Educational Gradients in Parents' Child‐Care Time Across Countries, 1965–2012

Parental time with children leads to posive child outcomes. Some studies have reported a posive educational gradient: More educated parents devote more time to children than other parents. Furthermore, some research finds that parental child care increased over time. Less certain is whether more educated parents increased their time more than less educated ones did, whether parenting trends for mothers and fathers are the same, and whether observed patterns characterize all Western countries or only some. Hypotheses inspired by theories of social diffusion, class differentiation, and ideologies of child rearing are tested with time‐use data for 11 Western countries between 1965 and 2012. For both mothers and fathers, results indicated a widespread educational gradient and an increase in child‐care time. In a number of countries, the posive educational gradient increased; nowhere was it dished. Thus, the advantages of intensive parenting continued to accrue to the well‐educated elite.     

Newborn Body Perception: Sensitivity to Spatial Congruency

Studies on adults have demonstrated that the perception our own body can be manipulated by varying both temporal and spatial properties of multisensory information. While human newborns are capable of detecting the temporal synchrony of visuo‐tactile body‐related cues, it remains unknown whether they also utilise spatial information for body perception. Twenty newborns were presented with a video of an infant's face touched with a paintbrush, while their own face was touched either in the spatially congruent, or an incongruent, location. We found that newborns show a visual preference for spatially congruent synchronous events, supporting the view that newborns have a rudimentary sense of their own body.     

Impact of Model Choice on LR Assessment in Case of Rare Haplotype Match (Frequentist Approach)

The likelihood ratio (LR) measures the relative weight of forensic data regarding two hypotheses. Several levels of uncertainty arise if frequentist methods are chosen for its assessment: the assumed population model only approximates the true one, and its parameters are estimated through a limited database. Moreover, it may be wise to discard part of data, especially that only indirectly related to the hypotheses. Different reductions define different LRs. Therefore, it is more sensible to talk about ‘a’ LR instead of ‘the’ LR, and the error involved in the estimation should be quantified. Two frequentist methods are proposed in the light of these points for the ‘rare type match problem’, that is, when a match between the perpetrator's and the suspect's DNA profile, never observed before in the database of reference, is to be evaluated.     

A Model-based Approach to Measure School Achievements in Latent Groups of Students: A Simulation Study

In this article, we present a model-based framework to estimate the educational attainments of students in latent groups defined by unobservable or only partially observed features that are likely to affect the outcome distribution, as well as being interesting to be investigated. We focus our attention on the case of students in the first year of the upper secondary schools, for which the teachers’ suggestion at the end of their lower educational level toward the subsequent type of school is available. We use this information to develop latent strata according to the compliance behavior of students simplifying to the case of binary data for both counseled and attended school (i.e., academic or technical institute). We consider a likelihood-based approach to estimate outcome distributions in the latent groups and propose a set of plausible assumptions with respect to the problem at hand. In order to assess our method and its robustness, we simulate data resembling a real study conducted on pupils of the province of Bologna in year 2007/2008 to investigate their success or failure at the end of the first school year.     

Metropolitan Governance: Which Policies for Globalizing Cities?

Today, for the first time in history, half the world’s people live in cities. This puts metropolitan areas to the test, especially in developing countries, where the greatest part of urban growth is occurring. In order to meet the new challenges linked to urbanization, today’s growing cities need appropriate metropolitan governance. The present paper wants to investigate this issue, through the definition of a general model of metropolitan governance, which can be adapted to every urbanization context according to its own specificities. Considerable emphasis will be given to concrete examples to test the consistency of our model. In particular, since water and sanitation supply is one of the key challenges affecting metropolitan areas, we will apply our model to urban water management. Furthermore, an important focus will be given to the contribution that Information and Communication Technologies can provide to the implementation of the model.     

Support provided by elderly in Italy: a hierarchical analysis of ego networks controlling for alter–overlapping

Statistical Methods & Applications - Providing support outside the household can be considered an actual sign of an active social life for the elderly. Adopting an ego–network...     

Re-randomization tests as sensitivity analyses to confirm immunological noninferiority of an investigational vaccine: Case study

Here we present as case study how re-randomization tests were performed in two randomized, controlled clinical trials as sensitivity analyses, as recommended by the United States Food and Drug Administration in the context of adaptive randomization. This was done to confirm primary conclusions on immunological noninferiority of an investigational new fully liquid presentation of a quadrivalent cross-reacting material conjugate meningococcal vaccine (MenACWY-CRM), over its licensed lyophilized/liquid presentation. In two phase 2b studies (Study #1: NCT03652610; Study #2: NCT03433482), noninferiority of the fully liquid presentation of MenACWY-CRM to the licensed presentation was assessed and demonstrated for immune responses against meningococcal serogroup A (MenA), the only vaccine component modified from lyophilized to liquid in the new presentation. The original vaccine assignment algorithm, with a minimization procedure accounting for center or center within age strata, was used to re-randomize participants belonging to the fully liquid and licensed vaccine groups while keeping antibody responses, covariates and entry order as observed. Test statistics under re-randomization were generated according to the ANCOVA model used in the primary analysis. To confirm immunological noninferiority following re-randomization, the corresponding p-values had to be <0.025. For both studies and all primary objective evaluations, the re-randomization p-values were well below 0.025 (0.0004 for Study #1; 0.0001 for the two co-primary endpoints in Study #2). Re-randomization tests performed to comply with a regulatory request confirmed the primary conclusions of immunological noninferiority for the MenA of the fully liquid compared to the licensed vaccine presentation.