Design of ISD-1: an instrument for social diagnosis in care homes for older persons*

This article describes the design process and main features of an instrument developed for use in the specialist area of intervention in care homes for older persons. The essential aim of ISD-1 (instrument for social diagnosis) is to permit the correct formulation of social diagnoses and to standardise and define the professional language used by social workers. Its content has been organised into 4 dimensions of social diagnosis, divided into 15 sub-dimensions containing 83 diagnostic categories. This work was performed in Spain, in the 24 care homes of the Madrid Social Care Agency of the Community of Madrid, involving the participation of the 40 social workers practising in these centres. ISD-1 is an easily understood and used tool, of potential use for social workers practising in care homes for older persons and capable of being adapted for use in other institutional environments, as well as being capable of adaptation and translation for its application in other countries.     

Control centers design for ergonomics and safety

This paper shows the general design conditions about ergonomics and safety for control centers in the petrochemical process industry. Some of the topics include guidelines for the optimized workstation design, control room layout, building layout, and lighting, acoustical and environmental design. Also takes into account the safety parameters in the control rooms and centers design. The conditions and parameters shown in this paper come from the standards and global advances on this topic on the most recent publications. And also the work was supplemented by field visits of our team to the control center operations in a petrochemical company, and technical literature search efforts. This guideline will be useful to increase the productivity and improve the working conditions at the control rooms.     

Modeling healthcare costs in simultaneous presence of asymmetry,heteroscedasticity and correlation

Highly skewed outcome distributions observed across clusters are common in medical research. The aim of this paper is to understand how regression models widely used for accommodating asymmetry fit clustered data under heteroscedasticity. In a simulation study, we provide evidence on the performance of the Gamma Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) and log-Linear Mixed-Effect (LME) model under a variety of data-generating mechanisms. Two case studies from health expenditures literature, the cost of strategies after myocardial infarction randomized clinical trial on the cost of strategies after myocardial infarction and the European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel hospital prevalence survey of pressure ulcers, are analyzed and discussed. According to simulation results, the log-LME model for a Gamma response can lead to estimations that are biased by as much as 10% of the true value, depending on the error variance. In the Gamma GLMM, the bias never exceeds 1%, regardless of the extent of heteroscedasticity, and the confidence intervals perform as nominally stated under most conditions. The Gamma GLMM with a log link seems to be more robust to both Gamma and log-normal generating mechanisms than the log-LME model.     

Trouble en Route: Drug Trafficking and Clientelism in Rio de Janeiro Shantytowns

This article examines the ways that endemic drug trafficking has affected local level politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of political exchanges in the 1998 national elections in three favelas (shantytowns), I argue that drug trafficking has changed the practice of clientelism. Evidence and analysis in this paper will show that the persistence of drug trafficking in the city has led to the emergence of a two-tiered clientelist system in which politicians make exchanges with traffickers who then, in turn, provide some benefits to favela residents in return for their votes. This results in an arrangement that provides votes to politicians and limited assistance to the poor but does little to build the legitimacy of the political system.

Telephone survey respondents' reactions to questions regarding interpersonal violence

Concerns have been raised regarding the appropriateness of asking about violence victimization in telephone interviews and whether asking such questions increases respondents' distress or risk for harm. However, no large-scale studies have evaluated the impact of asking such questions during a telephone interview. This study explored respondents' reactions to questions regarding violence in two large recently completed telephone surveys. After respondents were asked about violence, they were asked if they thought surveys should ask such questions and whether they felt upset or afraid because of the questions. In both surveys, the majority of respondents (regardless of their victimization history) were willing to answer questions about violence and were not upset or afraid because of the questions. More than 92% of respondents thought such questions should be asked. These results challenge commonly held beliefs and assumptions and provide some assurance to those concerned with the ethical collection of data on violent victimization.     

Bayesian sample size determination for phase IIA clinical trials using historical data and semi‐parametric prior's elicitation

The Simon's two‐stage design is the most commonly applied among multi‐stage designs in phase IIA clinical trials. It combines the sample sizes at the two stages in order to minimize either the expected or the maximum sample size. When the uncertainty about pre‐trial beliefs on the expected or desired response rate is high, a Bayesian alternative should be considered since it allows to deal with the entire distribution of the parameter of interest in a more natural way. In this setting, a crucial issue is how to construct a distribution from the available summaries to use as a clinical prior in a Bayesian design. In this work, we explore the Bayesian counterparts of the Simon's two‐stage design based on the predictive version of the single threshold design. This design requires specifying two prior distributions: the analysis prior, which is used to compute the posterior probabilities, and the design prior, which is employed to obtain the prior predictive distribution. While the usual approach is to build beta priors for carrying out a conjugate analysis, we derived both the analysis and the design distributions through linear combinations of B‐splines. The motivating example is the planning of the phase IIA two‐stage trial on anti‐HER2 DNA vaccine in breast cancer, where initial beliefs formed from elicited experts' opinions and historical data showed a high level of uncertainty. In a sample size determination problem, the impact of different priors is evaluated.     

Using housing items to indicate socioeconomic status: Latin America

This note explores the possibility of using physical housing quality information from censuses to help indicate socioeconomic status, particularly that of children, elderly people and women in developing areas such as Latin America. We develop a comparative scale from six housing items (wall material, floor material, roof material, availability of electricity, type of sewerage and water facilities) since these items are recommended by the U.N., tend to be present in most housing censuses, tend to be highly related to each other and tend to have a similar valuation. A more basic three-item scale, consisting of the last three items listed above, is also discussed because this scale might be even more widely available while providing valuable, aggregated, information. The six-item and three-item scales correlate highly with each other. There is a wide range among Latin American countries in people's distribution along the scales but the scales themselves seem applicable everywhere. Not only have they been proving useful in our own research, but both scales correlate fairly well with a country's infant mortality rate on the aggregate level and with an individual's educational attainment among men and women 15 to 59 and among elderly people 60 years of age and older.     

Analysis of ergonomics conditions of a brand of mattress and pillows. University-industry project, Medellín-Colombia

This project presents an analysis of the ergonomic conditions of three types of mattress and three types of pillow. The products are manufactured by a Colombian company which specializes in flexible polyurethane foam and other products designed for rest and relaxation. The project was developed through the University - Industry relationship: a strategic partnership based on the knowledge and strengths of each component. The conceptual theories that underpin the Ergonomics Research Division of the Design Studies Research Group (GED) provided the methodological approach for the project: the characteristics, the requirements and the relationships that are established between the components that constitute the User - Product - Context system (basic principles of the Ergonomics - Design relationship). An important factor in the project was the conception and measurement of comfort. Comfort can be measured on an objective level (quantitative measurement), and on a subjective level (a user's particular perceptions and tastes). What constitutes 'comfort' can vary from person to person, thus making the identification of criteria for the standardization of consumer products problematic. This project enabled design recommendations to be made to the Company vis-à-vis future proposals for mattress and pillow products. This experience of applied research was carried out by professors and students from the Faculty of Industrial Design at the UPB in Medellín, Colombia.