Multilevel community health promotion: How can we make it work?

The need for multilevel, comprehensive health promotion programmeshas become widely accepted, as has the importance of communityapproaches. However, many health promotion programmes focuson change at the individual level, no doubt partly due to thedifficulty of implementing all-inclusive health promotion. Thispaper discusses two strategies for guiding multilevel projects:multiple methods for community assessment and charting projectactivities by level of change (a possibility framework). Thesestrategies help ensure a multilevel focus and provide valuableinformation that can assist with the implementation of multilevelhealth promotion research projects in specific community contexts.Our primary purpose, therefore, is not to focus on theory orresearch findings. Rather, our goal is to make visible two strategiesthat have been helpful in one health promotion research projectin Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.     

National survey evidence on disasters and relief: Risk beliefs, self-interest, and compassion

A nationally representative sample of respondents estimated their fatality risks from four types of natural disasters, and indicated whether they favored governmental disaster relief. For all hazards, including auto accident risks, most respondents assessed their risks as being below average, with one-third assessing them as average. Individuals from high-risk states, or with experience with disasters, estimate risks higher, though by less than reasonable calculations require. Four-fifths of our respondents favor government relief for disaster victims, but only one-third do for victims in high-risk areas. Individuals who perceive themselves at higher risk are more supportive of government assistance.     

Factors Associated with the Development of Nonmetropolitan Growth Nodes in Producer Services Industries, 1980–1990*

Abstract Over the 1980–1990 period, employment in producer services industries in the nonmetropolitan United States increased substantially. This growth resulted in the development of nonmetropolitan growth nodes in producer services industries. A growth node refers to a nonmetropolitan area that contains a greater than average concentration of employment in a particular industry sector relative to other nonmetropolitan areas. Moreover, this industry concentration not only increases over time, but also represents an important source of employment growth within the area. With nonmetropolitan counties as the spatial unit of analysis, 317 growth nodes in producer services industries are identified for the 1980–1990 period. Access to workers with clerical and administrative support skills, access to highly educated workers, higher earnings per employed worker, access to recreational amenities, and proximity to metropolitan areas were associated with the development of nonmetropolitan growth nodes in producer services industries during this period.     

Review Essay: The Political Sociology of Nader and Chomsky

Sociological Forum -     

Local polynomial estimation of Poisson intensities in the presence of reporting delays

Summary.  The system for monitoring suicides in Hong Kong has considerable delays in reporting as the cause of death needs to be determined by a coroner's investigation. However, timely estimates of suicide rates are desirable to assist in the formulation of public health policies. This motivated us to develop a non-parametric procedure to estimate the intensity function of a Poisson process in the presence of reporting delays. We give closed form estimators of the Poisson intensity and the delay distribution, conduct simulation studies to evaluate the method proposed and derive their asymptotic properties. The method proposed is applied to estimate the intensity of suicide in Hong Kong.     

Stochastic Modelling of Times to Temperature for Furnaces Supplying Titanium Blooms to a Rolling Mill at TIMET

In conjunction with TIMET at Waunarlwydd (Swansea, UK) a model has been developed that will optimise the scheduling of various blooms to their eight furnaces so as to minimise the time taken to roll these blooms into the finished mill products. This production scheduling model requires reliable data on times taken for the various furnaces that heat the slabs and blooms to reach the temperatures required for rolling. These times to temperature are stochastic in nature and this paper identifies the distributional form for these times using the generalised F distribution as a modelling framework. The times to temperature were found to be similarly distributed over all furnaces. The identified distributional forms were incorporated into the scheduling model to optimise a particular campaign that was run at TIMET Swansea. Amongst other conclusion it was found that, compared to the actual campaign, the model produced a schedule that reduced the makespan by some 35%.     

Estimating ordered parameters by linear programming

There are many models that require the estimation of a set of ordered parameters. For example, multivariate analysis of variance often is formulated as testing for the equality of the parameters versus an ordered alternative. This problem, referred to as isotonic inference, constrained inference, or isotonic regression, has led to the development of general solutions, not often easy to apply in special models. In this expository paper, we study the special case of a separable convex quadratic programming problem for which the optimality conditions lead to a readily solved linear complementarity problem in the Lagrange multipliers, and subsequently to an equivalent linear programming problem, whose solution can be used to recover the solution of the original isotonic problem. The method can be applied to estimating ordered correlations, ordered binomial probabilities, ordered Poisson parameters, ordered exponential scale parameters, or ordered risk differences.     

Circuits of schooling: A sociological exploration of parental choice of school in social class contexts

Parental choice of school is one of the main platforms of government education policy and is the centre piece of the Parents Charter. But sociological understanding of choice and choice-making is woefully underdeveloped. This paper draws on an ESRC study of market forces in education to explore social class variations in choice of school in one specific locality. The complexity of choice-making is portrayed using data from interviews with parents and it is argued that middle-class parents are taking full advantage of ‘the market’ to sustain or re-assert their class advantages.