Unveiling the Canvas Ceiling: A Multidisciplinary Literature Review of Refugee Employment and Workforce Integration

Increasing levels of displacement and the need to integrate refugees in the workforce pose new challenges to organizations and societies. Extant research on refugee employment and workforce integration currently resides across various disconnected disciplines, posing a significant challenge for management scholars to contribute to timely and relevant solutions. In this paper, we endeavour to address this challenge by reviewing and synthesizing multidisciplinary literature on refugee employment and workforce integration. Using a relational framework, we organize our findings around three levels of analysis – institutional, organizational and individual – to outline the complexity of factors affecting refugees’ employment outcomes. Based on our analysis, we introduce and elaborate on the phenomenon of the canvas ceiling ? a systemic, multilevel barrier to refugee workforce integration and professional advancement. The primary contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we map and integrate the multidisciplinary findings on the challenges of refugee workforce integration. Second, we provide management scholarship with a future research agenda to address the knowledge gap identified in this review and advance practical developments in this domain.     

Health insurance literacy: A mixed methods study of college students

Objective: This study examines the health insurance literacy, or the ability to use health insurance effectively, of college students. Participants: A total of 455 students from a large, public university completed an online questionnaire in November 2016. Methods: A questionnaire examined students’ knowledge of commonly encountered health insurance terms and ability to apply that knowledge to determine cost-sharing in a clinical setting. Results: The majority of students were able to correctly identify the most commonly encountered terms, but could not identify terms related to plan types and options. Eighty-eight percent of students could not determine their cost-sharing for two presented scenarios. Approximately half of the students indicated they had been confused about their health insurance plan, with one-quarter of students stopping or delaying medical care due to confusion. Conclusions: Outreach and education for students should target specific deficits in knowledge such as those identified in this study.     

ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN AIR POLLUTION AND HOSPITAL VISITS FOR CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES IN THE ELDERLY IN SYDNEY USING BAYESIAN STATISTICAL METHODS

Using generalized linear models (GLMs), Jalaludin  et al. (2006;  J. Exposure Analysis and Epidemiology   16 , 225–237) studied the association between the daily number of visits to emergency departments for cardiovascular disease by the elderly (65+) and five measures of ambient air pollution. Bayesian methods provide an alternative approach to classical time series modelling and are starting to be more widely used. This paper considers Bayesian methods using the dataset used by Jalaludin  et al.  (2006) , and compares the results from Bayesian methods with those obtained by Jalaludin  et al.  (2006) using GLM methods.     

An Empirical Model of Perceived Mortality Risks for Selected U.S. Arsenic Hot Spots

Researchers have long recognized that subjective perceptions of risk are better predictors of choices over risky outcomes than science‐based or experts’ assessments of risk. More recent work suggests that uncertainty about risks also plays a role in predicting choices and behavior. In this article, we develop and estimate a formal model for an individual's perceived health risks associated with arsenic contamination of his or her drinking water. The modeling approach treats risk as a random variable, with an estimable probability distribution whose variance reflects uncertainty. The model we estimate uses data collected from a survey given to a sample of people living in arsenic‐prone areas in the United States. The findings from this article support the fact that scientific information is essential to explaining the mortality rate perceived by the individuals, but uncertainty about the probability remains significant.     

A Tighter Extra-Resource Analysis of Online Deadline Scheduling

This paper is concerned with online algorithms for scheduling jobs with deadlines on a single processor. It has been known for long that unless the system is underloaded, no online scheduling algorithm can be 1-competitive, i.e., matching the performance of the optimal offline algorithm. Nevertheless, recent work has revealed that some online algorithms using a moderately faster processor (or extra processors) can guarantee very competitive performance Kalyanasundaram and Pruhs, 2000 or even be 1-competitive Koo et al., 2002; Lam and To, 2001. This paper takes a further step to investigate online scheduling algorithms with an even higher performance guarantee (i.e., better than 1-competitive algorithms) and in particular, presents an extra-resource analysis of the earliest-deadline-first strategy (EDF) with respect to such a higher performance guarantee.A preliminary version of this paper has been accepted by The Australian Theory Symposium on Computing, 2004.This research was supported in part by Hong Kong RGC Grant HKU-7024/01E.     

