Discretionary Use of Computers: An Empirically Derived Explanatory Model*

This study identifies variables that explain variations in computer use. Factor analysis of data gathered from 422 business administration faculty reveal eight themes among the independent variables. Seven of these factors significantly discriminate among non, minimal, and high users. These results suggest an empirical model for future studies and provide policy insights for decision makers seeking to stimulate computer usage. Additionally, the study shows that there is much commonality between the previously separate organizational innovation and information systems implementation streams. It also demonstrates that motivation theory may be a valid framework within which to study computer use.     

Strategies for Implementing a Tobacco-Free Campus Policy

Abstract

This report examines the rationale for creating a tobacco-free campus to utilize in passing antitobacco policies, and recommendations for overcoming barriers. As with any type of advocacy effort, a variety of impediments exist, including lack of administrative and staff support, absence of student involvement, and sparse resources. A variety of potential remedies and advocacy opportunities are explored and delineated.     

Mothers’ Sexual Identity and Children’s Health

Sexual minority women face a plethora of structural, socioeconomic, and interpersonal disadvantages and stressors. Research has established negative associations between women’s sexual minority identities and both their own health and their infants’ birth outcomes. Yet a separate body of scholarship has documented similarities in the development and well-being of children living with same-sex couples relative to those living with similarly situated different-sex couples. This study sought to reconcile these literatures by examining the association between maternal sexual identity and child health at ages 5–18 using a US sample from the full population of children of sexual minority women, including those who identify as mostly heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, regardless of partner sex or gender. Analyses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N?=?8978) followed women longitudinally and examined several measures of their children’s health, including general health and specific developmental and physical health conditions. Analyses found that children of mostly heterosexual and bisexual women experienced health disadvantages relative to children of heterosexual women, whereas the few children of lesbian women in our sample evidenced a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. These findings underscore that to understand sexual orientation disparities and the intergenerational transmission of health, it is important to incorporate broad measurement of sexual orientation that can capture variation in family forms and in sexual minority identities.

     

Children's Voices: The Views of Vulnerable Children on Their Service Providers and the Relevance of Services They Receive

This paper describes and analyses the views of vulnerable childrenof eleven years and under on the relevance of services theyreceived. The two research questions posed were, first, whatare effective practices for engaging with vulnerable children;and, second, how can the voices of vulnerable children be usedto influence the development of policy? The first question wasaddressed through a systematic review of existing literatureon effective strategies for interviewing vulnerable childrenand revealed that few studies that focus on interviewing youngchildren are designed to address effectiveness. As yet, notall young children are asked for their views by those makingdecisions about their lives, though their involvement increaseswith age. The second question was addressed through focus groupsand interviews which revealed that children hold many validviews related to their roles and relationships with serviceproviders and decisions being made concerning their lives. Itwas concluded that whilst children’s lived experienceof services they receive could contribute to the creation ofmore democratic communities in which children and their familiesparticipate, it remains to be seen whether the new Green Paper,Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003), increases their sense of autonomyor merely extends the degree to which they are controlled.     

Strategies for implementing a tobacco-free campus policy

This report examines the rationale for creating a tobacco-free campus to utilize in passing antitobacco policies, and recommendations for overcoming barriers. As with any type of advocacy effort, a variety of impediments exist, including lack of administrative and staff support, absence of student involvement, and sparse resources. A variety of potential remedies and advocacy opportunities are explored and delineated.     

Models of cognition and affect in perceptions of well-being

How do people arrive at assessments of their own life quality? A series of models was developed to provide an interpretation of the way the factors of cognition and affect operate along with evaluations of specific life concerns (domains) in the perception of well-being. Following previous research, cognition was defined operationally as a factor which accounts for the covariance among a set of assessments of life-as-a-whole after affect, as measured by Bradburn's scales, is partialled out and after allowance is made for the presence of correlated measurement errors. It was found that loadings on the cognitive factor, and hence the interpretation of this factor, changed little despite quite large changes in the models. Moreover, in all major comparisons, models that contained the cognitive factor fitted the data better than models that did not. Models that included affect as the only variable intervening between the domains and the life-as-a-whole factor led to results that were intuitively difficult to accept. In the preferred model both affect and cognition were positioned as intervening variables. In this model it was found that the domain evaluations had no direct impact on life-as-a-whole assessments — the contribution of the domains was indirect by way of their association with cognition and affect. It was hypothesised that associated with each domain was a domain-specific element of affect and a domain-specific element of cognition. The linear additive relation found by previous researchers between domain evaluations and life-as-a-whole assessments would then be explainable as a statistical result arising from the summing of the domain-specific elements of affect and cognition.     

Cognition and affect in perceptions of well-being

The general characteristics and some possible implications of the distinction between cognition and affect in the perception of well-being are reviewed. It is posited that currently-used rating-scale indicators of perceived well-being differ only marginally in the extent to which they are compounds of both factors, and consequently variables that move differently and possibly strongly on the underlying factors will have only muted relationships with the indicators. Two kinds of secondary analyses of data from recent American Surveys are presented which support and amplify this hypothesis, along with some British data. The first kind focusses on the area of non-overlap between happiness and life satisfaction ratings by dichotomising and cross-tabulating the two indicators, and then observing what further variables change diagnostically between appropriate cells of the 2×2 table. Differential trends with age and education, barely discernible in straightforward correlations against the indicators now emerge strongly, along with further interesting differences for other outside variables, notably enjoyment-of-life, affect balance, income and personal competence. The second kind of analysis draws on data sets which include Bradburn's affect balance scales along with a range of global ratings of subjective well-being. The considerable variance in the global ratings which remains after the affect scales are partialled out, and allowance is made for correlated method effects, is attributed to cognition. Starting points are then explored for analysing the role of cognition and affect more exactly by means of path models which include the cognitive factor as an unobserved variable.     

An engineer's approach to the development of real anti-aging medicine

In this Viewpoint, I list the various age-related molecular and cellular changes that are thought to limit mammalian life-span, and I outline a problem-solving approach to reversing these detrimental changes. This approach should help to prevent the development of these age-related changes into life-threatening pathologies and possibly, in due course, allow a large increase in healthy human life expectancy.