Public response to the 1970 census: A Wisconsin survey

The 1970 census included numerous procedural innovations, of which the most important was the use of mail-out/mail-back techniques. A statewide survey of Wisconsin households (conducted in May and June, 1970) included questions designed to elicit information on the degree of cooperation rendered, ease of comprehension of the form, possible objectionable items on the census, whether or not contacts were made by enumerators, and respondent judgments of the adequacy of enumerators’ performance. The results indicate that Wisconsin respondents tended to comply with census procedures, that they found very little difficulty in filling out the mailed forms, and that they regarded the census enumerators as doing a “good job” in most cases.     

Personal, health, academic, and environmental predictors of stress for residence hall students

The authors studied contributors to stress among undergraduate residence hall students at a midwestern, land grant university using a 76-item survey consisting of personal, health, academic, and environmental questions and 1 qualitative question asking what thing stressed them the most. Of 964 students selected at random, 462 (48%) responded to the survey. The authors weighted data to reflect the overall university-wide undergraduate population (55% men, 12% minority or international, and 25% freshmen). Women and US citizens experienced greater stress than did men and non-US citizens, respectively. Frequency of experiencing chronic illness, depression, anxiety disorder, seasonal affective disorder, mononucleosis, and sleep difficulties were significant stress predictors. Although alcohol use was a positive predictor, drug use was a negative predictor of stress. Both a conflict and a satisfactory relationship with a roommate, as well as a conflict with a faculty or staff member, were also significant predictors of stress.     

To participate or not to participate: that is the question

Do I wish to participate or not to participate in this program? That is the question that young people ask themselves when considering a new opportunity. What can be done to increase the likelihood that they will choose to participate in out-of-school-time (OST) programs? This chapter describes a qualitative study that examined reasons for participating or not participating in OST programs. Some common reasons emerged, but the study also revealed differences among youth from different ethnic groups. It is clear that those who design and conduct programs must understand the processes through which diverse adolescents initiate their participation in programs and either persist or drop out. Given the apparent benefits of active participation in youth programs, it is important to remove barriers and increase access and, equally important, design programs that are of interest to youth in the contexts in which they live.     

A Semi-parametric Bayesian Analysis of Survival Data Based on Lévy-driven Processes

In the presence of covariate information, the proportional hazards model is one of the most popular models. In this paper, in a Bayesian nonparametric framework, we use a Markov (Lévy-driven) process to model the baseline hazard rate. Previous Bayesian nonparametric models have been based on neutral to the right processes, which have a number of drawbacks, such as discreteness of the cumulative hazard function. We allow the covariates to be time dependent functions and develop a full posterior analysis via substitution sampling. A detailed illustration is presented.     

Random Weighted Bootstrap Method for Recurrent Events with Informative Censoring

Using the data from the AIDS Link to Intravenous Experiences cohort study as an example, an informative censoring model was used to characterize the repeated hospitalization process of a group of patients. Under the informative censoring assumption, the estimators of the baseline rate function and the regression parameters were shown to be related to a latent variable. Hence, it becomes impractical to directly estimate the unknown quantities in the moments of the estimators for the bandwidth selection of a smoothing estimator and the construction of confidence intervals, which are respectively based on the asymptotic mean squared errors and the asymptotic distributions of the estimators. To overcome these difficulties, we develop a random weighted bootstrap procedure to select appropriate bandwidths and to construct approximated confidence intervals. One can see that our method is simple and faster to implement from a practical point of view, and is at least as accurate as other bootstrap methods. In this article, it is shown that the proposed method is useful through the performance of a Monte Carlo simulation. An application of our procedure is also illustrated by a recurrent event sample of intravenous drug users for inpatient cares over time.     

Measuring The Effects Of Race Differentials In Mortality Upon Surviving Family Members

A model is developed to use marital history data from the U.S. Current Population Survey and mortality statistics from the federal registration system to estimate color differences in (a) the risk of widowhood among women in the working ages and (b) the cumulative duration of widowhood. Color differentials in mortality among married males are thereby translated into person-years of dependent survivorship among women, in anticipation of our later estimating average and cumulative lifetime income losses for the survivors. Initial results of this model, dealing with the demographic aspects of survivorship, are presented.