The mediating role of work-to-family conflict in the relationship between shiftwork and depression

Abstract

With significant segments of the working population involved in shiftwork, there is the possibility of serious health outcomes. There are two possible pathways to ill health. In the biological pathway the body's circadian rhythms are affected, leading to physiological disturbances and the inability to cope. By contrast, the aim of this study is to elucidate a social pathway by which shiftwork may lead to mental ill health. It examines the mediating influence of work-to-family conflict in the association between shiftwork and depression. Gender differences are also investigated. The sample included 2,931 Canadian respondents with a spouse and at least one child living at home. Close to 28% of respondents were involved in some form of shiftwork. Structural equation modelling supported partial mediation through work-to-family conflict. Further analyses found that mediation was supported in sub-samples of male and female respondents. The results, however, suggest that the experience of shiftwork is quite similar for men and women as no significant differences were found between mediating models. Overall, the findings support the social explanation of the effect of shiftwork on mental health, but they do not rule out other social or biological pathways.     

Extending health care coverage: Potential linkages between statutory social security and community-based social protection

Abstract   The extension of social health protection in developing countries is widely recognized as a priority. Various financing and institutional methods can be used in pursuing this objective, but none of them can achieve universal coverage in the short term. Based on an analysis of the respective strengths and weaknesses of social health insurance and community-based health care schemes, this article demonstrates the high potential of coverage extension strategies that use a pluralistic institutional approach to establish linkages and exploit complementarities optimally. A typology of potential linkages among different methods is presented and their value added illustrated using country examples.     

International accounting: a French perspective

The objective of this article is to show how slow and imperfect the international accounting harmonization and standardization process is, based on the example of France but also some other European countries. One of the explanations is that accounting is a mirror of a society. Therefore, international harmonization and standardization is a response to social needs, a compromise among different interests, not only a technical process.     

Implementing Dynamics of Immigration Integration in Labor Force Participation Projection in EU28

Population Research and Policy Review - Many developed countries have turned to immigration in order to mitigate the consequences of population aging, particularly the expected decline in the labor...     

Immigration Selection and the Educational Composition of the US Labor Force

Immigration policy is often viewed as an important regulator of the flow of labor and human capital into the labor market. In the US context, this perspective underlies efforts to raise the educational levels of newly admitted US immigrants, which has been proposed through a variety of mechanisms. Yet it remains unclear whether and under what circumstances such changes would significantly raise the educational level of the US labor force. We use a microsimulation model to evaluate the effects of various policy proposals that would seek to admit more highly educated immigrants. Results suggest that adopting a Canadian-style admissions policy that explicitly selects immigrants based on educational attainment would lead to a better educated labor force, especially among immigrants and their descendants. Eliminating all unauthorized immigration or family reunification and diversity admission categories, however, would have minimal impact. Additionally, the effects of all policy scenarios on the educational composition of the entire labor force are likely to be modest and would be conditional on the continuation of intergenerational mobility and high levels of immigration.     

Estimation in the multipath change point problem for correlated data

In many experiments, several measurements on the same variable are taken over time, a geographic region, or some other index set. It is often of interest to know if there has been a change over the index set in the parameters of the distribution of the variable. Frequently, the data consist of a sequence of correlated random variables, and there may also be several experimental units under observation, each providing a sequence of data. A problem in ascertaining the boundaries between the layers in geological sedimentary beds is used to introduce the model and then to illustrate the proposed methodology. It is assumed that, conditional on the change point, the data from each sequence arise from an autoregressive process that undergoes a change in one or more of its parameters. Unconditionally, the model then becomes a mixture of nonstationary autoregressive processes. Maximum-likelihood methods are used, and results of simulations to evaluate the performance of these estimators under practical conditions are given.     

Uniform asymptotic linearity in a regression parameter of a process based on a rank statistic

For X₁, …, X_N a random sample from a distribution F, let the process S^δ_N(t) be defined as where K²_N = σ^N_i=1(c_i ? c?)² and R x_i, + Δd, is the rank of X_i + Δd_i, among X₁ + Δd₁, …, X_N + Δd_N. The purpose of this note is to prove that, under certain regularity conditions on F and on the constants c_i and d_i, S^Δ_N (t) is asymptotically approximately a linear function of Δ, uniformly in t and in Δ, |Δ| ≤ C. The special case of two samples is considered.     

A test for crossing receiver operating characteristic (roc) curves

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve gives a graphical representation of sensitivity and specificity of a prediction model when varying the decision treshold on a diagnostic criterion. A classical test for comparing the overall accuracies for two models -1 and 2- is based on the difference between ROC curves areas - related to its standard error. This test is designed for the situation where ROC curve 1 caps ROC curve 2. Often both curves cross :in this paper, a new test, based on the integrated difference between the curves, is proposed to deal with this situation. In a simulation experiment, the new test was less powerful than the old test for detecting an overall superiority, but much more powerfull against the crossing alternative.     

NEW MEDIA AND DISTANCE EDUCATION: AN EU-US PERSPECTIVE

This paper presents an overview of the development of new media in the secondary and higher education systems of the European Union (EU) and USA. A combination of driving forces in pedagogical thinking, technological progress and business models have raised new expectations for the wide-spread use of educational technology, such as by providing major market opportunities as in the adult training segment. Many public sector and private commercial initiatives for connecting schools to the Internet, first adopted in the USA, and then in member states of the EU, have met with marked success. Most of the secondary schools are, or are being, wired, if but to a limited extent. The diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the EU schools is particularly rapid given their initially low penetration rate. If American organizations are indeed leading the development of online courses and programmes in the higher education sector, European universities have now realized the importance of investing in this field. However, for new media to significantly improve the educational process in the EU and in the USA, they must be embodied in the complex school or university environment, and be nurtured by new partnerships between business and the academy.