2009–2010 Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Coverage Among College Students From 8 Universities in North Carolina

Abstract

Objective: The authors sought to describe the 2009–2010 seasonal influenza vaccine coverage of college students. Participants: A total of 4,090 college students from 8 North Carolina universities participated in a confidential, Web-based survey in October–November 2009. Methods: Associations between self-reported 2009–2010 seasonal influenza vaccination and demographic characteristics, campus activities, parental education, and e-mail usage were assessed by bivariate analyses and by a mixed-effects model adjusting for clustering by university. Results: Overall, 20% of students (range 14%–30% by university) reported receiving 2009–2010 seasonal influenza vaccine. Being a freshman, attending a private university, having a college-educated parent, and participating in academic clubs/honor societies predicted receipt of influenza vaccine in the mixed-effects model. Conclusions: The self-reported 2009–2010 influenza vaccine coverage was one-quarter of the 2020 Healthy People goal (80%) for healthy persons 18 to 64 years of age. College campuses have the opportunity to enhance influenza vaccine coverage among its diverse student populations.     

Bureaucracy and Democracy

The public bureaucracy is becoming an increasingly important locus for democratic activity. This shift of democratic activity is in part a function of the declining relevance of traditional forms of democracy, and changes within the public bureaucracy itself. In particular, the emphasis on performance and the links with output legitimation have led to greater participation through the bureaucracy.     

Informal leadership support: an often overlooked competitive advantage

As environmental pressures mount, the advantage of using the same strategies and tactics employed by competitors continues to shrink. An alternative is adapting and applying answers successfully employed in other industries to health care organizations. Working with informal influence leaders to share your change management efforts represents one such example. Informal influence leaders offer an often-overlooked source of competitive advantage--they have already earned credibility and respect from others, who regularly look to them for guidance. When sharing their views, they significantly influence the acceptance or rejection of new initiatives. Influence leaders reach into every conversation, every meeting, and every decision made in an organization. The important question is whether they will exert their leadership in support or in opposition to changes you propose. By identifying influence leaders and inviting them to join a group to discuss change initiatives, physician executives can create a positive force for change.     

Enhancing hospital performance through perioperative services

Perioperative services are the lifeblood of a hospital, but with increasing competition, the services are under attack. Discover ways to protect and improve a hospital's perioperative services.     

Comparing drug use between welfare-receiving arrestees and non-welfare-receiving arrestees

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) symbolized a comprehensive change to the nation's welfare system. Despite several provisions within PRWORA that focus on the use of illegal drugs, few studies have attempted to identify the prevalence of illegal drug use among welfare recipients. Moreover, no scholarly works have compared rates of drug use in welfare-receiving populations to those of non-welfare-receiving populations with an objective measure of drug use. In the current study, urine specimens were collected from 1,572 arrestees interviewed through Houston's Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) Program in 1999. Drug positive rates are compared between welfare-receiving arrestees (n = 116), non-welfare receiving arrestees living below the poverty level (n = 539), and non-welfare receiving arrestees living above the poverty level (n = 917). Welfare-receiving arrestees were more likely to be female, older, less educated, and to test positive for opiates and benzodiazepines than the other subgroups. Implications for welfare reform policy are discussed in light of the current findings.     

Disparate voices: The magic show of sociology

C. Wright Mills directed sociologists to use sociological imaginations to understand the happenings in the world at large and to understand people through points where history and biographies intersect. Using this approach as it applies to sociology as a discipline, I examine its intersection of history and biography with regard to silencing voices that are not the status quo, i.e. white, male, and middle class. I do this using the metaphor of a magic show with three magic acts: Pulling a White Rabbit out of a Black Hat, Levitation, and The Vanishing Woman. These acts refer to the history of sociology of repressing the voices of the nonwhite, non-middle class and of women.     

