Editorial

Immigrants from Asian countries who are living in Canada are more likely to live with extended families than Canadian-born seniors. This article focuses on the living arrangements of 161 South Asian immigrant seniors in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and examines the relative importance of various factors that influence living arrangements. Demographic characteristics were associated with living arrangements; seniors who immigrated when they were young and were married were the most likely to live independently. Logistic regression analyses suggest that economic and cultural factors were more important than health and availability of kin factors in explaining living arrangements, after controlling for demographic and immigration variables.     

Deconstructing language practices: discursive constructions of children in Individual Education Plan resource documents

Although Individual Education Plan (IEP) resource documents in Ontario, Canada aim to assist children in achieving their special educational goals, a point of disjuncture exists between the documents’ intentions and children’s actual experiences. Addressing this issue is crucial in preventing inequity and fostering educational development and social well-being for children. We employ critical discourse analysis informed by disability theory to deconstruct the language practices used to conceptualize children in IEP resource documents. Our purpose is to question the underlying assumptions regarding representations of children and illuminate the potentially harmful consequences of such conceptions. We expose the presence of both neutral and harmful language practices and consider how such language may shape the way the documents translate from policy to practice. This study offers a model through which the language of other special education documents can be critically evaluated and proposes potential avenues for creating documents that avoid disabling children further.     

Risk patterns in drug safety study using relative times by accelerated failure time models when proportional hazards assumption is questionable: an illustrative case study of cancer risk of patients on glucose‐lowering therapies

Observational drug safety studies may be susceptible to confounding or protopathic bias. This bias may cause a spurious relationship between drug exposure and adverse side effect when none exists and may lead to unwarranted safety alerts. The spurious relationship may manifest itself through substantially different risk levels between exposure groups at the start of follow‐up when exposure is deemed too short to have any plausible biological effect of the drug. The restrictive proportional hazards assumption with its arbitrary choice of baseline hazard function renders the commonly used Cox proportional hazards model of limited use for revealing such potential bias. We demonstrate a fully parametric approach using accelerated failure time models with an illustrative safety study of glucose‐lowering therapies and show that its results are comparable against other methods that allow time‐varying exposure effects. Our approach includes a wide variety of models that are based on the flexible generalized gamma distribution and allows direct comparisons of estimated hazard functions following different exposure‐specific distributions of survival times. This approach lends itself to two alternative metrics, namely relative times and difference in times to event, allowing physicians more ways to communicate patient's prognosis without invoking the concept of risks, which some may find hard to grasp. In our illustrative case study, substantial differences in cancer risks at drug initiation followed by a gradual reduction towards null were found. This evidence is compatible with the presence of protopathic bias, in which undiagnosed symptoms of cancer lead to switches in diabetes medication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ruin Probabilities for the Perturbed Compound Poisson Risk Process with Investment

In this article, we consider the perturbed compound Poisson risk process with investment incomes. The risk reserve process is perturbed by an independent Brownian motion and the surplus is invested at a constant force of interest. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the ruin probability as the initial reserve goes to infinity. Bounds and time-dependent bounds are derived for the ultimate ruin probability and the probabilities of ruin within finite time, respectively. We also obtain an explicit expression for the Laplace transform of the ultimate ruin probability.     

Expected subjective utility: Is the Neumann-Morgenstern utility the same as the Neoclassical's?

Using axioms no stronger than those for the Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility hypothesis, with the recognition of finite sensibility, it is shown that the utility function derived by the N-M method is a neoclassical subjective utility function, contrary to the belief otherwise by prominent economists. This result is relevant for issues of utility measurability, social choice, etc. since it is subjective utility that is relevant for social choice. The relevance of individual risk aversion to the form of social welfare functions and the rationality of pure risk aversion are also discussed.     

Depression Amongst Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong: An Evaluation of a Stress Moderation Model

Stress has an established association with depression. However, not all adolescents experiencing stressors become depressed and it is helpful to identify potential resilience factors. The current study tests a theoretical extension of a stress-diathesis model of depression in a Chinese context, with stress, coping, family relationships, and alexithymia as risk factors for depression. This community study involves 1,199 secondary school students (567 males and 632 females) aged between 14 and 20 from six high schools with different bandings in Hong Kong. The models tested confirm the relationship between stress and depression. Ability to identify of one’s feelings (alexithymia subscale), the adoption of problem solving coping and the rejection of non-productive coping all acted as protective factors (moderators) against depression in the presence of stress. Coping also partially mediated the relationship between alexithymia and depression. A stress-diathesis model received some support, however, a complex set of inter-relationship between all the explanatory variables was revealed. Problem solving coping and non-productive coping emerged as key factors in understanding adolescent depression.     

A Bayesian-loss function-based method in assessing loss caused by ship-source oil spills in the arctic area

It is difficult to assess the risk of ship-source oil spills in Arctic waters for insurance purposes due to many unknowns and the lack of reliable data. However, maritime activities in the Arctic area continue to grow, indicating the urgent needs for the development of innovative methods to estimate loss from potential ship-source oil spills in the Arctic area. To fill this gap, we develop a hybrid Bayesian-loss function-based method to assess ship-source oil spill-related loss and implement an illustrative test on Baffin Island, Nunavut in Canada. The results confirm that our method can accurately assess loss and, subsequently, develop reliable insurance premiums for shipping activities in the Arctic area. This enables governmental and nongovernmental organizations alike to use the method as a reliable loss estimation mechanism for ship-source oil spills. Also, it is a valuable tool in designing measures for safer and more resilient Arctic shipping.