You Just Have to Ask Coproduction of Primary Healthcare in Ghana and Nigeria

Public Organization Review - The urgent need to improve the quality of healthcare provision in developing countries such as Nigeria and Ghana is caused in part by inadequate financial support for...     

The orang utan is not an indigenous name: knowing and naming the maias as a decolonizing epistemology

ABSTRACT

Much of wildlife conservation literature and practices rely on euro-western nomenclature that are legacies of empire. Although seemingly neutral, the practice of (re)naming nature depends on political, philosophical, and social assumptions that encode top-down behaviour and governance in conservation practices. Indigenous communities’ processes of classifying nature are not recognized as valid and, as such, their conservation strategies are made invisible. If Indigenous knowledge is accounted for by contemporary conservation, it is often from a paradigm that focusses on ecological-scientific knowledge, rather than the complex inter-species relationships that Indigenous communities have with nature. As such, Indigenous communities are often perceived as a barrier or problem towards conservation, due to what is perceived as their lack of care for species of conservation interest. In this article, drawing on a kin study of maias conservation in Sarawak, I explore the power dynamics and tensions emerging within practice and discourses of conservation. In particular, I focus upon the struggles and negotiations in which conservation actors understand the orang utan, as they are commonly known in an international space, that overshadow the Iban ways of naming and knowing the orang utan as maias. Finally, I discuss the Iban classifications/names and relations with nature and how this affects different understandings of conservation.     

Framing Identity Politics: Right-Wing Women as Strategic Party Actors in the UK and US

ABSTRACT

Women’s political underrepresentation in right-wing parties remains a global phenomenon. Despite their rejection of “identity politics,” the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party and the United States’ Republican Party have launched formal initiatives to recruit women legislative candidates. In this article, we ask: How do right-wing women advocate for increasing women’s representation within parties that explicitly reject group identity politics? More specifically, we examine 1) how party elites frame the UK’s Women2Win and the US’s Project GROW campaigns, and 2) the role that women play in each of these initiatives. Through interviews with party elites and content analyses of news articles and campaign materials, we show that right-wing women in both countries function as strategic party actors, advocating for women’s representation tactically within the specific ideological and electoral context of their party.     

Prevalence and reasons for Juul use among college students

Abstract

Objective: Examine Juul use patterns, sociodemographic and personal factors associated with Juul use, and reasons for Juul initiation and current use, among college students. Participants: Convenience sample of 371 undergraduates at a large university in the southeast; recruited April 2018. Methods: Cross-sectional design using an online survey. Logistic regression identified the personal risk factors for current use. Results: Over 80% of participants recognized Juul; 36% reported ever use and 21% past 30-day use. Significant risk factors for current Juul use were: male, White/non-Hispanic, lower undergraduate, and current cigarette smoker. Current Juul users chose ease of use and lack of a bad smell as reasons for use. Ever Juul users most commonly endorsed curiosity and use by friends as reasons for trying Juul. Conclusions: Given the propensity for nicotine addiction among youth and young adults, rates of Juul use are alarming and warrant immediate intervention.     

The gender gap on public opinion towards genetically modified foods

Ever since genetically modified (GM) foods were introduced into the food supply in the 1990s they have provoked debate and concern. The number of GM foods approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and offered on supermarket shelves has steadily grown at the same time that public wariness about the safety of GM foods has increased. Studies within the scientific literature show a strikingly large gender gap in attitudes towards GM foods with women consistently more skeptical than men. However, there have been few efforts to understand the determinants of the gender gap on GM foods within the political science literature. This study employs a 2014 Pew Research Center survey on science issues to test several possible explanations for the gender gap in attitudes towards GM foods rooted in the different life experiences of women and men. The results show that while being a parent predicts more skeptical views about genetically modified foods overall it does not explain the gender gap in attitudes. In contrast, knowledge about science and having confidence in science do play a significant role in mediating the gender gap. By exploring the robust and pervasive gender gap on the issue of GM foods, this study sheds light on the fundamentally different ways men and women approach political issues.     

Propensity score applied to survival data analysis through proportional hazards models: a Monte Carlo study

Propensity score methods are increasingly used in medical literature to estimate treatment effect using data from observational studies. Despite many papers on propensity score analysis, few have focused on the analysis of survival data. Even within the framework of the popular proportional hazard model, the choice among marginal, stratified or adjusted models remains unclear. A Monte Carlo simulation study was used to compare the performance of several survival models to estimate both marginal and conditional treatment effects. The impact of accounting or not for pairing when analysing propensity‐score‐matched survival data was assessed. In addition, the influence of unmeasured confounders was investigated. After matching on the propensity score, both marginal and conditional treatment effects could be reliably estimated. Ignoring the paired structure of the data led to an increased test size due to an overestimated variance of the treatment effect. Among the various survival models considered, stratified models systematically showed poorer performance. Omitting a covariate in the propensity score model led to a biased estimation of treatment effect, but replacement of the unmeasured confounder by a correlated one allowed a marked decrease in this bias. Our study showed that propensity scores applied to survival data can lead to unbiased estimation of both marginal and conditional treatment effect, when marginal and adjusted Cox models are used. In all cases, it is necessary to account for pairing when analysing propensity‐score‐matched data, using a robust estimator of the variance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nursing home performance on select publicly reported quality indicators and resident risk of hospitalization: grappling with policy implications

This study examines how resident risk of hospitalization varies in relation to facility performance on select quality indicators (QIs). Using a 15% sample, three years of Medicaid reimbursement data from over 525 nursing homes (NHs) were linked with four years of hospital claims data and facility-level data to investigate whether residents of NHs with worse (better) than expected performance on QIs experienced increased (decreased) risk of hospitalization. Logistic regression results indicate that variations in hospitalization risk among NH residents are explained in part by facility performance on QIs. Residents from NHs with more decubitus ulcers, with greater use of physical restraints, and with a higher than expected incidence of unexplained weight loss/gain experienced increased risk of hospitalization.     

What's up? What young teens and parents want from youth programs

Young teens and their parents clearly state that the "if you build it, they will come" approach, even if it is well built, is only part of the solution for engaging young people in learning opportunities. Interviews with youth and parents explore what they are doing and what they say they want in their nonschool hours. Opportunities that are flexible, less structured, and more leisure-based emerge as priorities. Although relatively content with the options currently available to them, when pressed, youth and families want more connections between people and age groups as well as more of the free-spirited, organic activities likely to emerge in neighborhoods and communities.     

Strategic leadership for exploration and exploitation: The moderating role of environmental dynamism

This study advances prior theoretical research by linking transformational and transactional behaviors of strategic leaders to two critical outputs of organizational learning: exploratory and exploitative innovation. Findings indicate that transformational leadership behaviors contribute significantly to adopting generative thinking and pursuing exploratory innovation. Transactional leadership behaviors, on the other hand, facilitate improving and extending existing knowledge and are associated with exploitative innovation. In addition, we argue that environmental dynamism needs to be taken into account to fully understand the effectiveness of strategic leaders. Our study provides new insights that misfits rather than fits between leadership behaviors and innovative outcomes matter in dynamic environments. Hence, we contribute to the debate on the role of strategic leaders in managing exploration and exploitation, not only by examining how specific leadership behaviors impact innovative outcomes, but also by revealing how the impact of leadership is contingent upon dynamic environmental conditions.