Home and hospital; hospice and palliative care: how the environment impacts the social work role

Social workers play key roles on interdisciplinary hospice teams and in hospitals on oncology or palliative care teams. Though palliative care settings include both home hospice and hospital-based consultation services, the different environments and scope of practice impact the role of the social worker. The purpose of this article is to examine the similarities and differences in coordination of care, teamwork, and collaboration in these two fields in order to highlight opportunities for enhancing clinical skills and developing our confidence and presence in asserting social work expertise with our transdisciplinary colleagues.     

What Parents Think About Child Rearing!

In a survey of current attitudes of parents towards child rearing, 386 parents of 4th grade children completed questionnaires containing Hereford's Parent Attitude Scale. Results indicated that parents with the highest education and occupational status were: more confident in themselves as parents; more inclined to believe that they could influence their child's behaviour; more accepting of the child as an individual; shared ideas and feelings more often with their child; and were more likely to enjoy a mutually trusting relationship with their child. This suggests that programmes aimed at improving parent-child relationships should be primarily directed towards the less well educated and those of lower occupational standing. Yet the Health Commission, in pilot Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) programmes found that parents who joined the programmes were even better educated than those in the survey, and already had very favourable attitudes towards child rearing.     

An analysis of the welfare implications of alternative exchange rate regimes: An intertemporal model with an application

This paper develops a methodology for evaluating the short-run welfare implications of different exchange rate regimes. Heterogeneous, optimizing domestic consumers live for two periods, consume goods and leisure, supply labor, save home and foreign bonds, and demand currency. Firms maximize profits. The home government levies taxes, issues money and bonds and supplies public goods. The foreign country demands imports, supplies exports, and lends to the home country. The theoretical model is estimated for Australia. Counter-factual simulations are carried out. The results suggest that floating was, or would have been, the superior regime for the 1981–1984 period.     

Stable Matching With Incomplete Information

We formulate a notion of stable outcomes in matching problems with one‐sided asymmetric information. The key conceptual problem is to formulate a notion of a blocking pair that takes account of the inferences that the uninformed agent might make. We show that the set of stable outcomes is nonempty in incomplete‐information environments, and is a superset of the set of complete‐information stable outcomes. We then provide sufficient conditions for incomplete‐information stable matchings to be efficient. Lastly, we define a notion of price‐sustainable allocations and show that the set of incomplete‐information stable matchings is a subset of the set of such allocations.     

Challenges in Constructing a Multi-dimensional European Job Quality Index

There are few attempts to benchmark job quality in a multi-dimensional perspective across Europe. Against this background, we have created a synthetic job quality index (JQI) for the EU27 countries in an attempt to shed light on the question of how European countries compare with each other and how they are developing over time in terms of job quality. Taking account of the multi-faceted nature of job quality, the JQI is compiled on the basis of six sub-indices which cover the most important dimensions of job quality as identified in the literature. The paper addresses the methods used to construct the JQI and make it comparable over time. It presents the results for 2010 and briefly addresses changes over time to illustrate the potential and limits of a multidimensional European JQI. It also considers alternative specifications for various sub-indices and tests for the impact of changes in the indicators used on the outcomes. Overall, the findings appear to confirm the feasibility and desirability of attempting to assess job quality by means of a composite index that can be periodically updated. The key strength of this approach is the possibility to monitor and benchmark EU countries’ overall job quality performances and the outcomes in six sub-dimensions of job quality and compare them with each other, across gender and over time. At the same time, the limitations of such a composite index need to be borne in mind. The most important challenges are the availability (over time), timeliness and periodicity, comparability and disaggregation of data.     

An Improved Method on Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test for Gene Selection from Microarray Experiments

Selecting a small subset out of the thousands of genes in microarray data is important for accurate classification of phenotypes. In this paper, we propose a flexible rank-based nonparametric procedure for gene selection from microarray data. In the method we propose a statistic for testing whether area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for each gene is equal to 0.5 allowing different variance for each gene. The contribution to this “single gene” statistic is the studentization of the empirical AUC, which takes into account the variances associated with each gene in the experiment. Delong et al. proposed a nonparametric procedure for calculating a consistent variance estimator of the AUC. We use their variance estimation technique to get a test statistic, and we focus on the primary step in the gene selection process, namely, the ranking of genes with respect to a statistical measure of differential expression. Two real datasets are analyzed to illustrate the methods and a simulation study is carried out to assess the relative performance of different statistical gene ranking measures. The work includes how to use the variance information to produce a list of significant targets and assess differential gene expressions under two conditions. The proposed method does not involve complicated formulas and does not require advanced programming skills. We conclude that the proposed methods offer useful analytical tools for identifying differentially expressed genes for further biological and clinical analysis.     

Sex Differences in the Relationship between Military Service Status and Functional Limitations and Disabilities

This paper examines the relationship between military service status (active duty, veteran, never served), sex, and six functional limitations/disabilities using data from the 5% sample of the 2000 U.S. Census. We estimate multivariate logistic regression models separately for men and women, and evaluate sex differences by comparing coefficients across models using a Wald chi-square test and computing predicted probabilities. For both men and women, the highest rates of functional limitation/disability are observed among veterans, while the lowest rates are recorded among active duty personnel. The increased odds of functional limitations/disabilities associated with veteran status is higher among women than men, whereas the decreased odds of functional limitations/disabilities associated with active duty status is lower among women than men. The predicted probabilities, which are based on a subgroup of 40–49 year olds with select sociodemographic characteristics, indicate that veteran women’s probabilities of many types of functional limitations/disabilities equal or exceed those of veteran men. Overall, the findings suggest women experience a more detrimental effect of past military service and a less beneficial effect of current military service. More life course analysis with longitudinal data that accounts for factors that influence sex-differentiation with respect to selection into military service, experiences in the military, and the short- and long-term consequences of military service is needed to fully understand sex differences in the relationship between military service and functional limitations/disabilities.     

Academic Hiring Networks and Institutional Prestige: A Case Study of Canadian Sociology

This article examines the academic job market for Canadian sociology through its PhD exchange network. Using an original data set of employed faculty members in 2015 (N = 1,157), I map the hiring relationships between institutions and analyze the observed network structure. My findings show that institutional prestige is a likely organizing force within this network, reflective of a disproportionate number of faculty coming from a few centralized high‐status institutions, as well as predominantly downward flows in hiring patterns. However, further investigation is needed to understand the role of prestige in Canadian higher education, which has been previously characterized as having a flat social structure. This requires attention toward the interrelationships between institutional prestige, scholarly competence, and department size situated within a segmented academic field in Canada. Overall, this study aims to encourage collective self‐reflection and motivate discourse about status‐based inequalities in our own discipline.     

What are axiomatizations good for?

Theory and Decision - Do axiomatic derivations advance positive economics? If economists are interested in predicting how people behave, without a pretense to change individual decision making, how...