Multilevel community health promotion: How can we make it work?

The need for multilevel, comprehensive health promotion programmeshas become widely accepted, as has the importance of communityapproaches. However, many health promotion programmes focuson change at the individual level, no doubt partly due to thedifficulty of implementing all-inclusive health promotion. Thispaper discusses two strategies for guiding multilevel projects:multiple methods for community assessment and charting projectactivities by level of change (a possibility framework). Thesestrategies help ensure a multilevel focus and provide valuableinformation that can assist with the implementation of multilevelhealth promotion research projects in specific community contexts.Our primary purpose, therefore, is not to focus on theory orresearch findings. Rather, our goal is to make visible two strategiesthat have been helpful in one health promotion research projectin Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.     

Contributors to disruption and dissolution of older-child adoptions

According to recent evidence, adoptive placements that do not work out are increasingly common. This article reviews research on rates of, and contributors to, adoption and "foster-adoption" disruptions and dissolutions. Implications for practice are included.     

Restructuring of the Financial Industry: The Disappearance of Locally Owned Traditional Financial Services in Rural America

Restructuring in the financial services industry has altered the relationship between small business owners and capital. In the past small businesses have relied on relational, or soft data, lending from locally owned banks for capital. The proliferation of absentee‐owned local branch networks brought standardized practices, thus eliminating the autonomy of local loan officers to utilize soft data in loan decisions. In this article we examine the changes in the percentage of traditional financial services that are locally owned in three county types: metropolitan, micropolitan, and noncore. We utilize the Longitudinal Business Database at the U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies. We examine changes in local ownership of traditional financial services between 1976 and 2007. We find that the rate of decline of local ownership has been greatest in the noncore (most rural) counties. We also explore to what extent these patterns are related to the emergence of alternative financial services during the same period. We find that such alternative services are growing in all three county types, but at rates not significantly different than the population growth for these county types. We supplement our analysis with data from qualitative interviews with small business owners throughout rural Texas. We conclude with a discussion of implications and plans for future research.     

African-American and white inequality in the nineteenth century American South: a biological comparison

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic history. By using a new source of nineteenth century Texas state prison records, the present study contrasts the heights of comparable blacks and whites between the Civil War and Reconstruction in the American South. White stature exceeded black stature. Between 1850 and 1870, black stature declined by more than 1 cm but recovered toward the end of the nineteenth century. Postbellum white stature declined by more than 1 1/2 cm over the same period yet never recovered.

The network of global corporations and elite policy groups: a structure for transnational capitalist class formation?

This study situates five top transnational policy–planning groups within the larger structure of corporate power that is constituted through interlocking directorates among the world's largest companies. Each group makes a distinct contribution towards transnational capitalist hegemony both by building consensus within the global corporate elite and by educating publics and states on the virtues of one or another variant of the neo–liberal paradigm. Analysis of corporate–policy interlocks reveals that a few dozen cosmopolitans – primarily men based in Europe and North America and actively engaged in corporate management – knit the network together via participation in transnational interlocking and/or multiple policy groups. As a structure underwriting transnational business activism, the network is highly centralized, yet from its core it extends unevenly to corporations and individuals positioned on its fringes. The policy groups pull the directorates of the world's major corporations together, and collaterally integrate the lifeworld of the global corporate elite, but they do so selectively, reproducing regional differences in participation. These findings support the claim that a well–integrated global corporate elite has formed, and that global policy groups have contributed to its formation. Whether this elite confirms the arrival of a transnational capitalist class is a matter partly of semantics and partly of substance.     

Business games and implementation research

This paper reviews some recent research in OR implementation and suggests that a new approach is required, which will take fuller account of the perceptions of managers concerned with the problem. Research games in business settings seem to offer a means for such approach. Some lessons learned from a business game used in this way are described and their implications for modelbuilders are discussed.     

Some computational problems related to multinomial trials

Efficient numerical algorithms are developed to evaluate several probabilities related to multinomial trials.In the first part of the paper, the probability distribution of the number of trials until the alternatives j, j = 1,… m, have occurred at least i_j times is computed. The multinomial trials involve the m alternatives l,…, m, with positive probabilities P_l-P_m of occurrence. In the second part, several aspects of a multinomial subset selection problem, discussed by S. S. Gupta and K. Nagel, are investigated.     

Be gentle about death ... and leave the balcony open

This meditation on advance directives shows how such documents are part of a larger social movement. People are now reclaiming the right to direct their own dying, a process that requires the active support of the community around them.