Using resistance resources to reduce stress: A study of rural Nevadans

Based upon Antonovsky's conceptual model of resources as resistors to stress, seven personal and three environmental resistance resources are identified, and quantified. The resistance resources and measure of tension are used as the predictor variables in a stepwise multiple regression analysis to identify the factors which best predict stress. The four variables which are statistically significant in explaining variance in stress scores are satisfaction with family life, total number of life events experienced, age, and satisfaction with family finances.This project was part of the W-167 Western Regional Agricultural Experiment Station Project, Coping with Stress: Adaptation of Nonmetropolitan Families to Socioeconomic Changes, and was partially funded by the Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station. The original instrument was developed and the first wave of data was collected by Dr. Judith Zimmerman, former faculty member of the School of Home Economics at the University of Nevada-Reno.Virginia A. Haldeman is Associate Professor, School of Home Economics, University of Nevada-Reno, Reno, NV 89557. She received her Ed.D. from Utah State University and her research interests include stress and conservation practices.Jeanne M. Peters received her Ph.D. from Oregon State University. She is Assistant Professor, School of Home Economics, University of Nevada-Reno, Reno, NV 89557. Research interests include stress and time use.     

The inter-rater reliability and validity of self-report of risk factors for cumulative trauma disorders within the hand therapist population - a pilot study

OBJECTIVES: This study examined the validity of hand therapists' self-report of cumulative trauma disorder (CTD) risk factors by comparing the self-report to observations performed by the raters. Inter-rater reliability was also analyzed between the raters who observed the hand therapists. STUDY DESIGN: Two raters simultaneously observed each hand therapist during a splinting task at a therapy facility. Following this task, the raters and the hand therapist independently completed an identical assessment tool. Thirteen therapists were observed and a total of six raters observed the therapists. Responses from two categories of the self-assessment, "posture" and "mechanical stress", were compared. Percentage of agreement was calculated by dividing the number of like responses by the total number of possible responses for each category. RESULTS: Overall inter-rater reliability was 72%, significantly above the accepted minimum standard of 60-70%, and validity was 39%, significantly below the accepted minimum. CONCLUSION: The high percentage of inter-rater reliability established consistency and accuracy among the raters in their observations. However, the low percentage of validity should prompt hand therapists to investigate the accuracy of a patient's self-report before relying on it for treatment.     

Does the Impact of the Tobacco Epidemic Explain Structural Changes in the Decline of Mortality?

Since 1950, most developed countries have exhibited structural changes in mortality decline. This complicates extrapolative forecasts, such as the commonly used Lee–Carter model, that require the presence of a steady long-term trend. This study tests whether the impact of the tobacco epidemic explains the structural changes in mortality decline, as it is presumed in earlier studies. For this purpose, the time index of the Lee-Carter model in males was investigated in 20 developed countries between 1950 and 2011 for possible structural changes. It was found that removing the impact of smoking from mortality trends took away more than half of the 12 detected trend breaks. For the remaining trend breaks, adjusting for smoking attenuated the degree of change in mortality decline. Taking the tobacco epidemic into account should become standard procedure in mortality forecasts to avoid a misleading extrapolation of trends. Nevertheless, more research is needed to identify additional factors, such as health-care policies and innovations in medical treatment, to explain the remaining structural changes.     

Collaboration in sociology and other scientific disciplines: A comparative trend analysis of scholarship in the social, physical, and mathematical sciences

This inquiry examines comparative trends in collaboration among scholars, both over several decades and for several scientific disciplines. Findings suggest that in sociology specifically and science generally the trend is toward greater collaborative scholarship. At the turn of the twentieth century, better than 90 percent of the articles appearing in major periodicals in physics, biochemistry, biology, and chemistry were sole authored. Today, over 95 percent of such articles are collaboratively published. Disciplines affiliated with the social and mathematical sciences have experienced similar monotonic increases in collaborative activity, albeit, at a slower rate. A discussion of plausible explanations is offered for this observed growth in scientific collaboration.