Sample size determination for clinical trials with co‐primary outcomes: exponential event times

Clinical trials with event‐time outcomes as co‐primary contrasts are common in many areas such as infectious disease, oncology, and cardiovascular disease. We discuss methods for calculating the sample size for randomized superiority clinical trials with two correlated time‐to‐event outcomes as co‐primary contrasts when the time‐to‐event outcomes are exponentially distributed. The approach is simple and easily applied in practice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Data‐driven treatment selection for seamless phase II/III trials incorporating early‐outcome data

Seamless phase II/III clinical trials are conducted in two stages with treatment selection at the first stage. In the first stage, patients are randomized to a control or one of k > 1 experimental treatments. At the end of this stage, interim data are analysed, and a decision is made concerning which experimental treatment should continue to the second stage. If the primary endpoint is observable only after some period of follow‐up, at the interim analysis data may be available on some early outcome on a larger number of patients than those for whom the primary endpoint is available. These early endpoint data can thus be used for treatment selection. For two previously proposed approaches, the power has been shown to be greater for one or other method depending on the true treatment effects and correlations. We propose a new approach that builds on the previously proposed approaches and uses data available at the interim analysis to estimate these parameters and then, on the basis of these estimates, chooses the treatment selection method with the highest probability of correctly selecting the most effective treatment. This method is shown to perform well compared with the two previously described methods for a wide range of true parameter values. In most cases, the performance of the new method is either similar to or, in some cases, better than either of the two previously proposed methods. © 2014 The Authors. Pharmaceutical Statistics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Mixed methods,materialism and the micropolitics of the research-assemblage

We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques interact with the events they wish to study. Micropolitically, many of these techniques and methods have unintended effects of specifying and aggregating events, with the consequently that the knowledge produced by social inquiry is invested with these specifications and aggregations. We argue that rather than abandoning these social research tools, we may use the micropolitical analysis to assess precisely how each method affects knowledge production, and engineer the research designs we use accordingly. This forms the justification for mixing methods that are highly aggregative or specifying with those that are less so, effectively rehabilitating methods that have often been rejected by social researchers, including surveys and experiments.     

The Impact of Poverty on Children and Young People’s Use of Services

This article describes a qualitative study exploring the impact of poverty on children’s access to and use of services, which took a comparative approach to gather the views of children from more and less affluent households. Findings suggest affordability and related factors including limited mobility constrained service use for less affluent children, resulting in cumulative missed opportunities. However, extended family, friends and agencies facilitated service access, mitigating the impact of poverty on service use to some extent. Research implications include the importance of listening to and taking account of the views of children from lower income families in service planning.     

The Role of Poverty and Chaos in the Development of Task Persistence Among Adolescents

Late adolescents (N = 256; M_age = 17.5) who spent a larger proportion of their early life in poverty exhibited less persistence when confronted by a challenging task. Greater chaos during early adolescence also predicted less task persistence at age 17. However, the effects of poverty were moderated by chaos such that if chaos levels were high during early adolescence, task persistence was uniformly lower among late adolescents, irrespective of childhood poverty. Only when chaos levels were relatively low did poverty matter for future task persistence. Furthermore, the interactive effects of chaos and early childhood poverty were independent of child ability, and of concurrent chaos and poverty.     

Joking aside: Theorizing laughter in organizations

Humour is becoming an increasingly prevalent topic in organization studies. On the one hand, humour is said to enable workers to undermine management control; on the other hand, humour is said to provide managers with a resource for ensuring compliance with corporate objectives. This paper seeks to challenge the duality found in the literature between rebellious and disciplinary forms of humour by examining the meaning and significance of laughter in organizations. Following Bergson, it will be argued that laughter serves to rectify overly rigid behaviour that has temporarily disrupted the natural elasticity of life. This will serve to attune us to the way in which laughter – whether it is directed at a dominant group or a marginalized group – plays a socially normative role in organizations through processes of ridicule and embarrassment.     

Mathematical modeling in sociology: An exemplar (1)

This paper describes the method of differential equation modeling. To illustrate its application in sociology, a theory of the contribution of income to occupational prestige is developed and tested. The importance of theoretical foundations and inference therefrom is then discussed with a view to providing a model for teaching and the initiation of research.     

Public crises,public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analysing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support.