Urban congregations as incubators of service organizations

A growing body of research has begun to describe the variety and pervasiveness of community services offered by religious congregations across the United States. This study investigated the process whereby a congregation forms a new community service entity by tracing patterns in its development from formation through emancipation. Based on a sample of twenty‐three spin‐off organizations engaged in housing services in three cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis), this exploratory study found that religious congregations provided very limited forms of incubation for new entities. Although the congregations exhibited considerable involvement in governance, their inability to undertake management of daily spin‐off operations notably contributed to the eventual separation between parent and organizational offspring.     

Rethinking constraints on public relations practice

Analysis of survey responses from 371 public relations professionals in four-year colleges and universities revealed two constraints on how public relations is practiced. In the communication technician role, disclosure of information about the organization is constrained. In the manager role, participation in the decision-making process is constrained. Implications of these constraints for what can be communicated outside and what can be done inside the organization are discussed. Strategies for practitioners and educators in addressing constraints are presented, particularly in light of the recent movement toward Total Quality Management (TQM) in U.S. organizations.Duane Sweep is a marketing officer for the First American Bank in Minot ND; Glen T. Cameron is an assistant professor and RuthAnn Weaver Lariscy is an associate professor, both in public relations at the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia.     

Evaluating a post-graduate diploma in primary health care education (DPHCE): Issues and interpretations

An evaluation of the Diploma in Primary Health Care Education (DPHCE), a course offered in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, was carried out between February and September 1991. This paper discusses the implications of the findings for the future of the program, and the development of Primary Health Care (PHC) education more generally. The following in particular are dealt with:

— an educational approach where teaching has been insufficiently linked to the daily working conditions of the students; and

— teaching a group of students consisting of individuals from both educationally advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The importance of clearly defined goals and an appropriate educational framework, consistent with the limitations that apartheid education has placed on educationally disadvantaged students, are highlighted.     

Health care cost containment in the 1980s.

Benefits administrators--and their employers--can no longer ignore the skyrocketing costs of health care. The wide range of measures explored here for controlling these costs include negotiating with providers, analyzing medical claims, enlisting the aid of employee/patients, structuring benefit programs to eliminate excesses, and setting up wellness programs to alter the lifestyles--smoking, drinking, poor nutrition--that result in crippling, even fatal diseases.     

Note on the Cramér-Rao inequality in the nonregular case: the family of uniform distributions

We consider the family of uniform distributions with range of unit length. The main result of this note asserts that the average variance of any unbiased estimator of the midpoint of the range is not less than (2(n+1))(n+2))^-1 and this lower bound is sharp. The proof is based upon a nonregular version of the Cramér-Rao inequality.     

Conditional inference for subject-specific and marginal agreement: Two families of agreement measures

A two-stage procedure is described for assessing subject-specific and marginal agreement for data from a test-retest reliability study of a binary classification procedure. Subject-specific agreement is parametrized through the log odds ratio, while marginal agreement is reflected by the log ratio of the off-diagonal Poisson means. A family of agreement measures in the interval [-1, 1] is presented for both types of agreement. The conditioning argument described facilitates exact inference. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by way of an example involving hypothetical data chosen for illustrative purposes, and data from a National Health Survey Study (Rogot and Goldberg 1966).