Analysis of longitudinal health-related quality of life data with terminal events

Longitudinal health-related quality of life data arise naturally from studies of progressive and neurodegenerative diseases. In such studies, patients’ mental and physical conditions are measured over their follow-up periods and the resulting data are often complicated by subject-specific measurement times and possible terminal events associated with outcome variables. Motivated by the “Predictor’s Cohort” study on patients with advanced Alzheimer disease, we propose in this paper a semiparametric modeling approach to longitudinal health-related quality of life data. It builds upon and extends some recent developments for longitudinal data with irregular observation times. The new approach handles possibly dependent terminal events. It allows one to examine time-dependent covariate effects on the evolution of outcome variable and to assess nonparametrically change of outcome measurement that is due to factors not incorporated in the covariates. The usual large-sample properties for parameter estimation are established. In particular, it is shown that relevant parameter estimators are asymptotically normal and the asymptotic variances can be estimated consistently by the simple plug-in method. A general procedure for testing a specific parametric form in the nonparametric component is also developed. Simulation studies show that the proposed approach performs well for practical settings. The method is applied to the motivating example.     

A New Immigration Regularization Policy: The Settlement Program in Spain

The topic of regularization of immigrants has occupied a position high on the agenda in Spain and elsewhere. In this paper, we contribute to this particular issue by providing an evaluative case study in Spain using administrative data from the Province of Barcelona from 2005 to 2009, which allows survival analysis, the follow‐up of migrants’ trajectories after regularization and the examination of the hazard of lapsing back into irregularity. Our analysis reveals critical differences on the effectiveness of two pathways to earned legalization in Spain as a policy: the 2005 Normalisation and the Settlement Program in full operation since 2006.     

Makrosoziologie f��r Individualisten. Zur Kritik und Verteidigung kollektivistischer Erkenntnisziele

In this paper it is asked for the existence of macro-sociological laws in a realist perspective if one accepts the existence of emergence and macrodetermination. R. Keith Sawyers?? theory of emergence which favours the search for causal macro-laws will be criticised. He imports the argument of multiple realisation and wild disjunction from the philosophy of mind into sociology. But there are some weaknesses in his solutions to the problems dealt with which concerns action theory, reduction and macrodetermination, the difference between structural and efficient causality, and his ambiguous ontology. As a contraposition a realist ontology of social wholes will be outlined which combines contemporary ontology and anthropology. Accordingly holistic social wholes are build on intentional intertwinments between actors. All social wholes are of discrete, not of continuous nature. Therefore causal laws on a macro-social level seem to be impossible. But a classical argument of Peter Blau shows that non-causal laws of coexistence on the macro-level are possible. Therefore, an independent aim of macro-sociological research could be the search for macro-social laws of coexistence.     

Likelihood testing populations modeled by autoregressive process subject to the limit of detection in applications to longitudinal biomedical data

Dependent and often incomplete outcomes are commonly found in longitudinal biomedical studies. We develop a likelihood function, which implements the autoregressive process of outcomes, incorporating the limit of detection problem and the probability of drop-out. The proposed approach incorporates the characteristics of the longitudinal data in biomedical research allowing us to carry out powerful tests to detect a difference between study populations in terms of the growth rate and drop-out rate. The formal notation of the likelihood function is developed, making it possible to adapt the proposed method easily for various different scenarios in terms of the number of groups to compare and a variety of growth trend patterns. Useful inferential properties for the proposed method are established, which take advantage of many well-developed theorems regarding the likelihood approach. A broad Monte-Carlo study confirms both the asymptotic results and illustrates good power properties of the proposed method. We apply the proposed method to three data sets obtained from mouse tumor experiments.     

An Instrument for Assessing the Organizational Benefits of IS Projects

This paper reports the development of an instrument to measure the organizational benefits of IS projects. The basis for this instrument was a published framework that suggests three categories of such benefits: strategic, informational, and transactional. In a cross-sectional study of 178 IS projects proposed and approved for development, this framework was operationalized and empirically tested using the measurement model of LISREL. The analysis culminated in the validation and refinement of the these categories. The final instrument offers items under three separate subdimensions of strategic benefits: competitive advantage, alignment, and customer relations. Informational benefits are similarly comprised of information access, information quality, and information flexibility. Finally, transactional benefits are also shown to be of three types: communications efficiency, systems development efficiency, and business efficiency. Implications of this multidimensional instrument for IS practitioners and researchers are discussed.     

Towards a critical realist epistemology?

When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned, with a particular standpoint. What is more, the social power relations between standpoints organize the production of truth in ways that produce systematic distortions. In this paper, we propose a critical realist social epistemology. We introduce feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theory as our suggested interventions into critical realism and we use two case studies of existing work to highlight i) the social production of truth and the real, and ii) what is at stake for radicalizing epistemology in critical realism. In so doing, our paper emphasizes the epistemic complexities that continuously shape ontology, a commitment to subaltern voices or experiences, and a thorough interrogation of the relations between positions of knowledge production.     

DEVELOPING MARKETING STRATEGIES AND TACTICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION THROUGH TARGET MARKET RESEARCH

This paper describes research undertaken by a large midwestern university to determine the needs of the market it serves, to ascertain the image of the university, to develop procedures for identifying potential students with a high probability of matriculating and procedures for increasing the probability of matriculation. The population studied was prospective students who submitted ACT profiles. A modified Fishbein instrument was used for measuring their image of the university. Factor analysis was used to reduce 102 ACT variables to 20. These variables plus others developed through literature search and the image study were included in the set of input variables used in multiple discriminant analysis. The resulting classification functions provided a means for identifying variables important to each individual's matriculation decision and providing them with information designed to increase his/her awareness of the attractiveness of the university.