The Intentions of Parents in Influencing the Career Development of Their Children

Parents' intentions associated with critical incidents they undertake in the career development of their children are examined from an intentional action perspective. From interviews with 207 parents, 1,772 critical incidents were identified. Approximately half of the incidents contributed to the construction of 10 categories representing the intentions of parents; the remainder was used to substantiate the categories. The categories illustrate that parents, although not necessarily attempting to influence particular occupational choice, are active agents in influencing their children in a broad range of areas in career development.     

Some criteria for making decisions concerning the distribution of scarce medical resources

In this paper I proceed on the assumption that moral philosophers can and should contribute to the resolution of perplexing moral problems. The ones considered here relate to decisions concerning the distribution of scarce medical resources as between those in need of treatment. I draw on considerations of egalitarianism and concern for the maximization of the use of scarce resources in the task of satisfying basic human needs (such as for good health). I propose certain principles and offer some supporting suggestions as guidelines or rules for medical decisions with a view to providing a helpful decision procedure for the various persons (doctors, community panels and so on) whose task it is to make the life-or-death decisions involved in allocating certain scarce medical resources.     

Health status,health problems and practices among refugees from the Middle East,Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia

Recent refugees from Poland, Romania, Iraq, and Vietnam were extensively interviewed to assess their health, health care utilization, and health services use barriers. 277 recent arrivals from these countries and 63 previously arrived Laotians comprised the 1983-1985 sample from the Detroit metropolitan area. Results from a 195-item bilingual questionnaire indicated good overall health and little evidence of serious physical health symptoms. Dental health was the area of greatest reported need. Prenatal care and mental health services were additional areas of need noted by researchers. Barriers to health service utilization were primarily language related. There were major differences in both health problems and health service utilization among the 4 groups surveyed.     

Changing the default setting for information privacy protection: What and whose personal information can be better protected?

With Internet service providers (ISPs) increasingly demanding personal information to develop personalized services, people have become more vulnerable to privacy infringement. As a way to protect individuals’ privacy, industrialized countries have implemented a “notice-and-consent” requirement, meaning an ISP must obtain users’ consent to collect personal information in the course of the ISP's business. Drawing on prospect theory and earlier work on information privacy and behavioral science, in this study, we administered an online survey experiment to test whether the giving of consent differs between ‘opt-in’ and ‘opt-out’ frames. The framing effect was found to be moderated by personal information type, people's attitudes toward privacy, and people's privacy infringement experience. The results indicate that the opt-in frame better protects users’ information privacy, and the framing effect is magnified when the targeted information concerns online activities, when users have weakly held privacy attitudes, and when users have less experience of privacy infringement.     

Statutory leave entitlements across developed countries: Why US workers lose out on work–family balance

Using a composite index of legal provisions for annual and family leave in western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and the Republic of Korea, the authors rank legislative support for this aspect of work–family balance. The United States ranks last: its employers are not required to grant annual leave and employees can take no more than 12 weeks' family leave per year. The United States' comparatively low labour standards, the authors argue, may be due to the dominance of a market‐based conception of employment and the assumption of equal employer–employee bargaining power, neither of which is fully shared by the other industrialized democracies.     

Trends in Domestic and International Social Work Research: A 10-Year Review of American Research Journals

ABSTRACT

This article presents a typology of international social work research and analyzes trends over a 10-year period (1995–2004) based on reviews of 707 articles from three major American social work research journals: Social Work Research, Journal of Social Service Research, and Research on Social Work Practice. The analysis revealed there was a considerable increase (3.5%) in the total amount of research articles, particularly a higher increase in international social work research (2.8%) than national social work research (0.8%). A small decline was detected in transnational comparative research (?0.4%).     

Episodic Cessation of Gambling: A Numerically Aided Phenomenological Assessment of Why Gamblers Stop Playing in a Given Session

The topic of permanent cessation of gambling behavior has received increased attention as the rates gaming (and pathology) increase with accessibility and legalization. Despite this increased attention there is a paucity of research on why people stop gambling in a given session, i.e. episodic cessation. We propose that the study of first-person experiential accounts of why gamblers stopped engaging in play within a given session will shed light on the progression and maintenance of wagering behavior. Using numerically aided phenomenology, we systematically examined accounts of episodic cessation. In doing so, we were able to identifying recurrent themes and then clustering these accounts according to similarities in theme profiles. People reported that episodic cessation occurred because they had lost all their money or because they were forced to (Cluster I), a sufficient amount of money had been won or lost (Cluster II), and a priori limits on wins or losses had been reached (Cluster III). As predicted, gamblers with maladaptive reasons for episodic cessation (Cluster I and II) reported more illusory perceptions of control and negative attitudes toward treatment seeking than those who engage in responsible gambling behavior (Cluster III). Moreover, illusions of control mediated the effect of cluster membership on attitudes toward treatment seeking. The findings of the present research help to integrate recent studies of gambling progression and maintenance.     

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo EM for change-point analysis

In the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation from incomplete data, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been used in change-point inference for a long time when the expectation step is intractable. However, the conventional MCMC algorithms tend to get trapped in local mode in simulating from the posterior distribution of change points. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a stochastic approximation Monte Carlo version of EM (SAMCEM), which is a combination of adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo and EM utilizing a maximum likelihood method. SAMCEM is compared with the stochastic approximation version of EM and reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo version of EM on simulated and real datasets. The numerical results indicate that SAMCEM can outperform among the three methods by producing much more accurate parameter estimates and the ability to achieve change-point positions and estimates simultaneously.     

Using the dependent wild bootstrap for the nonparametric goodness-of-fit test for density functions

In this paper, we consider the well-known nonparametric consistent model-specification test for the stationary density function (see [Aït-Sahalia Y. Testing continuous-time models of the spot interest rate. Rev Financ Stud. 1996;9:385–426; Li Q. Nonparametric testing of closeness between two unknown distribution functions. Econ Rev. 1996;15:261–274; Fan Y, Ullah A. On goodness-of-fit tests for weakly dependent processes using kernel method. J Nonparametric Stat. 2000;11:337–360]) and reinvestigate it carefully using asymptotics and simulation. Our work reveals that the test is subject to power and size distortions, which are mainly caused by dependence or convergence rate changes under the null and alternative hypothesis. A dependent wild bootstrap is newly suggested as a feasible remedy to such distortions. Our result provides a complete explanation as well as a solution to the problem that experienced by Aït-Sahalia [Testing continuous-time models of the spot interest rate. Rev Financ Stud. 1996;9:385–426], that is, that the test rejects true models too often when independent and identically distributed asymptotic critical values are used.