What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action,temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

Theory and Society - The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior...     

Estimation of location extremes within general families of scale mixtures

In this paper, we study the estimation of the minimum and maximum location parameters, respectively, representing the minimum guaranteed lifetime of series and parallel systems of components, within a general class of scale mixtures. The conditional or underlying distribution has only the primary restriction of being a location-scale family with positive support. The mixing distribution is also quite general in that we only assume that it has positive support and finite second moment. For demonstrative purposes several special cases are highlighted such as the gamma, inverse-Gaussian, and discrete mixture. Various estimators, including bootstrap bias corrected estimators, are compared with respect to both mean-squared-error and Pitman's measure of closeness.     

Discrete time modelling of disease incidence time series by using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods

Summary.  A stochastic discrete time version of the susceptible–infected–recovered model for infectious diseases is developed. Disease is transmitted within and between communities when infected and susceptible individuals interact. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to make inference about these unobserved populations and the unknown parameters of interest. The algorithm is designed specifically for modelling time series of reported measles cases although it can be adapted for other infectious diseases with permanent immunity. The application to observed measles incidence series motivates extensions to incorporate age structure as well as spatial epidemic coupling between communities.     

Triangle plots of three-level explanatory variables

Thalassaemias are genetic blood disorders which cause varying degrees of anaemia. Their geographical distribution suggests a compensating protection against malaria, which kills between 0.5 and 2.5 million people per year in developing countries. Neal Alexander describes a study in Papua New Guinea which estimated this association more directly, and a triangle plot which clarified, for himself and his non-statistician colleagues, the relative risks of malaria for those with none, one or two copies of the relevant haemoglobin mutation.     

The State of Care Management in Learning Disability and Mental Health Services 12 Years into Community Care

This paper reports on the organization of care management froma longitudinal study of community care for people resettledfrom long-stay learning disability and psychiatric hospitals.The findings from a 12-year follow-up of care management arrangementsin 12 learning disability and eight mental health study siteservices are described. The diversity of care management arrangementsfound at earlier points in the evaluation remained evident.Also, many of the former ‘care in the community’service users were excluded from mainstream care managementarrangements in their localities. The difficulty of developingperson-centred arrangements in learning disability and the lackof integration of the Care Programme Approach and care managementwere evident. The findings and observations are placed in thewider policy and practice context, with suggestions for takingcare management forward nationally and locally.     

Effects of Category Order on Answers in Mail and Telephone Surveys1

Abstract Past research suggests that mail surveys encourage a primacy effect, which is a tendency to choose the first answers from a list, whereas telephone surveys encourage a recency effect, a tendency to choose the last answers from a list. This paper summarizes results from 82 new experiments conducted in 12 separate surveys in seven states. Only four of 33 mail survey comparisons exhibited significant primacy effects, while five of 26 experiments in telephone surveys exhibited recency effects. In addition, only three of 23 cross-method comparisons produced a significant primacy/recency effect in the expected manner. The conclusion is that the prevalence of primacy and recency effects has been over-estimated by past research and a new theoretical approach that takes into account multiple causation is needed for examining these effects.