Problem structuring methods as intervention tools: Reflections from their use with multi-organisational teams

Problem structuring methods (PSMs), also known as soft OR approaches, are most commonly employed with teams formed by members who tend to operate within an overall framework of authority and accountability, and most of whom have the ‘power to act’ on their recommendations. However, other PSM users include teams whose members are drawn from different organisational settings to work on a problem of common interest. The multi-organisational nature of such multi-organisational teams (MOTs) adds further complexity to the PSM modelling and facilitation processes by increasing the potential for conflict regarding the problem. In addition, members of MOTs tend not to operate within an overall framework of authority and accountability and, therefore, do not necessarily have full authority to commit themselves to their joint agreements. This paper reports on the design and application of a PSM-based methodology with three such groups, within the context of a multi-organisational collaboration in the UK construction industry. The paper reflects on the apparent success of the intervention, discusses the appropriateness of PSMs in this particular intervention context, as well as the generalisibility of the findings to other PSMs and/or multi-organisational contexts. Directions for the research and practice of PSMs with MOTs are also presented.     

Bayesian and Classical Approaches for Hypotheses Testing in Trisomies

We introduce classical approaches for testing hypotheses on the meiosis I non disjunction fraction in trisomies, such as the likelihood-ratio, bootstrap, and Monte Carlo procedures. To calculate the p-values for the bootstrap and Monte Carlo procedures, different transformations in the data are considered. Bootstrap confidence intervals are also used as a tool to perform hypotheses tests. A Monte Carlo study is carried out to compare the proposed test procedures with two Bayesian ones: Jeffreys and Pereira-Stern tests. The results show that the likelihood-ratio and the Bayesian tests present the best performance. Down syndrome data are analyzed to illustrate the procedures.     

Reliability properties of generalized mixtures of Weibull distributions with a common shape parameter

Weibull mixtures have been considered in many applied problems, and they have also been generalized by allowing negative mixing weights. In this paper, we study the classification of the aging properties of generalized mixtures of two or three Weibull distributions in terms of the mixing weights, scale parameters and a common shape parameter, which extends the cases of exponential or Rayleigh distributions. We apply these general results to classify the aging properties of the minimum and maximum lifetimes of two-component systems whose component lifetimes follow one of the known bivariate Weibull distributions.     

Social Security Wealth and Retirement Decisions in Italy

Abstract. This paper uses administrative data to study the retirement decisions of Italian private‐sector non‐agricultural employees during the period 1977–97. Our analysis tries to assess the importance of the financial incentives built into the social security system. The basic idea is very simple: at any given age, and based on the available information, workers compare the expected present value of two alternatives: retiring today or working one more year, and then choose the best one. A key role in this kind of comparisons is played by social security wealth, whose level and changes reflect the expectations about the profile of future earnings and the institutional features of the social security system. The various incentive measures that we consider differ in the precise weight given to the social security wealth that workers accrue as they continue to work. Our model does not provide a structural representation of the retirement process. A worker's decision is modeled here following a ‘quasi reduced‐form’ approach, with the incentive measures entering as predictors of the worker's choice in addition to standard variables. The estimated models are then used to predict retirement probabilities under alternative policies that change social security wealth and derived incentive measures.     

Turning bad into good: How resilience resources protect organizations from demanding work environments

An organization’s survival and its performance are often connected to employees’ well-being, which in intensive work conditions can be compromised by employee exhaustion. To date, the last economic crisis has forced several companies to downsize and leave the remaining employees facing higher job demands and vulnerability toward job exhaustion. The present study investigates whether resilience together with other personal resources can function as a psychological shield through a mediation and/or moderation process that mitigate the emergence of burnout. Based on a sample of employees from three different Italian companies (N?=?208), our results confirmed that “resilience resources” (i.e., resilience, self-efficacy, self-regulation) mediated the relationship between job demands, exhaustion, and task performance (i.e., energetic process). These results suggest that organizational environments characterized by challenging demands are likely to foster the development of resilience resources to cope with the emergence of potentially harming processes.     

Health activism and the logic of connective action. A case study of rare disease patient organisations

This exploratory work investigates the role of digital media in expanding health discourse practices in a way to transform traditional structures of agency in public health. By focusing on a sample of rare disease patient organisations as representative of contemporary health activism, this study investigates the role of digital communication in the development of (1) bottom-up sharing and co-production of health knowledge, (2) health public engagement dynamics and (3) health information pathways. Findings show that digital media affordances for patient organisations go beyond the provision of social support for patient communities; they ease one-way, two-way and crowdsourced processes of health knowledge sharing, exchange and co-production, provide personalised routes to health public engagement and bolster the emergence of varied pathways to health information where experiential knowledge and medical authority are equally valued. These forms of organisationally enabled connective action can help the surfacing of personal narratives that strengthen patient communities, the bottom-up production of health knowledge relevant to a wider public and the development of an informational and eventually cultural context that eases patients’ political action.     

Cigarette Smoking and Multiple Health Risk Behaviors: A Latent Class Regression Model to Identify a Profile of Young Adolescents

Cigarette smoking is often established during adolescence when other health‐related risk behaviors tend to occur. The aim of the study was to further investigate the hypothesis that risky health behaviors tend to cluster together and to identify distinctive profiles of young adolescents based on their smoking habits. To explore the idea that smoking behavior can predict membership in a specific risk profile of adolescents, with heavy smokers being more likely to exhibit other risk behaviors, we reanalyzed the data from the 2014 Health Behaviour in School‐Aged Children Italian survey of about 60,000 first‐ and third‐grade junior high school (JHS) and second‐grade high school (HS) students. A Bayesian approach was adopted for selecting the manifest variables associated with smoking; a latent class regression model was employed to identify smoking behaviors among adolescents. Finally, a health‐related risk pattern associated with different types of smoking behaviors was found. Heavy smokers engaged in higher alcohol use and abuse and experienced school failure more often than their peers. Frequent smokers reported below‐average academic achievement and self‐rated their health as fair/poor more frequently than nonsmokers. Lifetime cannabis use and early sexual intercourse were more frequent among heavy smokers. Our findings provide elements for constructing a profile of frequent adolescent smokers and for identifying behavioral risk patterns during the transition from JHS to HS. This may provide an additional opportunity to devise interventions that could be more effective to improve smoking cessation among occasional smokers and to adequately address other risk behaviors among frequent smokers.     

Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics: Developing a New Field of Inquiry

The principal aim of this investigation was to help develop ‘Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics’ as a new field of inquiry. We identified: (i) current intra‐disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge gaps in childhood ethics; and (ii) priorities for future research and development. A prominent problem, highlighted within and across disciplines, relates to how the best interests standard should be reconciled with the recognition of children as agents. This project makes an innovative contribution by promoting the development of interdisciplinary childhood ethics knowledge and standards, informing future improvements in childhood research and services.