Treatment‐as‐usual in effectiveness studies: What is it and does it matter?

Andrée Löfholm C, Brännström L, Olsson M, Hansson K. Treatment‐as‐usual in effectiveness studies: What is it and does it matter? A hallmark of an evidence‐based practice (EBP) is the systematic appraisal of research related to the effectiveness of interventions. This study addressed the issue of interpreting results from effectiveness studies that use treatment‐as‐usual (TAU) as a comparator. Using randomised controlled studies that evaluate the effectiveness of multisystemic therapy as an illustrative example, we show that TAU includes a wide variety of treatment alternatives. Estimated treatment effects on recidivism suggest that TAU seems to contain a greater variation in underlying risk than experimental conditions, supporting the hypothesis that the content of TAU could affect outcomes. Implications for the realisation of an EBP are discussed.     

The problem of Iraqi nationalism

This article analyses the development of a tenuous Iraqi national identity since the creation of the Iraqi state in 1920. Informed by the ideas of Anthony D. Smith, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, it argues that various political actors in Iraq have sought to reshape historical memory and thus forge a national identity. Despite many setbacks and a long series of authoritarian regimes seeking to appropriate Iraqiness for their own political purposes, and recently the threat from Kurdish irredentism, this article nevertheless contends that an Iraqi cultural ‘ethnicity’ has been created over the past nine decades.     

How Job Characteristics Affect International Migration: The Role of Informality in Mexico

Despite the importance given to employment opportunities as a primary motive for migration, previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the kinds of jobs that are more likely to retain workers in their countries of origin. We use information from a panel survey of Mexican adults to examine how job characteristics affect the risk of international migration. The sampling strategy and overall size of the survey allow us to analyze the effect of employment characteristics on migration from urban areas, which have much greater labor market diversity, and to separate our analysis by gender. We also distinguish migrants according to whether they migrate for work or for other reasons. We find informality to be a significant predictor of international migration. Even after controlling for individual factors including workers’ wages, as well as various household- and community-level predictors, we find that workers employed in the informal sector have significantly higher odds of migrating than their counterparts in the formal sector. The pervasive nature of informality in many developing countries from which a high proportion of international migrants originate may therefore create a constant supply of workers who are predisposed to migrate. Our findings thus have important implications for a proper understanding of the effects of economic development on migration.     

Stress and Resilience in the Oral Histories of Rural Older Women

Oral history research has seldom focused on the reflections of rural older women. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify: (a) stresses associated with major historical events that affected the lives of rural older women, and (b) strategies they used to deal with those stresses. Oral histories were gathered from a cross-section of 25 older women living in a small rural Midwestern community and analyzed using the method of constant comparison (Glaser & Straus, 1967 Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. 1967. The discovery of grounded theory, Chicago: Aldine.  [Google Scholar]). Content analysis revealed that economic hardship, disruption of family life, and fears and uncertainties were stressors associated with the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. Resilience was demonstrated by frugality, reliance on social supports, and acceptance. Implications for intervention with rural older women are discussed.     

Activism Among Older Women in Quebec,Canada: Changing the World After Age 65

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to examine senior women's involvement experience in Quebec, Canada. Study results are based on a qualitative methodology, and shed light on family history and continuity in the involvement trajectory, diversity in terms of group type and involvement practices, and gender differences in involvement. The meaning that older women attribute to their involvement is also addressed, including attitudes toward feminism. The discussion highlights the extent to which older women's involvement has been marked by their life trajectories, above and beyond their age. In sum, their involvement in the private and public spheres is quite impressive.     

Differences in fertility behavior and uncertainty: an economic theory of the minority status hypothesis

We revisit the question of why fertility behaviors and educational decisions appear to vary systematically across ethnic groups. We assess the possibility that differences in fertility across groups remain even though their socio-economic characteristics are similar. More specifically, we consider that parents’ fertility decisions are affected by the uncertainty concerning the future economic status of their offspring. We assume that this uncertainty varies across groups and is linked to the size of the group one belongs to. We find theoretical support for the minority status hypothesis according to which members of large minorities usually have a higher fertility than those in the majority facing low potential for social mobility while small minorities have lower fertility.     

