Tales from the frontline: The experiences of early childhood practitioners working with an ‘embedded’ research team

In late 2006, SDN Children’s Services, an Australian not-for-profit provider of services for children, families and communities, engaged a research team that was ‘embedded’ within the organisation for 1 year. This action represented a significant investment of resources, such as staff time and organisational funds, and demonstrates SDN’s strong commitment to research and evaluation as a means of supporting organisational learning and development. This paper highlights the innovative nature of the approach by positioning the role of the embedded researcher within the current theoretical and socio-political context. It also provides evidence of the success of the approach by reporting on the findings of a study that investigated staff’s experiences of being involved in this type of collaborative investigation of their work. I argue that the employment of an embedded researcher can have positive benefits both for the organisation and the practitioners—but who the researchers are really matters.     

Mental health of parents with young children in Hong Kong: the roles of parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy

This study aimed to explore the sources of parenting stress and the mental health of parents with kindergarten and primary school children in Hong Kong. It also examined the intervening effects of parenting self-efficacy on mental health of parents. Results indicated that parents who perceived their children as more demanding, less acceptable and less reinforcing had more parenting stress. Those who found their parental roles to be more restrictive also had more parenting stress. Lastly, parenting self-efficacy moderated the effects of parenting stress on the mental health of parents. Cultural and social factors were put forward to explain these findings and suggestions were made towards reducing the parenting stress experienced by parents with younger children in Hong Kong.     

Simultaneous pairwise multiple comparisons in a two-way analysis of covariance model

Pairwise comparison procedures are important and popular statistical techniques in many disciplines, such as physiology and agrobiology. In this paper, we seek to derive the statistical methods which enable one to perform pairwise comparisons in a two-way analysis of covariance model. The overall family-wise type I error rate is controlled at a designated level. The procedures are outlined for simultaneous inferences among treatment means. Numerical examples are given to illustrate our testing procedure.     

On Consistency of the Self-Consistent Estimator of Survival Functions with Interval-Censored Data

The self-consistent estimator is commonly used for estimating a survival function with interval-censored data. Recent studies on interval censoring have focused on case 2 interval censoring, which does not involve exact observations, and double censoring, which involves only exact, right-censored or left-censored observations. In this paper, we consider an interval censoring scheme that involves exact, left-censored, right-censored and strictly interval-censored observations. Under this censoring scheme, we prove that the self-consistent estimator is strongly consistent under certain regularity conditions.     

On a mixture autoregressive model

We generalize the Gaussian mixture transition distribution (GMTD) model introduced by Le and co-workers to the mixture autoregressive (MAR) model for the modelling of non-linear time series. The models consist of a mixture of K stationary or non-stationary AR components. The advantages of the MAR model over the GMTD model include a more full range of shape changing predictive distributions and the ability to handle cycles and conditional heteroscedasticity in the time series. The stationarity conditions and autocorrelation function are derived. The estimation is easily done via a simple EM algorithm and the model selection problem is addressed. The shape changing feature of the conditional distributions makes these models capable of modelling time series with multimodal conditional distributions and with heteroscedasticity. The models are applied to two real data sets and compared with other competing models. The MAR models appear to capture features of the data better than other competing models do.     

Health Insurance and the Aging: Evidence From the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Seguro Popular</Emphasis> Program in Mexico

Aimed at covering the large fraction of workers in the informal sector without access to a social security program, the Mexican public health insurance program Seguro Popular began in 2002 and now reaches more than 50 million individuals. We estimate impacts of Seguro Popular for the population aged 50 and older on a set of indicators related to health care including utilization, diagnostic/preventive tests, and treatment conditional on being ill. Using the longitudinal Mexican Health and Aging Study over the period 2001–2012, we conduct before and after difference-in-difference matching impact estimators. Our results suggest large and important effects of the Program on utilization and diagnostic tests. We find overall smaller effects on the probability of being in treatment for individuals with chronic diseases, but these effects are concentrated in rural areas with relatively more health services versus rural areas with lower levels of health services. These results suggest that, to the extent that health services become more available in rural areas lacking services, effects of health insurance may increase.     

From the transnational to the Sinophone: lesbian representations in Chinese-language films

This article theorizes global lesbian cinema in Chinese-language films through regionalism, diaspora studies, and Sinophone studies. Through an inter-regional analysis of Butterfly (Yan Yan Mak, 2004, Hong Kong) and diasporic and Sinophone readings of Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2005, USA), I argue that Mak's film illustrates a Hong Kong regional retranslation of a Taiwanese lesbian story, which complicates any claim to a stable "Chinese" identity. Finally, Wu's representation of lesbianism also troubles the politics of Chineseness by pointing to the ways diasporic reproduction of "community" works through the disciplining of other non-normative sexualities.     

Three enigmatic examples and inference from likelihood

Statistics has many inference procedures for examining a model with data to obtain information concerning the value of a parameter of interest. If these give different results for the same model and data, one can reasonably want a satisfactory explanation. Over the last eighty years, three very simple examples have appeared intermittently in the literature, often with contradictory or misleading results; these enigmatic examples come from Cox, Behrens, and Box & Cox. The procedures in some generality begin with an observed likelihood function, which is known to provide just first order accuracy unless there is additional information that calibrates the parameter. In particular, default Bayes analysis seeks such calibration in the form of a model‐based prior; such a prior with second order accuracy is examined for the Behrens problem, but none seems available for the Box and Cox problem. Alternatively, higher‐order likelihood theory obtains such information by examining likelihood at and near the data and achieves third order accuracy. We examine both Bayesian and frequentist procedures in the context of the three enigmatic examples; simulations support the indicated accuracies. The Canadian Journal of Statistics © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

社会政策视角的中西社会和谐理论比较研究

采用比较社会政策视角探讨中西社会和谐理论具有开创性的意义。从社会政策理论发展中提炼出的社会和谐概念在现代社会背景下具有关系和制度两方面的重要性;社会和谐实践发展成为了三个互相关联的层面:经济的、社会的和政治的;在这个基础上建构出了三种意识形态理论下的社会和谐理论:自由主义的、保守主义的和社会民主主义的社会和谐观。中国政府发展出了具有本土意义的和谐社会观。如果把它与三种建构了的社会和谐观进行比较,就会发现它既有与西方和谐观相似的内容,又具有不同的发展。从社会政策的视角出发,改变国家角色的作用对建设和谐社会具有重要的意义。