On the mean L1-error in the heteroscedastic deconvolution problem with compactly supported noises

We study the heteroscedastic deconvolution problem when random noises have compactly supported densities. In this context, the Fourier transforms of the densities can vanish on the real line. We propose a truncated type of estimator for target density and derive the convergence rate of the mean L¹-error uniformly over a class of target densities. A lower bound for the mean L¹-error is also established. Some simulations will be given to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimator.     

Understanding Sheng Nu (“Leftover Women”): the Phenomenon of Late Marriage among Chinese Professional Women

In the past few decades, there has been a rise in the number of single, unmarried Chinese professional women, which is known as the sheng nu or “leftover women” phenomenon. Through an interactionist grounded theory method, this study has located the interactional constraints faced by 50 single Chinese professional women that were issued by their male romantic partners and parents, respectively. “Discriminatory” and “controlling” gendered constraints issued by the women's male suitors and partners reflected the persistence of the Chinese patriarchal structure, and this was found to be the leading cause of the women being “leftover” in the marriage market. Parents' traditional views continued to exert strong influences on the women's marital choices, but this was seen to conflict with their more “modern” views toward advocating and supporting the women's strong economic achievements. The four different types of Chinese professional women that were constructed based on their different partner choice strategies not only gave rise to an in‐depth and nuanced understanding of the sheng nu phenomenon in China, but could also be generalized toward understanding the marital choices of single professional women in other patriarchal societies who faced similar dilemmas in reconciling interactional constraints imposed by men and parents alike.     

A pragmatic adaptive enrichment design for selecting the right target population for cancer immunotherapies

One of the challenges in the design of confirmatory trials is to deal with uncertainties regarding the optimal target population for a novel drug. Adaptive enrichment designs (AED) which allow for a data-driven selection of one or more prespecified biomarker subpopulations at an interim analysis have been proposed in this setting but practical case studies of AEDs are still relatively rare. We present the design of an AED with a binary endpoint in the highly dynamic setting of cancer immunotherapy. The trial was initiated as a conventional trial in early triple-negative breast cancer but amended to an AED based on emerging data external to the trial suggesting that PD-L1 status could be a predictive biomarker. Operating characteristics are discussed including the concept of a minimal detectable difference, that is, the smallest observed treatment effect that would lead to a statistically significant result in at least one of the target populations at the interim or the final analysis, respectively, in the setting of AED.     

Generational Differences in Work Values,Perceived Job Rewards,and Job Satisfaction of Chinese Female Migrant Workers: Implications for Social Policy and Social Services

This cross-sectional survey study is a pioneering attempt to investigate the generational differences in the work values, perceived job rewards, and job satisfaction of Chinese female migrant workers. The study targeted two toy factories in the Guangdong Province of China and recruited a total of 1,307 female workers as participants. Among them were 577 female migrant workers who comprised the target group for this research. The authors hypothesized that the younger generation of female migrant workers would have higher levels of cognitive work values (such as self-enhancement and career development) but lower levels of perceived job rewards and job satisfaction than those of the older generation. The results indicate that there are no generational differences in work values among the three birth cohorts of Chinese female migrant workers. The older generation felt more satisfied with the job rewards that they received, and their sense of job satisfaction was higher than that of the younger generation. Furthermore, the findings showed a substantial positive influence of perceived social job rewards (such as support from co-workers and supervisors) on job satisfaction among the younger generation. The current findings suggest that in China, generational differences in work are affected by both the generation factor and the rural–urban stratification factor. The authors hope that the study will provide a knowledge base for understanding the perceptions of Chinese female migrant workers toward work and for exploring the ways in which new policies and social services can be developed in order to address their needs.