Communication after an integrity-based trust violation: How organizational account giving affects trust

How can an organization repair trust through communication after an ethical failure? This study examines how trust is repaired after an integrity-based trust violation using three different accounts: apology, excuse, and refusal. In our approach, we rely on two strands of attribution theory, which suggests that different attributions for responsibility and credibility affect trust. An experiment with n = 368 was conducted to explore trust repair effectiveness of apology versus refusal and apology versus excuse after an integrity-based trust violation. Results revealed apology as a double-edged sword; it repairs trust more successfully than refusal and excuse because it is evaluated as more credible. However, it is less successful than refusal and excuse because it is evaluated as more responsible.     

Constructions of ‘the ageless’ asylum seekers: An analysis of how age is understood among professionals working within the norwegian immigration authorities

This article explores how professionals within the Norwegian immigration authorities conceptualise age when doing non-medical age assessments. By using social constructivism, which challenges an ethnocentric quantifying understanding of age, we delve into how socially constructed perceptions of childhood and adulthood manifest in assessment practices and the implications of these. By examining how applicants’ physical appearance, body language and life experience are used as an assessment basis, we argue that the ways age is conceptualised relate to Western ideas and ideals while overlooking other social and cultural backgrounds in which age is embedded.     

Against the De Minimis Principle

According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the risk is sufficiently small. In this article, we argue that a de minimis threshold has no place in a normative theory of decision making, because the application of the principle will either recommend ignoring risks that should not be ignored (e.g., the sure death of a person) or it cannot be used by ordinary bounded and information-constrained agents.     

Principal stratum strategy: Potential role in drug development

A randomized trial allows estimation of the causal effect of an intervention compared to a control in the overall population and in subpopulations defined by baseline characteristics. Often, however, clinical questions also arise regarding the treatment effect in subpopulations of patients, which would experience clinical or disease related events post-randomization. Events that occur after treatment initiation and potentially affect the interpretation or the existence of the measurements are called intercurrent events in the ICH E9(R1) guideline. If the intercurrent event is a consequence of treatment, randomization alone is no longer sufficient to meaningfully estimate the treatment effect. Analyses comparing the subgroups of patients without the intercurrent events for intervention and control will not estimate a causal effect. This is well known, but post-hoc analyses of this kind are commonly performed in drug development. An alternative approach is the principal stratum strategy, which classifies subjects according to their potential occurrence of an intercurrent event on both study arms. We illustrate with examples that questions formulated through principal strata occur naturally in drug development and argue that approaching these questions with the ICH E9(R1) estimand framework has the potential to lead to more transparent assumptions as well as more adequate analyses and conclusions. In addition, we provide an overview of assumptions required for estimation of effects in principal strata. Most of these assumptions are unverifiable and should hence be based on solid scientific understanding. Sensitivity analyses are needed to assess robustness of conclusions.     

Unemployment and Earnings Assimilation of Immigrants

The regional unemployment elasticity of annual earnings for non‐OECD immigrants is found to be more than three times larger than for natives, using micro data covering all immigrants in Norway in 1990 and a random sample of natives. The decline in relative earnings of non‐OECD immigrants from 1980 to 1990 can largely be explained by the stronger impact of rising unemployment on immigrant earnings. These results highlight the importance of controlling for different period effects caused by fluctuating unemployment in panel studies of earnings assimilation among immigrants.     

Quality of Life as Medicine: Interventions that Induce Salutogenesis. A Review of the Literature

This paper reviews the medical (salutogenic) effect of interventions that aim to improve quality of life. Review of studies where the global quality of life in chronically ill patients was improved independently of subjective and objective factors (like physical and mental health, yearly income, education, social network, self-esteem, sexual ability and problems or work). The methods used were subtypes of integrative medicine (non-drug CAM) like mind body medicine, body psychotherapy, clinical holistic medicine, consciousness-based medicine and sexology. In about 20 papers on QOL as medicine, in cancer, coronary heart disease, chronic pain, mental illness, sexual dysfunction, low self-esteem, low working ability and poor QOL, the most successful intervention strategy seems to be to create a maternal, infantile bonding induced by a combination of conversation therapy and bodywork. The papers examined the treatments of over 2,000 chronically ill or dysfunctional patients and more than 20 different types of health problems. Global QOL measured by SEQOL, QOL5, QOL1, self-rated physical health, self-rated mental health, self-rated sexual functioning, anorgasmia, genital pain, self-rated working ability, self-rated relation to self, well-being, life-satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment of needs, experience of temporal and spatial domains, expression of life’s potentials, and objective functioning. We found “QOL as medicine” able in the treatment of physical disorders and illnesses including chronic pain (Number Needed to Treat (NNT) = 1–3, Number Needed to Harm (NNH) > 500), in mental illness (NNT = 1–3, NNH > 500), in sexual dysfunctions (NNT = 1–2, NNH > 1,000), self-rated low working ability (NNT = 2, NNH > 500), and self-rated low QOL (NNT = 2, NNH > 2,000). We found that QOL improving interventions helped or cured 30–90% of the patients, typically within one year, independent of the type of health problem. “QOL as medicine” seems to be able in improving chronic mental, somatic and sexual health issues without side effects.     

The role of local stakeholders in transforming economic upgrading into social upgrading in Ethiopian textile and garment firms

The authors examine the links between economic and social upgrading in a developing country with stringent industry policy and employment legislation, focusing on the strategies of local firms participating in global apparel production networks. Based on the 2015 case studies of five textile and garment firms in Ethiopia, they find that employment security and physical well-being were driven mainly by government labour regulations negotiated by local employers, workers and trade unions rather than by global buyers and conclude that upgrading and downgrading can occur simultaneously within a firm.     

The Copula Information Criteria

We derive two types of Akaike information criterion (AIC)‐like model‐selection formulae for the semiparametric pseudo‐maximum likelihood procedure. We first adapt the arguments leading to the original AIC formula, related to empirical estimation of a certain Kullback–Leibler information distance. This gives a significantly different formula compared with the AIC, which we name the copula information criterion. However, we show that such a model‐selection procedure cannot exist for copula models with densities that grow very fast near the edge of the unit cube. This problem affects most popular copula models. We then derive what we call the cross‐validation copula information criterion, which exists under weak conditions and is a first‐order approximation to exact cross validation. This formula is very similar to the standard AIC formula but has slightly different motivation. A brief illustration with real data is given.     

Recognizing and visualizing departures from independence in bivariate data using local Gaussian correlation

It is well known that the traditional Pearson correlation in many cases fails to capture non-linear dependence structures in bivariate data. Other scalar measures capable of capturing non-linear dependence exist. A common disadvantage of such measures, however, is that they cannot distinguish between negative and positive dependence, and typically the alternative hypothesis of the accompanying test of independence is simply “dependence”. This paper discusses how a newly developed local dependence measure, the local Gaussian correlation, can be used to construct local and global tests of independence. A global measure of dependence is constructed by aggregating local Gaussian correlation on subsets of \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\) , and an accompanying test of independence is proposed. Choice of bandwidth is based on likelihood cross-validation. Properties of this measure and asymptotics of the corresponding estimate are discussed. A bootstrap version of the test is implemented and tried out on both real and simulated data. The performance of the proposed test is compared to the Brownian distance covariance test. Finally, when the hypothesis of independence is rejected, local independence tests are used to investigate the cause of the rejection.