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.     

Voluntary childlessness in the Netherlands

Until recently, Holland has had a high birth rate and a low employment rate for married women when compared with other industrialized countries. This high rate, together with (since 1920) the lowest death rate in Northwestern Europe, has constituted a bona fide demographic anomaly. Nevertheless, the picture is now changing rapidly. In spite of the still traditional pronatalistic socialization, a remarkable rise in voluntary childlessness is taking shape. Author's Note: Thanks are due Professor Larry D. Barnett, who helped me to make my English understandable to more people than myself.     

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.     

Women under protection – in hiding from violent men

In Sweden in 2007, 11,047 people, out of a population of around nine million were living under at-risk conditions requiring protective measures for their safety. Sixty per cent were women, most of them hiding from men who had battered them and were still threatening and stalking them. In this research and intervention study, a group of women in hiding were given different kinds of support and 23 women were interviewed. These women struggle to make a living, work or study, and their finances are extremely strained. Their social networks/interactions are nonexistent. Living under constant threat and insecurity has an adverse impact on the women's health. The community is obliged, for economic and security reasons, to support battered women. There are still severe shortcomings with regard to security. One recommendation is the institution of personal protection officers, i.e. specially trained social service caseworkers able to support the woman once protection measures have been decided.     

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.     

Mixed Messages: Inconsistent Parental Mediation Indirectly Predicts Teens’ Online Relational Aggression

Although the predictors of off-line relational aggression have been examined in prior work, less is known about the factors that contribute to online relational aggression perpetration and victimization. This study examined parental restrictive and active mediation of teenagers’ social media use as potential predictors of these outcomes. We were particularly interested in understanding whether parental agreement about media rules and the consistency with which mediation was implemented had implications for teens’ social media use, conflict with parents, and experience with online relational aggression. We conducted an online survey of 814 adolescents from the United States (14- to17-year-olds), asking about perceived agreement between parents about media rules, parental mediation styles, the teens’ social media use, and their experiences with online relational aggression. Results showed that parental rule agreement negatively predicted inconsistent parental mediation. Inconsistent parental mediation predicted more adolescent social media use and more parent-teen conflict over media rules, which in turn, predicted both online victimization and perpetration.     

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.