How to improve gait and balance function in elderly individuals—compliance with principles of training

Most balance training regimens for elderly individuals focus on self-controlled exercises, although automatic postural responses after a balance perturbation are not under direct volitional control. We critically review the literature on this topic, and notice that several studies fail to comply with basic principles of training and therefore show little improvement in function. Some present the view that physical function in the too frail and too fit cannot be improved, which we instead argue would be the effect of nonspecific training programs. We propose a concept for balance training that incorporates voluntary exercises as well as perturbation and dual-task exercises to improve balance control. The program is performed on five different levels where levels 1–4 exercises focus on the skill to maintain balance and level 5 adds perturbation exercises that focus on the skill to recover balance as well as dual task exercises providing a cognitive load during execution of a balance motor task. Functional requirements for muscle strength and power are directly incorporated into the program. The feasibility of the concept has been demonstrated on elderly fallers. A randomized control trial is underway to investigate the effects on healthy elderly individuals. Further intervention studies using this concept are encouraged.     

New-dialect formation and Southern Hemisphere English: The New Zealand short front vowels

There are two conflicting hypotheses concerning the nature of the New Zealand English short vowel system. One is that this system is conservative and that it is distinguished from the system of English English by changes which have taken place in the latter. The other hypothesis is that New Zealand English is, on the contrary, innovative, and that it is English English which has remained conservative. Drawing on hitherto unavailable data and on recent empirical studies in New Zealand, this paper concludes that both of these hypotheses are to a certain extent wrong and to a certain extent correct.     

Studying Social Movements: Challenges and Opportunities for Participant Observation

The research method of participant observation has long been used by scholars interested in the motivations, dynamics, tactics and strategies of social movements from a movement perspective. Despite participant observation being a common research method, there have been very few efforts to bring together this literature, which has often been spread across disciplines. This makes it difficult to identify the various challenges (and their interrelation) facing participant observers. Consequently, this article first reviews how participant observation roles have been conceptualised in general and then draws specific links to how the method has been used in the study of activism and social movements. In doing so, this article brings together key academic debates on participant observation, which have been considered separately, such as insider/outsider and overt/covert, but not previously been brought together.     

Measurement models of women’s autonomy using the 1998/1999 India DHS

Research concerning the relationship between female status and demographic behaviour has largely concluded that community level influences are most important, while status and autonomy at the individual level are far less so. This consensus, however, rests on an untested a priori typology of women’s status and tenuous assumptions about the measurement of defined status dimensions on the individual level. To better understand the potential influences of both community and individual elements it is necessary to take a step back and assess the validity of the constructs of autonomy used. This work uses a latent variable measurement modelling framework to test both the dimensionality of women’s status and the appropriateness of using simple additive index scaling in constructing measures of women’s status on the individual level using questions from the Demographic and Health Surveys status-of-women module in India for 1998/1999.     

Funding Social Science Research in Academia

This paper identifies the different funding streams for social science research and the different purposes for which it is carried out. The issue of making research 'useful' and relevant and how this links to different modes of user involvement is discussed. For research users to be involved in research in a real, strong, way requires long-term relationships to be built between users and researchers. A large proportion of research being carried out within the higher education sector is funded by external bodies of some kind, on short-term contracts. The argument is put that little time and energy goes into the management of this contract research. The combination of high staff turnover, little management and the decline of the dual support system have made it increasingly difficult for long-term relationships between researchers and research users to be built up. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role and effect of the Research Assessment Exercise. There are no incentives in the RAE for the creation of the kind of environment within which applied research can flourish—team working, a focus on problems rather than disciplinary issues, support, training and skill development for researchers, and good management.     

Les députés, leurs assistants et les usages du crédit collaborateurs. Une sociologie du travail politique

This analysis of how the staffs of members of the French parliament are organized focuses on the tasks that deputies assign to their parliamentary assistants. The distribution of tasks among assistants suggests that the organization and division of labor should be understood mainly in relation to the pressures generated by elections in the home district. Most staff-members are assigned to this work, since a seat in the National Assembly very much depends on providing services to constituents. The staff is so involved in solving constituents’ “personal” problems of various sorts that its members are forced to devise strategies for regulating demand and providing often token responses. Developing relations with constituents even affects the staff's legislative tasks. For deputies, it is a way to reduce the “occupational” risks inherent in elective office. Deputies adapt to a voting system that pushes them to adopt a conception of representation closer to being a spokesperson for a district's inhabitants than being a representative of the Nation.     

Applications of a General Stable Law Regression Model

In this paper we present a method for performing regression with stable disturbances. The method of maximum likelihood is used to estimate both distribution and regression parameters. Our approach utilises a numerical integration procedure to calculate the stable density, followed by sequential quadratic programming optimisation procedures to obtain estimates and standard errors. A theoretical justification for the use of stable law regression is given followed by two real world practical examples of the method. First, we fit the stable law multiple regression model to housing price data and examine how the results differ from normal linear regression. Second, we calculate the beta coefficients for 26 companies from the Financial Times Ordinary Shares Index.     

Collective Rituals, Emotional Climate and Intergroup Perception: Participation in "Gacaca" Tribunals and Assimilation of the Rwandan Genocide

Fifty survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and 50 prisoners accused of being responsible of genocidal acts completed four scales 45 days before and 45 days after their participation to a gacaca trial. The scales assessed (1) negative emotions presently felt with regard to the genocide, (2) perceived emotional climate, (3) negative stereotypes of the outgroup, and (4) perceived similarity among outgroup members. Building upon Durkheim's (1912) theory of collective rituals, we predicted that participation to the gacaca would involve a reactivation of negative emotions in both groups and would also impact negatively on perceived emotional climate. In contrast, we expected positive consequences for intergroup perception under the form of a reduction of (1) the prejudicial reactions of survivors and prisoners toward each other and (2) the perceived homogeneity of outgroup members. The collected data supported all four predictions.