Empathy and professional attitude in social workers and non-trained aides

The purpose of this study was to investigate empathic communication and professional attitude in vocational groups representing different levels of professional training. A further aim was to elucidate some aspects of the impact of the clients. Four groups of professionals participated, three with degrees as social workers and one with only short professional training. Three groups worked with committed drug addicts, one group with somatically ill patients. The 110 subjects were tested with a video-test of professional attitude and empathic communication. Different response patterns were found in the different groups. The group with short training had the highest proportion of unprofessional responses. The group of social workers working with somatically ill patients showed the highest amount of empathic communication. Furthermore, there was a distinction among the kind of unprofessional responses used by the different groups. Hypotheses on the causes of these differences and implications for future research are discussed.     

Primary care networks: choose your physicians wisely

As hospitals and health care systems maneuver for a position in the integrated health care delivery system, no initiative is more important than building an effective and competitive primary care network. Yet this critical initiative is fraught with potential pitfalls. In their haste to develop primary care networks, hospitals and health care systems may fail to thoroughly evaluate network participants and in turn create large, inclusive, and inefficient primary care networks that don't come close to breaking even, much less repay practice acquisition costs. In an effort to become more efficient, practitioners often find themselves in the unenviable position of "de-selecting" peers retrospectively. The author presents criteria for evaluating and selecting network physicians.     

A Forecast Model for Unemployment by Education

ABSTRACT We present a dynamic forecast model for the labour market: demand for labour by education and the distribution of labour by education among industries are determined endogenously with overall demand by industry given exogenously. The model is derived from a simple behavioural equation based on a strong relationship between the “strength” in the struggle for jobs of an educational group, and the change in relative supply. This relationship proves to be significant in the data. Furthermore, when used to forecast employment by education on real data, the model predicts reasonably well even for educational groups, where the initial forecast year is a change point for unemployment.     

Decomposing primary and secondary effects: A new decomposition method

One strand of educational inequality research aims at decomposing the effect of social class origin on educational choices into primary and secondary effects. We formalize this distinction and present a new and simple method that allows empirical assessment of the relative magnitudes of primary and secondary effects. Contrary to other decomposition methods, this new method is unbiased, is more intuitive, and decomposes effects of both discrete and continuous measures of social origin. The method also provides analytically derived statistical tests and is easily calculated with standard statistical software. We give examples using the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Youth.     

Trust in surveys and games – A methodological contribution on the influence of money and location

This paper explores methods to study trust. In a variety of settings, answers to survey questions and choices in a trust game are obtained from student sample pools. Some subjects are approached by mail and execute their task at home whereas others participate in classroom experiments. No differences between the results obtained by these methods are observed. Furthermore, one additional group plays the trust game with purely hypothetical payments, and another receives random lottery payments. This changes trust behavior dramatically, whereas trustworthiness is unaffected. Subjects without any financial incentives exhibit less trust and their trust choices are significantly correlated with survey trust answers. There is no such correlation for the corresponding choices with real payments.     

Simultaneous estimation of location and dispersion in two-level fractional factorial designs

The reduction of variation is one of the obvious goals in quality improvement. The identification of factors aff ecting the dispersion is a step towards this goal. In this paper, the problem of estimating location effects and dispersion eff ects simultaneously in unreplicated factorial experiments is considered. By making a one-to-one transformation of the response variables, the study of the quadratic functions becomes clearer. The transformation also gives a natural motivation to the model of the variances of the original variables. The covariances of the transformed responses appear as parameters in the variances of the original variables. Results of Hadamard products are used for deriving these covariances. The method of estimating dispersion effects is shown in two illustrations. In a 24 factorial design, the essential covariance matrix of the transformed variables is also presented. The method is also illustrated in a 25-1 fractional design with a model which is saturated in this context.     

GRIND OR GAMBLE? AN EXPERIMENT ON EFFORT AND SPREAD SEEKING IN CONTESTS

We conduct a contest experiment to study if spread seeking and effort can be managed when participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in accordance with theory, we observe higher investments in spread for the winner-take-all scheme. Both types of investments can be controlled with a three-level prize scheme. However, the control management is imperfect and behavior is characterized by inertia. We also explore the correlation between effort and spread across subjects and find that is robustly positive.     

Confidence sets of fixed size with predetermined confidence level

In this paper a three stage method to obtain a confidence sets of given form and size, with a preassigned confidence coefficient, is suggested for the case of normally distributed observations from populations with different means and common unknown variance. The method is quite general, and it allows for most common forms of confidence sets. Asymptotic properties of the random sample sizes of the method are studied and compared to the same properties of other methods with the same aim.