Elder Mistreatment in U.S. Residential Care Facilities: The Scope of the Problem

Many in the United States believe elder mistreatment in long-term care is serious and widespread, but until recently few studies focused on the problem. This study was designed to describe the scope of mistreatment in assisted living facilities (ALFs) in Arizona during a 3-year period. Findings showed that receiving citations for elder mistreatment was relatively rare. However, analysis of narrative reports from only 7% of facilities showed 598 allegations of mistreatment in complaint investigations, of which 372 (62.2%) were substantiated and given citations for something other than mistreatment. Results show that elder mistreatment in ALFs is seriously underidentified, even by state inspectors.     

A Systematic Review of Interventions for Elder Abuse

The purpose of this study was to use rigorous systematic review methods to summarize the effectiveness of interventions for elder abuse. Only eight studies met our inclusion criteria. Evidence regarding the recurrence of abuse following intervention was limited, but the interventions for which this outcome was reported failed to reduce, and may have even increased, the likelihood of recurrence. Elder abuse interventions had no significant effect on case resolution and at-risk caregiver outcomes, and had mixed results regarding professional knowledge and behavior related to elder abuse. The included studies had important methodological limitations that limit our ability to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of these interventions.     

Environmental and Policy Change to Support Healthy Aging

Given the growing evidence of the influence of the environment on older adult health, the need to design and implement effective environmental policy around healthy and vital aging is urgent. This article describes issues amenable to improvement through policy change, evidence supporting specific policy approaches and outcomes, and promising strategies for implementing those approaches. Key areas of focus are neighborhood design and safety, housing, transportation, and mobility. Strategies to build capacity for policy change are also addressed. Our goals are to foster greater attention to environmental change in support of healthy aging and to illuminate directions for policy change.     

Separate and Unequal

Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between ‘religious,’ cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious practices fundamentally from patriarchal logic than we can separate jurisprudence and the workings of law, indeed the State, from its constitution in multiple embedded sites of patriarchal logic and race and imperial regimes. Optimal strategies for Indian Muslim women to be socioeconomically and legally empowered are also interrogated in this context, as the paper explores the ways in which gender equality and cultural difference and community support can, or not, protect women. It emphasizes the importance of problematizing both notions of ‘community’ and ‘gender equity’ in any attempt to address women's rights and needs.     

Bayesian inference using product of spacings function for Progressive hybrid Type-I censoring scheme

This article is devoted to the development of product of spacings estimator for a Progressive hybrid Type-I censoring scheme with binomial removals. The experimental units are assumed to follow inverse Lindley distribution. We propose a Bayes estimator of associated scale parameter based on the product of spacings function and simultaneously compare it with that obtained under a usual Bayesian estimation procedure. The estimators are obtained under the squared error loss function along with corresponding HP intervals evaluated by using the Markov chain Monte-Carlo technique. The classical product of spacings estimator has also been derived and compared with the maximum likelihood estimator in addition to 95% average asymptotic confidence intervals. The applicability of the proposed methods is demonstrated by analysing a real data of guinea pigs affected with tuberculosis for the considered censoring scheme.     

Reducing high blood cholesterol in children

There is compelling evidence that the process of atherosclerosis begins in childhood as a result of elevated levels of blood cholesterol and that preventing or slowing this process in childhood can extend the years of healthy life for many Americans. Health professionals need to use a variety of strategies to affect social policy in order to decrease the abuse of children whose elevated blood cholesterol has been ignored by the health care system. Through these strategies we can begin to improve the health of our children and thus ultimately improve the health of all Americans.     

Social upgrading and cooperative corporate social responsibility in global value chains: the case of Fairphone in China

In this article, we explore how a lead firm's strategy for corporate social responsibility influences the social upgrading of a supplier in a global value chain. Based on a single case study approach, we investigate the interaction between Dutch smartphone producer Fairphone and its Chinese supplier Guohong. On the one hand, the case illustrates how a cooperative approach to corporate social responsibility can lead to progress in suppliers' social upgrading. In particular, we highlight the role of a so‐called workers' welfare fund as a mechanism not only for improving measurable labour standards but also for enabling rights. On the other hand, the case demonstrates how the limited production and technological capabilities of the suppliers, a competitive market environment and lead firms' limited strategic access to the supply chain might constrain the extent of social upgrading through a cooperative approach towards corporate social responsibility in a global value chain.     

CONSEQUENCES OF OFFSHORING TO DEVELOPING NATIONS: LABOR-MARKET OUTCOMES,WELFARE, AND CORRECTIVE INTERVENTIONS

Our parsimonious two-country (developed country and developing country) model of offshoring provides nuanced results. These include cases where wages monotonically improve, as well as where wages exhibit an inverted-U relationship with offshoring cost reductions. We identify conditions under which these relationships hold. Since global welfare always rises with improvements in offshoring technology, we find that there is a role for a minimum wage (alternatively, wage tax) in the developing country. We derive such a policy's optimal level. There is also the possibility of a developed country optimal offshoring tax for extracting terms-of-trade benefits. We, finally, analyze the two-country Nash equilibrium in policies. (JEL F11, F13, F16, F66, O19, O24)     

Bayesian analysis for a stress-strength system under noninformative priors

Noninformative priors are used for estimating the reliability of a stress-strength system. Several reference priors (cf. Berger and Bernardo 1989, 1992) are derived. A class of priors is found by matching the coverage probabilities of one-sided Bayesian credible intervals with the corresponding frequentist coverage probabilities. It turns out that none of the reference priors is a matching prior. Sufficient conditions for propriety of posteriors under reference priors and matching priors are provided. A simple matching prior is compared with three reference priors when sample sizes are small. The study shows that the matching prior performs better than Jeffreys's prior and reference priors in meeting the target coverage probabilities.