Nurses' representations of the perceived causes of work-related stress: a network drawing approach

This paper reports a study, involving a network drawing approach, that examined how nurses perceive the interrelationship between causes of workplace stress. Network analysis originated in sociology as a method of examining the relationship between people, objects or events. It has recently been adapted to examine participants' perceptions of the relationships between causes of a phenomenon, either by asking participants to complete a grid rating the strength of all the possible links between causes or by getting them to draw a diagram of the links that they think are important. The network drawing technique, in which participants are asked to draw a diagram indicating perceived causal links between nominated causes of stress and also to indicate the strength of these links, was employed in this study. The causes of stress were taken from a previous study in which nurses kept a diary for one week detailing stressful events and their causes. There were 48 participants in the present study and the main results confirmed the importance of staffing levels and inadequate support as perceived direct causes of stress. The study also revealed the importance of indirect links between staffing levels and other causes of stress. The networks illustrate how direct and mediating causes of stress are connected and lie largely outside nurses' control. The results are discussed in relation to other recent work on the causes and experience of stress by nursing staff.     

Properties of maximum likelihood estimates of the ratio of parameters in ordinal response regression models

The properties of a method of estimating the ratio of parameters for ordered categorical response regression models are discussed. If the link function relating the response variable to the linear combination of covariates is unknown then it is only possible to estimate the ratio of regression parameters. This ratio of parameters has a substitutability or relative importance interpretation.

The maximum likelihood estimate of the ratio of parameters, assuming a logistic function (McCullagh, 1980), is found to have very small bias for a wide variety of true link functions. Further it is shown using Monte Carlo simulations that this maximum likelihood estimate, has good coverage properties, even if the link function is incorrectly specified. It is demonstrated that combining adjacent categories to make the response binary can result in an analysis which is appreciably less efficient. The size of the efficiency loss on, among other factors, the marginal distribution in the ordered categories     

Marx and the Category of Individuality' in Communist Society*

Marx was one among the great humanist philosophers who, like the humanists from the Renaissance up to those of our day, have stressed the idea that all social arrangements must serve the growth and the unfolding of man; that man must always be an end and never a means; that each individual carries within himself all of humanity; that human progress in science and in art depends upon freedom; that man has the capacity to perfect himself in the process of history…. It is an ironical fact that the main accusation against Marxism in the capitalist countries has been his “materialism”; this is ironical because it was precisely Marx's aim to fight the materialism engendered in bourgeois life and to create a society in which man—the creative, “self-active” human being—is the summon bonum, in which the rich man is the one, as Marx put it, who is much, and not the one who has much.     

Advances towards a critical criminology

Theory and Society -     

Unemployment,union density,and wages

We investigate, both theoretically and empirically, whether long-run industry unemployment rates modify the wage impact of union density on the earnings of members. Our theory suggests that the density effect increases as unemployment increases. Our empirical estimates use wage equations exclusive and inclusive of unemployment and of the interactive effect of unemployment and density in influencing wages. Based on a 1985 sample of manufacturing production workers, our findings indicate that the wage effect of union density for union workers as usually measured is only 41 percent as large as the effect when unemployment is in the model.     

Beyond excellence: Extending the generic approach to international public relations: The case of Bosnia

This article extends the generic approach to international public relations research. The current generic approach, based on the Excellence theory of public relations, suggests a normative framework to study and evaluate international public relations practices. This generic approach has great potential for focusing international research and clarifying infrastructure, geopolitical, legal, cultural, media, and other important variables. Unfortunately, this generic approach has been mainly used to confirm the Excellence model of public relations. Thus, it falls short of providing scholars and practitioners the tools they need to conduct and study global public relations. This paper seeks to clarify international public relations research by explicating rhetorical generic theory (RGT).     

The dynamics of laboratory populations ofCallosobruchus chinensis andC. Maculatus (Coleoptera: Bruchidae) in patchy environments

Summary Experiments are described showing the long-term dynamics of two species of bruchid beetles (Callosobruchus chinensis andC. maculatus) in arenas in which the resource of 50 black-eyed beans is divided between 5, 10 or 50 ‘patches’. Both species of adult beetles exhibit clumped distributions between patches. Within a patch there is a tendency for a density dependent reduction in (1) eggs laid per female, (2) the proportion of eggs hatching per bean (C. chinensis only) and (3) larval survival which is strongly overcompensating (particularly inC. maculatus). A discrete generation model is used as a framework to draw these results together and show how the different factors affecting natality and mortality can influence the population dynamics. Finally, the importance of the resource renewal interval in influencing the period of the population cycles is discussed.