Blurred lines: German freelance journalists with secondary employment in public relations

Nearly half of all German freelance journalists have a second job, mainly in public relations (PR). This work combination can be problematic, since journalists and PR practitioners have different responsibilities. Working as a journalist entails contributing to the public duties of journalism such as informing the public, offering multiple viewpoints, and representing societal interests; in contrast, PR practitioners must advocate solely in their clients’ interests. Conflicts can arise between these two roles if a freelance journalist is, for instance, required to critically investigate his or her PR client. However, there has been little research on freelance journalists with secondary work in PR. This study seeks to address this gap in research; therefore, we conducted a quantitative online survey among German “PR-journalists”. Our results show that nearly half of the participants take on secondary PR work for financial reasons; however, a similar number of journalists take on PR-work voluntarily, as they find the work interesting and enjoyable. Moreover, participants described their professional identity very similarly to that of German journalists in general. The PR-journalists surveyed were aware of the potential for conflicts of interest arising from their dual role. While such conflicts have been rarely encountered by those in the study sample, most participants assumed that other PR-journalists face such conflicts often, and expressed concern that these conflicts are not handled professionally.     

”Medien — Identität — Identifikationen“

KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie -     

An application of a multi‐stage strategy involving confidence intervals to evaluate whether a response rate is favourable or not

In early clinical development of new medicines, a single‐arm study with a limited number of patients is often used to provide a preliminary assessment of a response rate. A multi‐stage design may be indicated, especially when the first stage should only include very few patients so as to enable rapid identification of an ineffective drug. We used decision rules based on several types of nominal confidence intervals to evaluate a three‐stage design for a study that includes at most 30 patients. For each decision rule, we used exact binomial calculations to determine the probability of continuing to further stages as well as to evaluate Type I and Type II error rates. Examples are provided to illustrate the methods for evaluating alternative decision rules and to provide guidance on how to extend the methods to situations with modifications to the number of stages or number of patients per stage in the study design. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The working alliance as a model for interdisciplinary collaboration

Rehabilitation and health care researchers are increasingly called upon to examine contemporary disability issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to (a) borrow from the counseling literature to introduce the working alliance, a model developed by Bordin [1] to facilitate positive therapeutic relationships; and (b) to discuss its application to interdisciplinary research. The authors, who represent the fields of nursing, rehabilitation, and health communication, describe characteristics of the working alliance and draw upon their experiences to illustrate the key components of effective working alliances (bonds, goals, and tasks). We also introduce strategies for resolving disagreements and conclude the article with a discussion regarding the multiple rewards that can be acquired from interdisciplinary research.     

T Cell Immunity and Aging

The effect of age on the immune system is generally detrimental and results in "immunosenescence," a poorly-defined state inadequately reflected in clinical data and for which few reliable "biomarkers of aging" are available. The multinational consortium "T-Cell Immunity in Ageing," T-CIA, was set up to examine these issues specifically as applied to T lymphocytes. This Perspective discusses some of the outcomes of a recent conference that considered progress toward resolving these questions in humans.     

Evaluating the Contributions of Individual Variables to a Quadratic Form

Quadratic forms capture multivariate information in a single number, making them useful, for example, in hypothesis testing. When a quadratic form is large and hence interesting, it might be informative to partition the quadratic form into contributions of individual variables. In this paper it is argued that meaningful partitions can be formed, though the precise partition that is determined will depend on the criterion used to select it. An intuitively reasonable criterion is proposed and the partition to which it leads is determined. The partition is based on a transformation that maximises the sum of the correlations between individual variables and the variables to which they transform under a constraint. Properties of the partition, including optimality properties, are examined. The contributions of individual variables to a quadratic form are less clear‐cut when variables are collinear, and forming new variables through rotation can lead to greater transparency. The transformation is adapted so that it has an invariance property under such rotation, whereby the assessed contributions are unchanged for variables that the rotation does not affect directly. Application of the partition to Hotelling's one‐ and two‐sample test statistics, Mahalanobis distance and discriminant analysis is described and illustrated through examples. It is shown that bootstrap confidence intervals for the contributions of individual variables to a partition are readily obtained.     

Puberty and Transdiagnostic Risks for Mental Health

Puberty in girls represents a notable period of vulnerability for different psychological disorders. The research literature has primarily considered external and contextual factors that might explain these rises in symptomatology. In the present study, we investigate relations of pubertal status and timing with individual cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies, commonly identified as transdiagnostic processes, in a sample of N = 228 girls (M_age = 11.75 years). We also test whether these transdiagnostic processes mediate associations of pubertal status and pubertal timing with depressive symptoms. Results support greater endorsement of rumination, co‐rumination, negative urgency, and both anxious and angry rejection sensitivity in girls with more advanced pubertal status, as well as in girls with early pubertal timing. Higher levels of transdiagnostic processes fully mediated associations of pubertal status and timing with depressive symptoms at significant and marginally significant levels, respectively. Although the data are cross‐sectional, these findings offer promising preliminary evidence that transdiagnostic processes represent an important mental health risk in early adolescent girls.