The Performance of the World Health Organization’s WHOQOL-BREF in Assessing the Quality of Life of Thai College Students

The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of the Thai-version of WHOQOL-BREF in assessing the quality of life (QoL) among Thai college students. The psychometric properties of WHOQOL-BREF were assessed in this study. The self-administered WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was applied. A total of 407 Thai college students (male age = 20.5 ± 1.2; female age = 20.5 ± 1.2) participated in this study. Item-response distributions, internal consistency reliability, discriminant validity, criterion-related validity and construct validity through confirmatory analysis were analyzed. The findings indicate that the WHOQOL-BREF had acceptable internal consistency (α = 0.73–0.83 across four domains), all items highly correlated with corresponding domain scores (r = 0.53–0.80), the indices of a two-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrate that the data fit the model well with allowing covary of error variances of some items, all items had good property of criterion-related validity and item discrimination and, all three domain scores except the social relationship domain had significant associations with overall QoL or general health. The results suggest that the WHOQOL-BREF was reliable and valid to health professionals in the assessment of the QoL of college-based Thai youth, but some unsuitable items may be deleted in future studies.     

Power Mapping: Enhancing Sociological Knowledge by Developing Generalizable Analytical Public Tools

In this article, I argue for and illustrate ‘power mapping’ as a concrete research approach that can benefit specific publics while enhancing professional sociological knowledge and theory. I present power mapping as an example of a more broad approach to public sociology which seeks to harness sociological theory and knowledge in order to create generalizable analytical tools that social movements, policy makers, concerned citizens, voluntary associations, and community organizations can use to develop their own strategic assessments of the sociological contexts in which they act. One of the ironies of the current discussion of public sociology is that it has been conducted in an abstract, hyper-theoretical discourse which is precisely one of the factors that has disconnected so much sociology from general publics. In this article, I instead turn towards presenting a specific concrete research strategy which could engender mutually beneficial research collaboration and dialogue between sociologists and specific publics.     

Subset Selection Toward Optimizing the Best Performance at a Second Stage

In the search for the best of n candidates, two-stage procedures of the following type are in common use. In a first stage, weak candidates are removed, and the subset of promising candidates is then further examined. At a second stage, the best of the candidates in the subset is selected. In this article, optimization is not aimed at the parameter with largest value but rather at the best performance of the selected candidates at Stage 2. Under a normal model, a new procedure based on posterior percentiles is derived using a Bayes approach, where nonsymmetric normal (proper and improper) priors are applied. Comparisons are made with two other procedures frequently used in selection decisions. The three procedures and their performances are illustrated with data from a recent recruitment process at a Midwestern university.     

‘Look at me! Oh Lord have mercy!’: images of roller-coaster riders and the work of self-recognition

The omnipresence of screens in contemporary life presents an unprecedented variety of ways of displaying as well as ways of seeing, reacting to and consuming images. This paper focuses on commercial and mediatised leisure spaces in the shape of theme parks and on on-site procedures of production and display of images of roller-coaster riders. Contemporary roller-coaster machines combine speed with high-resolution photography, to supply an enmeshed, mobile-cum-visual product, and the study asks how the images are displayed – by the corporations who run the theme parks and how they are received – by the consumers. First, the material settings in which images of roller-coaster riders are produced and displayed are explored, and then the ‘work’ that viewers engage in when they see themselves is addressed ethnographically in detail: What discursive actions and reactions are publicly performed when consumers face their images? I conceptualise the activities of viewing, and specifically of viewing images of oneself, as ‘work’, a concept which I borrow from Erving Goffman (as in ‘face-work’) and, more recently, from Mark Andrejevic (‘the work of watching’). By using qualitative and ethnographic methods, the study supplies up-close observations and analyses of the media spaces and logic in contemporary amusement parks, and the ‘work’ that viewers undertake when confronted with their images. This study contributes to our understanding of the proliferation of images of oneself in leisure and tourism, of the mediatisation of consumer publics, and of consumers’ activities of viewing their images and reacting to them when the latter are displayed commercially on public screens.     

Total business strategy—the missing link

‘Total Business Strategy’ is the missing link between the aloof ‘Mission Statement’ and the particular ‘Functional Strategies’, that will make strategy formulation more implementation oriented. Total Business Strategy addresses five strategic questions:

• 1. 

  1.|What are our markets? What are the needs (existing or to be developed) of the markets and customers that our firm wants to satisfy?

• 2. 

  2.|What should be our ‘generic’ competitive advantage?

• 3. 

  3.|Are we going to be technology leaders or followers?

• 4. 

  4.|What is our attitute to risk? What risks, and to what extent are we willing to take?

• 5. 

  5.|What are our long range quantitative targets?

     

THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND QUITTING IN HIGH POWER TOURNAMENTS

Tournaments may be characterized by the performance they induce as well as by the rate of quitting and dropouts of participants. Although most of the attention in the literature is on the performance induced by high power incentives, there are many daily situations in which dropouts and quitting are a major concern. Using a field experiment in schools and a model of dynamic tournament we examine the effect of different levels of rewards on the rate of quitting. Our experiment indicates that there is a possible tradeoff between performance and quitting. Strong incentives tournaments induced participants to exert more effort and exhibit a better performance but, at the same time, it induces a higher rate of quitting. We present a multi‐stage tournament model that gives rise to a similar characterization.     

“OK guys,thank you for coming today”: Indexicality,utterance events,and verbal rituals in political speeches in Sheikh Jarrah

This ethnography looks at the indexical function of several brief utterances, routinely employed by a Palestinian speechmaker, in the Sheikh Jarrah protest in East Jerusalem. Following Silverstein's contributions to the indexically based theory of (meta)pragmatics, “creative” and nonreferential utterances are examined at the utterance event level, in relation to the speech event level, and more generally to verbal rituals. The political speeches I study have been delivered weekly, in Hebrew, by a Sheikh Jarrah resident and activist, for over a decade. The ethnographic analysis depicts how the utterances create a physical and symbolic (rhetorical) space for the performance of the speeches, routinize and ritualize their recurrence, and secure their endurance in a hostile environment. This is accomplished by spatially disassembling and reassembling the protesters, modifying the participation structure, and establishing a host–guest relationship. The speaker is repositioned as a resident, activist, and political rhetor-in-the-becoming, and the protestors are repositioned as his audience.