Community engagement in the Aboriginal Families Study: Strategies to promote participation

Background

Aboriginal women and families are under-represented in Australian research on pregnancy and childbirth. The Aboriginal Families Study aimed to investigate the views and experiences of a representative sample of women giving birth to an Aboriginal baby in South Australia between July 2011 and June 2013, using methods designed to respect Aboriginal culture and communities.

Transformed symmetric generalized autoregressive moving average models

Cordeiro and Andrade [Transformed generalized linear models. J Stat Plan Inference. 2009;139:2970–2987] incorporated the idea of transforming the response variable to the generalized autoregressive moving average (GARMA) model, introduced by Benjamin et al. [Generalized autoregressive moving average models. J Am Stat Assoc. 2003;98:214–223], thus developing the transformed generalized autoregressive moving average (TGARMA) model. The goal of this article is to develop the TGARMA model for symmetric continuous conditional distributions with a possible nonlinear structure for the mean that enables the fitting of a wide range of models to several time series data types. We derive an iterative process for estimating the parameters of the new model by maximum likelihood and obtain a simple formula to estimate the parameter that defines the transformation of the response variable. Furthermore, we determine the moments of the original dependent variable which generalize previous published results. We illustrate the theory by means of real data sets and evaluate the results developed through simulation studies.     

The Medicare Part D Coverage Gap: Implications for Non-Dually Eligible Older Adults With a Mental Illness

This study examines how the Medicare Part D coverage gap impacts non-dually eligible older adults with a mental illness. Qualitative, semistructured interviews were conducted with 11 case managers from community-based agencies serving persons, age 55 and over, with a mental disorder. Five themes illustrating the central difficulties associated with the Part D gap emerged: medication affordability, beneficiary understanding, administrative barriers, Low-Income Subsidy income and asset guidelines, and medication compliance. Although the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act gradually reduces cost sharing within the gap, findings suggest that medication access and adherence may continue to be impacted by the benefit's structure.     

Rabbinical response to domestic violence: A qualitative study

Clergy, including Rabbis, though not specifically trained to provide domestic violence (DV) counseling, are often now considered formal helpers because of the active role they have taken in addressing DV issues among congregants. Participants were presented with two vignettes about couples engaged in conflict and asked to describe how they would respond to each. The Rabbis in this sample, while willing and desiring to help, also talked much about their discomfort with providing advice, as they did not feel qualified to help or to provide advice. Implications for social work practitioners and educators will be discussed.     

Two-sample tests for sparse high-dimensional binary data

In this article, we study the methods for two-sample hypothesis testing of high-dimensional data coming from a multivariate binary distribution. We test the random projection method and apply an Edgeworth expansion for improvement. Additionally, we propose new statistics which are especially useful for sparse data. We compare the performance of these tests in various scenarios through simulations run in a parallel computing environment. Additionally, we apply these tests to the 20 Newsgroup data showing that our proposed tests have considerably higher power than the others for differentiating groups of news articles with different topics.