Quality of Life Experienced by Human Capital: An Assessment of European Cities

This paper aims to provide an assessment of urban quality of life (QoL) of European cities from the perspective of qualified human resources. The competitiveness of cities relies increasingly in their capacity to attract highly educated workers, as they are important assets for firms when choosing a location. Qualified human resources, on the other hand, tend to value QoL over other urban features. This is why policymakers and urban planners need to evaluate QoL of cities and be provided with tools that can guide action to improvements in this area. We assess urban QoL by means of a composite indicator constructed using data envelopment analysis, based on Urban Audit data and Mercer’s framework of analysis, to give account of 246 European cities. Besides presenting a ranking of the best and the worst scores of QoL, this methodology allows benchmarking strategies.     

Social Capital and Subjective Wellbeing in Europe: A New Approach on Social Capital

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the various dimensions of social capital and subjective wellbeing. Data used in this study come from the fourth wave of the European Social Survey and different measures of wellbeing are used to take account of both the cognitive and affective processes of individual wellbeing (i.e. life satisfaction, happiness, and subjective wellbeing). A factor analysis is performed to summarize information coming from a large set of variables into different components corresponding to each dimension of social capital (i.e. networks, norms, and trust). Among the results, we find that the impact of social capital on subjective wellbeing differ depending on the component of social capital which is under analysis. In particular, social networks, social trust and institutional trust are the components that show a higher correlation with subjective wellbeing. Furthermore, in addition to the positive effects of the individual variables, our results suggest that social capital at the aggregate level positively correlates with individual wellbeing, thus pointing to an external or environmental effect of social capital.     

Morphological differences along a chronological gradient of urbanisation in an endemic insectivorous bird of New Zealand

Urbanisation constitutes one of the most rapid human-induced environmental changes, developing at the expense of natural and semi-natural habitats. It often implies alterations of many abiotic and biotic factors and contributes to create new environmental conditions, including temperature, food resources, competition and predation. Despite increasing empirical evidence of intra-specific divergence in phenotypic traits (e.g., physiological, behavioural or morphological) between urban and rural individuals, such patterns have often remained disconnected from the underlying mechanisms involved. In the current study, we tested for divergence in functional morphological traits that are related to feeding ecology (i.e., bill morphology, body mass and condition) and/or to the locomotory performance in escaping from predators (i.e., wing, tarsus and tail morphology, body mass and condition) along a chronological gradient of urbanisation (old urban, recent urban and rural areas), using the New Zealand fantail, an endemic insectivorous passerine species. We found divergences in phenotypic traits related to bill morphology along the urban–rural gradient: birds inhabiting the old urban area had stubbier bills (i.e., shorter, deeper and wider bills) than those inhabiting the recent urban and rural areas. We did not detect any difference in locomotion-related morphological traits. Our results suggest the urbanisation-induced alteration in food resources may drive morphological divergence in bird populations. We emphasized the need for mechanistic and experimental studies, with a particular focus on resource-based mechanisms, to identify more precisely the morphological responses of urban populations to changes in food composition, and the resulting implications for communities in urban ecosystems.

     

Time-varying coefficients in a multivariate frailty model: Application to breast cancer recurrences of several types and death

During their follow-up, patients with cancer can experience several types of recurrent events and can also die. Over the last decades, several joint models have been proposed to deal with recurrent events with dependent terminal event. Most of them require the proportional hazard assumption. In the case of long follow-up, this assumption could be violated. We propose a joint frailty model for two types of recurrent events and a dependent terminal event to account for potential dependencies between events with potentially time-varying coefficients. For that, regression splines are used to model the time-varying coefficients. Baseline hazard functions (BHF) are estimated with piecewise constant functions or with cubic M-Splines functions. The maximum likelihood estimation method provides parameter estimates. Likelihood ratio tests are performed to test the time dependency and the statistical association of the covariates. This model was driven by breast cancer data where the maximum follow-up was close to 20 years.