Are crisis communicators practicing what we preach?: An evaluation of crisis response strategy analyzed in public relations research from 1991 to 2009

Quantitative content analysis is used to evaluate crisis response strategy analyzed in more than 18 years of research published in crisis communication literature in public relations to reveal its effectiveness, nature, and contextual application. Analysis of 51 articles published in 11 different journals using two dominant theories in public relations crisis communication literature, Benoit's Image Restoration Theory and Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory, indicates a lack of diversity in cases analyzed by scholars, gaps between theory and practice, and pressing directions for future research in crisis communication.     

Making nice may not matter: The interplay of crisis type,response type and crisis issue on perceived organizational responsibility

Experimental findings suggest limited effects for corporate social responsibility (CSR) to inoculate a company prior to a crisis. CSR may be viewed as accommodative window dressing that diminishes resources to assure corporate competence. When an accident occurs, emphasis in crisis communication on corporate ability (CA) may be more effective than CSR, especially when corporate culpability is low.     

Individual Income Inequality and Its Drivers in Indonesia: A Theil Decomposition Reassessment

This article employs a Theil decomposition analysis to examine various dimensions of income inequality, using the 2007 Indonesian Family Life Survey. The empirical strategy is based on the individual-level income data—instead of group means as in the existing literature—and thus accounts for within-group dispersion of individual incomes. The decomposition exercise reveals that income inequality across education levels constitutes about 13 % of total income inequality. The urban–rural and interprovincial dimensions individually explain 6.0–6.5 %, but the contribution of income inequality by genders appears to be negligible. The findings highlight educational reform as an effective redistributive policy.     

Estimation of product moments of a stationary stochastic process with application to estimation of cumulants and cumulant spectral densities

Inference concerning the structure of stationary stochastic processes can be investigated by looking at properties of various cumulant spectral densities of order two and higher. However, except for cases when cumulants and product moments are identical, estimation of higher-order cumulant spectral densities has been restricted by the dependence of higher-order cumulants on lower-order product moments. By first estimating product moments and then using an identity between product moments and cumulants, asymptotically unbiased and consistent estimates of cumulants are obtained. This in turn leads to asymptotically unbiased and consistent estimators of higher-order cumulant spectral densities. In addition, asymptotic normality of product-moment estimators is exhibited under weak dependence.     

Political Control and Bureaucratic Autonomy Revisited: A Multi-Institutional Analysis of OSHA Enforcement

The proper role of bureaucracy in democratic governance haslong been a matter of controversy. One part of the debate involvesthe argument that democratic control and bureaucratic autonomyare dichotomous opposites: if there is democratic control, therecannot be bureaucratic autonomy, and vice versa. This articledevelops a spatial model of bureaucratic policy choices thatreveals that conditions of democratic control and bureaucraticautonomy are not incompatible: the interactions among politicalinstitutions not only create the condition in which governmentagencies must respond to the will of the elected officials butalso provide the opportunity for the agencies to reflect theirown preferences in policy outcomes. Empirical analyses of occupationalsafety and health enforcement between 1982 and 2000 providesupport for the general argument that bureaucratic responsivenessand bureaucratic autonomy together constitute the behavioralcharacteristics of bureaucracy under institutional influence.     

TESTS FOR DETECTING MORE NBU-NESS AT A SPECIFIC AGE

This paper proposes a class of non‐parametric test procedures for testing the null hypothesis that two distributions, F and G, are equal versus the alternative hypothesis that F is ‘more NBU (new better than used) at specified age t₀’ than G. Using Hoeffding's two‐sample U‐statistic theorem, it establishes the asymptotic normality of the test statistics and produces a class of asymptotically distribution‐free tests. Pitman asymptotic efficacies of the proposed tests are calculated with respect to the location and shape parameters. A numerical example is provided for illustrative purposes.     

Importance of Land,family and culture for a good life: Remote Aboriginal people with disability and carers

Worldwide health and social outcomes of Indigenous people are poorer than those of non-Indigenous. In Australia, the Indigenous population experience disability at more than twice the rate of the non-Indigenous population, and a quarter live in geographically remote areas. The challenges associated with accessing services and supports in remote communities can impact on a good life for Aboriginal people with disability. Interviews were conducted with Aboriginal people (An angu) with disability and family carers from remote Central Australian communities and service workers. Thematic data analysis determined factors An angu viewed as essential to living a good life: connection to their Lands, being with family and engaging in cultural activities. Workers' support for a good life involves “Proper Way” help and an understanding of An angu culture. Three culturally relevant strengths-based concepts are important in supporting An angu with disability to live a good life: being connected to the Lands and family, sharing together and working together.     

Relational ethics as a cultural constraint on fathers' parental leave in a Confucian welfare state,South Korea

Promoting fathers' parental leave has recently become of major policy interest in many welfare states. The Korean Government also introduced paid parental leave for working fathers in 2001 and has increasingly strengthened such incentive schemes. However, despite its rapid advancement, fathers' utilisation of parental leave is increasing slowly and most fathers still opt out of their responsibilities for childcare. As sociocultural norms are a primary cause of this low take-up behaviour pattern, this study focuses on the Confucian relational ethics deeply embedded in Korean society. Through in-depth interviews with 15 Korean working couples, this article demonstrates how Confucian relational ethics constrain fathers from enjoying their individual right to parental leave by designating them as last-resort caregivers within families and as forefront workers in the workplace. This study shows the importance of the sociocultural grounding of a society to ordinary citizens when they utilise a social policy in their daily lives.     

Intrinsic Priors for Model Selection Using an Encompassing Model with Applications to Censored Failure Time Data

In Bayesian model selection or testingproblems one cannot utilize standard or default noninformativepriors, since these priors are typically improper and are definedonly up to arbitrary constants. Therefore, Bayes factors andposterior probabilities are not well defined under these noninformativepriors, making Bayesian model selection and testing problemsimpossible. We derive the intrinsic Bayes factor (IBF) of Bergerand Pericchi (1996a, 1996b) for the commonly used models in reliabilityand survival analysis using an encompassing model. We also deriveproper intrinsic priors for these models, whose Bayes factors are asymptoticallyequivalent to the respective IBFs. We demonstrate our resultsin three examples.     

Imputation using response probability

The authors propose a new ratio imputation method using response probability. Their estimator can be justified either under the response model or under the imputation model; it is thus doubly protected against the failure of either of these models. The authors also propose a variance estimator that can be justified under the two models. Their methodology is applicable whether the response probabilities are estimated or known. A small simulation study illustrates their technique.