The Relationship Between Hope,Eustress, Self-Efficacy,and Life Satisfaction Among Undergraduates

The construct of eustress was studied alongside hope and self-efficacy, to explore how these constructs are related to life satisfaction among undergraduates. Questionnaires were administered to undergraduates to test the hypotheses that (1) as eustress levels increase, so will life satisfaction levels; (2) when eustress, hope, and self-efficacy are examined together, they will predict life satisfaction better than eustress alone; (3) eustress, hope, and self-efficacy will all be positively correlated with life satisfaction; and (4) self-efficacy will be the most positively correlated with life satisfaction. The results revealed a significant positive correlation between eustress and life satisfaction. A Hierarchical Linear Regression analysis revealed significant results supporting hypotheses 2 and 3, but not hypothesis 4. Results indicated that hope is the best predictor of life satisfaction. The work reported provides a reliable tool for measuring eustress, examines eustress in a new way at the academic level, and provides helpful information about student wellness to college administrators.     

Assessing Effects on Long-term Survival after Early Termination of Randomized Trials

In this paper we present an approach to using historical control data to augment information from a randomized controlled clinical trial, when it is not possible to continue the control regimen to obtain the most reliable and valid assessment of long term treatment effects. Using an adjustment procedure to the historical control data, we investigate a method of estimating the long term survival function for the clinical trial control group and for evaluating the long term treatment effect. The suggested method is simple to interpret, and particularly motivated in clinical trial settings when ethical considerations preclude the long term follow-up of placebo controls. A simulation study reveals that the bias in parameter estimates that arises in the setting of group sequential monitoring will be attenuated when long term historical control information is used in the proposed manner. Data from the first and second National Wilms' Tumor studies are used to illustrate the method.     

Human and organizational factors in offshore safety

The role of human and organizational factors in predicting accidents and incidents has become of major interest to the UK offshore oil and gas industry. Some of these factors had been measured in an earlier study focusing on the role of risk perception in determining accident involvement. The current study sought to extend the methodology by focusing on perceptions of organizational factors that could have an impact on safety. A self-report questionnaire was developed and distributed to 11 installations operating on the UK Continental Shelf. A total of 722 were returned (33% response rate) from a representative sample of the offshore workforce on these installations. The study investigated the underlying structure and content of offshore employees' attitudes to safety, feelings of safety and satisfaction with safety measures. Correlations and step-wise regression analysis were used to test the relationships between measures. The results suggest that 'unsafe' behaviour is the 'best' predictor of accidents/near misses as measured by self-report data and that unsafe behaviour is, in turn, driven by perceptions of pressure for production.     

Projecting Australia's Fertility—Postscript

An accelerated decline in family size has led to a downward revision of projected fertility. Replacement fertility could be reached in the 1980s with births numbering about 250,000 a year. The population is approaching stability at the younger ages. The potential for poverty arising from large families may be halved in ten years.     

An Experiment in Helping Foster-Carers Manage Challenging Behaviour

A randomized controlled trial was implemented with groups offoster-carers to test the effectiveness of cognitive–behaviouralmethods in the management of difficult behaviour. Contrary toexpectations, no statistically significant differences werefound between the groups with regard to behaviour managementskills, the frequency and/or severity of behavioural problems,and placement stability. In contrast, foster-carers expressedsatisfaction with the overall training programme and increasedconfidence in dealing with difficult behaviour. Discussion ofthe results focuses on a number of competing explanations forsuch findings and concludes with recommendations for futurework.     

A specification of marital fertility by parents’ age,age atmarriage and marital duration

The positive association between wife's age at marriage and fertility experienced at the older reproductive ages, cited in recent natural fertility literature, is explored using Mormon birth cohorts from 1840 to 1879. When this relationship is specified by husband's age at marriage and marriage duration, the results indicate that older-aged husbands depress marital fertility only at higher marriage durations. The general decomposition of age-specific fertility utilizing both mother's and father's age is also considered. The results show that mother's aging is the most important factor, while father's aging has a moderately negative effect under a natural fertility regime.     

The Practice of Religion in Australia

Nominally most Australians are christians, but fewer than one-third regularly attend church. Many privileges flow to christian churches and religious procedures are still imposed in some circumstances. It is commonly assumed that everyone has a religion, though it is doubtful whether the majority have any real belief. Australia should re-examine the place of religion in society.     

Nonparametric estimation of the survival distribution in censored data

Two nonparametric estimators o f the survival distributionare discussed. The estimators were proposed by Kaplan and Meier (1958) and Breslow (1972) and are applicable when dealing with censored data. It is known that they are asymptotically unbiased and uniformly strongly consistent, and when properly normalized that they converge weakly to the same Gaussian process. In this paper, the properties of the estimators are carefully inspected in small or moderate samples. The Breslow estimator, a shrinkage version of the Kaplan-Meier, nearly always has the smaller mean square error (MSE) whenever the truesurvival probabilityis at least 0.20, but has considerably larger MSE than the Kaplan-Meier estimator when the survivalprobability is near zero.