A theory of organizational response to hospital regulation: a reply to Smith and Mick

Smith and Mick identify four basic problems with the theory the present writers developed to explain organizational responses (in this case the behavior of hospitals) to regulation. They challenge the basic assumption regarding autonomy, disagree with the implied cause and effect relations between organizational response and regulation, criticize the omission of goals, and claim that the theory has only limited generality. In so doing they state that their primary concern is with "improving our understanding of the limitations and benefits of the theory." Each of the four topics they raise for consideration will receive comment.     

Role Salience and Multiple Roles: A Gender Perspective

This article describes Super's construct of role salience, and recent literature on gender issues in multiple roles that supports the wisdom of his basic ideas. Gender influences how individuals perceive various roles, role priorities and involvements over time, and role juggling during adulthood. Whether or not men and women report key roles as similarly salient; how they define, enact, and manage these roles may differ substantially. Personal variations in life careers remind counselors to explore clients' own life meanings as expressed in roles.     

Trends and needs in programming for independent living

This report, from a national survey, pictures what presently exists on this important part of the foster care continuum, and sets forth the specifics of policy and practice that should characterize preparation for independent living.     

Media and agenda setting: effects on the public, interest group leaders, policy makers, and policy

Using an experimental design built around a single media event, the authors explored the impact of the media upon the general public, policy makers, interest group leaders, and public policy. The results suggested that the media influenced views about issue importance among the general public and government policy makers. The study suggests, however, that it was not this change in public opinion which led to subsequent policy changes. Instead, policy change resulted from collaboration between journalists and government staff members.     

Copula-based score test for bivariate time-to-event data,with application to a genetic study of AMD progression

Lifetime Data Analysis - Motivated by a genome-wide association study to discover risk variants for the progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), we develop a computationally efficient...     

The sensitivity of robust unit root tests

The power properties of the rank-based Dickey–Fuller (DF) unit root test of Granger and Hallman [C. Granger and J. Hallman, Nonlinear transformations of integrated time series, J. Time Ser. Anal. 12 (1991), pp. 207–218] and the range unit root tests of Aparicio et al. [F. Aparicio, A. Escribano, and A. Siplos, Range unit root (RUR) tests: Robust against non-linearities, error distributions, structural breaks and outliers, J. Time Ser. Anal. 27 (2006), pp. 545–576] are considered when applied to near-integrated time series processes with differing initial conditions. The results obtained show the empirical powers of the tests to be generally robust to smaller deviations of the initial condition of the time series from its underlying deterministic component, particularly for more highly stationary processes. However, dramatic decreases in power are observed when either the mean or variance of the deviation of the initial condition is increased. The robustness of the rank- and range-based unit root tests and their higher power results relative to the seminal DF test have both been noted previously in the econometrics literature. These results are questioned by the findings of the present paper.     

Save: a method for dimension reduction and graphics in regression

Sliced average variance estimation (SAVE) is a method for constructing sufficient summary plots in regressions with many predictors. The summary plots are designed to capture all the information about the response that is available from the predictors, and do not require a model for their construction. They can be particularly helpful for guiding the choice of a first model. Methodological aspects of SAVE are studied in this article.     

Sparse canonical correlation analysis between an alcohol biomarker and self-reported alcohol consumption

In investigating the correlation between an alcohol biomarker and self-report, we developed a method to estimate the canonical correlation between two high-dimensional random vectors with a small sample size. In reviewing the relevant literature, we found that our method is somewhat similar to an existing method, but that the existing method has been criticized as lacking theoretical grounding in comparison with an alternative approach. We provide theoretical and empirical grounding for our method, and we customize it for our application to produce a novel method, which selects linear combinations that are step functions with a sparse number of steps.