Understanding Human Capital Through Multiple Disciplines: The Educational Needs Index

Through a focus on the external and internal benefits of education,this study examines the link between educational attainment and socialwelfare at the country level in Tennessee. The ``Educational Needs Index'presented includes twenty country-level variables that reflect participationrates in postsecondary education, educational attainment levels, employmentpatterns, population growth, and socioeconomic status of residents. Allowingfor comparison amongst all of the counties, the index classifies thosedisplaying the need for increased efforts to deliver education and/orremove participation barriers.     

Legitimacy and the Role of UK Third Sector Organizations in the Policy Process

This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.     

Building Capacity for Local Governance: An Application of Interactional Theory to Developing a Community of Interest*

Abstract The Emory‐Obed Watershed in Tennessee, like many other rural areas throughout the United States, is experiencing changes in economic activities and social values associated with natural resources. Informed by the interactional approach to community development, this effort strove to build community capacity so community members could more fully govern their life according to their values and interests. We utilized key informant and focus group interviews to gain information about the watershed and to obtain different perspectives on resource‐related issues. Data from key informant interviews led to the selection of a geographic community in which a community of interest was nurtured throughout a year involving monthly meetings, a community assessment and submission of a development grant application. It was found that gaining entry into the community and building trust among participants, and between participants and researchers, were critical in this in‐place participatory community research. Lessons drawn from this experience applicable to similar efforts are discussed.     

Working life expectancies: the case of Finland 1980–2006

Summary.  Working life expectancy is the future time that a person is expected to spend in employment. The paper is concerned with its estimation jointly with the expected times spent in the related states of 'on disability pension' and 'other alive'. The method, which is novel in this field, first estimates year- and age-dependent probabilities of being in the states of interest by large sample multivariate logistic regression. Estimates of probabilities, and subsequently expectancies, are given for the case of Finnish women and men aged 16–64 years for selected years in the period 1980–2001, together with projections for 2006. Since 1996 the decline in the employment of males has largely been due to the increasing popularity of early retirement. It was not due to an increase in disability. There has been no such decline for women, and the working life expectancy for males has been predicted to decline to or to fall below the initially lower figure for females by 2006. Considering that the Finnish population is aging rapidly, these trends could entail serious social and economic consequences for society in the coming years because of a looming shortage in the labour force that could undermine the sustainability of a welfare state.     

Sustaining corporate class consciousness across the new liquid managerial elite in Britain

This article asks: how is class consciousness and cohesiveness amongst the UK business elite maintained in the twenty‐first century? Elite studies traditionally sought to account for the construction and circulation of dominant ideology through exclusive education systems, institutional board interlocks and club memberships. The problem is that business elite membership of all these institutions has been steady declining in recent decades. Contemporary corporate elites now appear more mobile and fragmented in an age of globalization. However, class cohesion amongst business leaders appears as strong as ever after decades of neoliberal policy hegemony. So, how are such ideas, norms and values circulated and maintained? This study tried to answer this question drawing on a set of 30 semi‐structured interviews with top UK CEOs and a demographic audit of current FTSE 100 CEOs. The findings suggest that three additional means of achieving business elite coherence have become more significant: professional business education, semi‐formal but regular meeting sites, and specialist business media.     

The views and attitudes of health professionals providing antenatal care to women with a high BMI: A qualitative research study

BackgroundThe prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing amongst women of child bearing age. The objective of this study was to investigate the views and attitudes of providers of antenatal care for women who have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m² and over.MethodsA qualitative study using focus groups was undertaken within the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at a large teaching hospital in south-eastern Australia. Three focus group discussions were held. One with hospital midwives (n = 10), one with continuity of care midwives (n = 18) and one with obstetricians (n = 5). Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).FindingsSix dominant themes emerged: (1) obesity puts the health of mothers, babies and health professionals at risk; (2) overweight and obesity has become the norm; (3) weighing women and advising about weight gain is out of fashion; (4) weight is a sensitive topic to discuss; (5) there are significant barriers to weight control in pregnancy; and (6) health professionals and women need to deal with maternal obesity. These themes are drawn together to form a model representing current health care issues for these women.ConclusionHealth professionals, who have a high BMI, can find it difficult to discuss obesity during antenatal visits with obese women. Specialist dietary interventions and evidence based guidelines for working with child-bearing women is seen as a public health priority by health care professionals.     

Optimal adaptive sequential designs for crossover bioequivalence studies

In prior works, this group demonstrated the feasibility of valid adaptive sequential designs for crossover bioequivalence studies. In this paper, we extend the prior work to optimize adaptive sequential designs over a range of geometric mean test/reference ratios (GMRs) of 70–143% within each of two ranges of intra‐subject coefficient of variation (10–30% and 30–55%). These designs also introduce a futility decision for stopping the study after the first stage if there is sufficiently low likelihood of meeting bioequivalence criteria if the second stage were completed, as well as an upper limit on total study size. The optimized designs exhibited substantially improved performance characteristics over our previous adaptive sequential designs. Even though the optimized designs avoided undue inflation of type I error and maintained power at 80%, their average sample sizes were similar to or less than those of conventional single stage designs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asymptotic Properties of the Empirical Spatial Extremogram

The extremogram is a useful tool for measuring extremal dependence and checking model adequacy in a time series. We define the extremogram in the spatial domain when the data is observed on a lattice or at locations distributed as a Poisson point process in d‐dimensional space. We establish a central limit theorem for the empirical spatial extremogram. We show these conditions are applicable for max‐moving average processes and Brown–Resnick processes and illustrate the empirical extremogram's performance via simulation. We also demonstrate its practical use with a data set related to rainfall in a region in Florida and ground‐level ozone in the eastern United States.