Testing an Economic Model of Nonprofit Growth: Analyzing the Behaviors and Decisions of Nonprofit Organizations,Private Donors,and Governments

This study draws an economic model of the growth of nonprofit organizations by analyzing the behaviors of three major actors—nonprofit organizations, private donors, and governments—in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources for nonprofit services. Since decisions made by each actor affect resource allocation, it is important to understand what drives these decisions. The model was tested using an unbalanced, 463 panel dataset collected from 28 OECD countries over a 23-year period. The results indicated that macro- and micro-economic trends and government policies framed the decision premises of the three major actors, which led them to leverage the supply and demand for goods and services and, in turn, determined how they allocated limited resources for nonprofit services. This result implies that understanding the interdependencies of all sectors of the economy is critical to comprehending the size and development of the nonprofit sector. Effective management of micro-economic policies and macro-economic stability is necessary. More important, however, is understanding how a decision in one part of the economy will have intended and unintended effects on the nonprofit sector.     

Religious Attendance,Stress, and Happiness in South Korea: Do Gender and Religious Affiliation Matter?

Is religious attendance positively associated with happiness in South Korea? If yes, can religious attendance buffer against the harmful effect of stress on happiness? Moreover, do gender and religious affiliation modify these associations? This study addresses these questions with data from 2009 Korean General Social Survey which is a nationally representative survey (N = 1,599). Ordinal least square regression analyses reveal that although the effect size is relatively small, religious attendance is associated with a higher level of happiness in South Korea. However, this positive effect holds only for women and only for Protestants. In addition, an interaction effect between religious attendance and stress is observed for women only; the negative association between stress and happiness is weakened among those women who report more frequent church attendance. In this regard, a high level of church attendance buffers against the deleterious effects of stress on happiness for women. I discuss the implications of the findings with regard to theories about religion, mental health, and gender in South Korean context.     

The Effects of Corporate Elitism and Groupthink on Organizational Empathy in Crisis Situations

This study is to empirically testify that corporate elitism is an antecedent to groupthink, which prevents organizational empathy from working effectively in crises. The current study is expected to expand the boundary of crisis management literature into a company’s crisis-preparedness before a crisis occurs. The findings offer the useful guidance to organizations on how to better manage their crisis proneness through identifying the early signs of corporate elitism and groupthink.     

What makes hybrid insourcing successful: A new public–private partnership model for social welfare services

Outsourcing has been a key policy tool for delivering a range of social services, and regarded as more effective than insourcing or direct government provision. At the same time, it has also caused many delivery issues such as principal‐agent problems, a lack of policy coordination, and poor‐quality welfare services. While the pendulum continues to swing between insourcing and outsourcing, we aim to propose a new public–private partnership model called the “hybrid insourcing model” and examine which factors influence the performance of the model. In South Korea, around 2010, the local government in Namyangju City was the first to implement the “Hope Care Center model,” a kind of hybrid insourcing model, which has been praised for its innovation and widely emulated by central and local governments. Our analysis utilizes data collected between December 2017 and January 2018 from public sector employees and civilian staff in Namyangju and a comparable city, A. From this, we draw a number of implications, both for theory and for policy. We argue that, for public–private partnerships, active cooperation and equality are the biggest factors in contributing to positive performance. These work alongside leaders with a clear vision and with employees' positive attitude.     

Modified linear discriminant analysis using block covariance matrix in high-dimensional data

Among many classification methods, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a favored tool due to its simplicity, robustness, and predictive accuracy but when the number of genes is larger than the number of observations, it cannot be applied directly because the within-class covariance matrix is singular. Also, diagonal LDA (DLDA) is a simpler model compared to LDA and has better performance in some cases. However, in reality, DLDA requires a strong assumption based on mutual independence. In this article, we propose the modified LDA (MLDA). MLDA is based on independence, but uses the information that has an effect on classification performance with the dependence structure. We suggest two approaches. One is the case of using gene rank. The other involves no use of gene rank. We found that MLDA has better performance than LDA, DLDA, or K-nearest neighborhood and is comparable with support vector machines in real data analysis and the simulation study.     

Predictive factors of acculturation attitudes and social support among Asian immigrants in the USA

This study examines acculturation attitude and its relation to social support among Asian immigrants. The data were collected from 242 Korean, Indian and Filipino immigrants in the USA using the Acculturation Attitude Scale and the Social Support Index. Findings showed that Koreans had a less positive attitude toward acculturation than did Indian and Filipino participants. Acculturation attitude was positively correlated with educational level and English fluency. This study also found a negative correlation between acculturation attitude and social support. Social support from friends and English fluency were identified as significant predictor variables in determining the level of acculturation attitude. These findings not only contribute to social work education and practice, but also increase cultural sensitivity and awareness in working with these populations.     

Bayesian variable selection approach to a Bernstein polynomial regression model with stochastic constraints

This paper provides a Bayesian estimation procedure for monotone regression models incorporating the monotone trend constraint subject to uncertainty. For monotone regression modeling with stochastic restrictions, we propose a Bayesian Bernstein polynomial regression model using two-stage hierarchical prior distributions based on a family of rectangle-screened multivariate Gaussian distributions extended from the work of Gurtis and Ghosh [7 S.M. Curtis and S.K. Ghosh, A variable selection approach to monotonic regression with Bernstein polynomials, J. Appl. Stat. 38 (2011), pp. 961–976. doi: 10.1080/02664761003692423[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]]. This approach reflects the uncertainty about the prior constraint, and thus proposes a regression model subject to monotone restriction with uncertainty. Based on the proposed model, we derive the posterior distributions for unknown parameters and present numerical schemes to generate posterior samples. We show the empirical performance of the proposed model based on synthetic data and real data applications and compare the performance to the Bernstein polynomial regression model of Curtis and Ghosh [7 S.M. Curtis and S.K. Ghosh, A variable selection approach to monotonic regression with Bernstein polynomials, J. Appl. Stat. 38 (2011), pp. 961–976. doi: 10.1080/02664761003692423[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] for the shape restriction with certainty. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method that incorporates the uncertainty of the monotone trend and automatically adapts the regression function to the monotonicity, through empirical analysis with synthetic data and real data applications.     

We Don’t Belong Here: Adolescents of North Korean Refugee Families and Their Suicidal Behaviors

Despite the increasing number of studies that examine the link between immigration and suicide in Korean youths, most have focused on self-harming behaviours among adolescents in multicultural families, while much less attention has been directed towards those in North Korean (NK) refugee families. This paper addresses this gap by comparing three determinants of suicidal behaviours across three groups of Korean adolescents. Data are drawn from the KYRBS, a nationally representative sample of students in middle and high schools, and the results indicate that NK youths were 87.2 per cent more likely to have suicidal ideation than their South Korean peers, that they are 3.7 times more likely to experience suicidal plans and 4.1 times more likely to attempt suicide. These results clearly suggest that immigrant youths, including NK refugees, are confronting significant difficulties with assimilation, and those disadvantages lead to a higher propensity of self-threatening behaviours.