emphasizes the importance of both formal organizations (e.g., long-term care facilities) and primary groups (e.g., family) to optimal care, the framework provides a limited understanding of the roles of family members in long-term care facilities. The first section of this article describes Litwak's framework and then outlines the limitations of this task-assignment approach. By adopting a symbolic interactionist approach and integrating concepts from an ecological perspective and Hughes' concept of career, an alternative, more dynamic, contextual framework for understanding the roles of family members in long-term care settings is presented.     

Latent Variable Models for Mixed Discrete and Continuous Outcomes

We propose a latent variable model for mixed discrete and continuous outcomes. The model accommodates any mixture of outcomes from an exponential family and allows for arbitrary covariate effects, as well as direct modelling of covariates on the latent variable. An EM algorithm is proposed for parameter estimation and estimates of the latent variables are produced as a by-product of the analysis. A generalized likelihood ratio test can be used to test the significance of covariates affecting the latent outcomes. This method is applied to birth defects data, where the outcomes of interest are continuous measures of size and binary indicators of minor physical anomalies. Infants who were exposed in utero to anticonvulsant medications are compared with controls.     

Understanding the experience of moving a loved one to a long-term care facility:family members' perspectives

This project was designed to develop an understanding of family members' experiences of moving a loved one to a long-term care facility and to identify ways in which facilities might help ease this process. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with family members who had recently moved a relative into one of three long-term care facilities in Southern Ontario, Canada. Several factors appeared to contribute to the overall experience of the move to long-term care and either served to impede or facilitate a positive transition for families. These factors included: the experience during the waiting process, preparation for the move, ease of the actual move, control over decisions, communication throughout the process, support from others, and family and resident perceptions and attitudes towards the move. Easing the difficult aspects of moving a loved one to a long-term care setting can be facilitated with better preparation and support from facilities and community services.