A bibliometric approach demonstrates the impact of a social care data set on research and policy

Religion is important in the lives of many ex-offenders. This study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study data set to examine the impact of religiosity on criminal desistance and drug use among delinquent White, Black, and Hispanic youth. Results from mixed-effects longitudinal analyses revealed that religiosity was a significant predictor of lower criminal offending and substance use for White youth postconviction, controlling for changes in employment, social support, and delinquent peer association. Although religiosity was associated with lower substance use among Black youth, it was not associated with lower criminal offending among Black or Hispanic youth. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and policy, particularly the need for resources.

Download Full-text

Innovation and the performance of informal enterprises in developing countries: a gender perspective

International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship ◽

10.1108/ijge-11-2020-0174 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Elvis Korku Avenyo ◽

Erika Kraemer-Mbula

Keyword(s):

Product Innovation ◽

Business Performance ◽

Design Methodology ◽

Data Set ◽

Content Type ◽

Factors Affecting ◽

Product Innovations ◽

Innovative Products ◽

The Impact ◽

Research And Policy

Purpose Examining the impact of gender on various aspects of business performance has gained research and policy traction, although the empirical evidence remains inconclusive. This paper aims to focus on one type of business, namely, informal enterprises and one dimension of business performance, namely, product innovation, to better understand how product innovations affect employment in both female- and male-owned informal enterprises. Design/methodology/approach This paper relies on a unique data set of 513 informal enterprises located in two urban centres in Ghana (Accra and Tema), covering the period between 2013 and 2015 and the Dose-Response Model to examine the effect of product innovations on employment in informal enterprises in urban Ghana. Findings The findings suggest that product innovation has considerable beneficial impacts on the creation of employment in informal enterprises. The results do not show systematic differences in the factors affecting product innovation in female- and male-owned enterprises. However, they suggest that although female-owned enterprises are less likely to introduce product innovations, they do sell more innovative products. Originality/value These findings support the view that innovation is “gendered”, and therefore, requires a “gendered” policy lens.

Download Full-text

Age at Exposure to Parental Suicide and the Subsequent Risk of Suicide in Young People

Crisis ◽

10.1027/0227-5910/a000468 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 39 (1) ◽

pp. 27-36 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Kuan-Ying Lee ◽

Chung-Yi Li ◽

Kun-Chia Chang ◽

Tsung-Hsueh Lu ◽

Ying-Yeh Chen

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Proportional Hazards ◽

Proportional Hazards Model ◽

Cox Proportional Hazards ◽

Cox Proportional Hazards Model ◽

Birth Registry ◽

Data Set ◽

Parental Suicide ◽

The Impact ◽

Age At Exposure

Abstract. Background: We investigated the age at exposure to parental suicide and the risk of subsequent suicide completion in young people. The impact of parental and offspring sex was also examined. Method: Using a cohort study design, we linked Taiwan's Birth Registry (1978–1997) with Taiwan's Death Registry (1985–2009) and identified 40,249 children who had experienced maternal suicide (n = 14,431), paternal suicide (n = 26,887), or the suicide of both parents (n = 281). Each exposed child was matched to 10 children of the same sex and birth year whose parents were still alive. This yielded a total of 398,081 children for our non-exposed cohort. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to compare the suicide risk of the exposed and non-exposed groups. Results: Compared with the non-exposed group, offspring who were exposed to parental suicide were 3.91 times (95% confidence interval [CI] = 3.10–4.92 more likely to die by suicide after adjusting for baseline characteristics. The risk of suicide seemed to be lower in older male offspring (HR = 3.94, 95% CI = 2.57–6.06), but higher in older female offspring (HR = 5.30, 95% CI = 3.05–9.22). Stratified analyses based on parental sex revealed similar patterns as the combined analysis. Limitations: As only register-based data were used, we were not able to explore the impact of variables not contained in the data set, such as the role of mental illness. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a prominent elevation in the risk of suicide among offspring who lost their parents to suicide. The risk elevation differed according to the sex of the afflicted offspring as well as to their age at exposure.

Download Full-text

State Medical Boards' Perceptions of a Minimum Data Set and Current Practices for Collecting Physician Information

Journal of Medical Regulation ◽

10.30770/2572-1852-99.4.40 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 99 (4) ◽

pp. 40-45 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Aaron Young ◽

Philip Davignon ◽

Margaret B. Hansen ◽

Mark A. Eggen

Keyword(s):

Media Coverage ◽

The United States ◽

Minimum Data Set ◽

Direct Patient Care ◽

Physician Workforce ◽

Data Set ◽

Minimum Data ◽

State Medical Boards ◽

The Impact ◽

Current Practices

ABSTRACT Recent media coverage has focused on the supply of physicians in the United States, especially with the impact of a growing physician shortage and the Affordable Care Act. State medical boards and other entities maintain data on physician licensure and discipline, as well as some biographical data describing their physician populations. However, there are gaps of workforce information in these sources. The Federation of State Medical Boards' (FSMB) Census of Licensed Physicians and the AMA Masterfile, for example, offer valuable information, but they provide a limited picture of the physician workforce. Furthermore, they are unable to shed light on some of the nuances in physician availability, such as how much time physicians spend providing direct patient care. In response to these gaps, policymakers and regulators have in recent years discussed the creation of a physician minimum data set (MDS), which would be gathered periodically and would provide key physician workforce information. While proponents of an MDS believe it would provide benefits to a variety of stakeholders, an effort has not been attempted to determine whether state medical boards think it is important to collect physician workforce data and if they currently collect workforce information from licensed physicians. To learn more, the FSMB sent surveys to the executive directors at state medical boards to determine their perceptions of collecting workforce data and current practices regarding their collection of such data. The purpose of this article is to convey results from this effort. Survey findings indicate that the vast majority of boards view physician workforce information as valuable in the determination of health care needs within their state, and that various boards are already collecting some data elements. Analysis of the data confirms the potential benefits of a physician minimum data set (MDS) and why state medical boards are in a unique position to collect MDS information from physicians.

Download Full-text

The Impact of Green Labels on U.S. Hotel Net Operating Income: Operating Statements Analyses

Journal of Sustainable Real Estate ◽

10.22300/1949-8276.11.1.156 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 156-173

Author(s):

Spenser Robinson ◽

A.J. Singh

Keyword(s):

Environmental Design ◽

Green Buildings ◽

Small Sample ◽

Sample Survey ◽

Data Set ◽

Operating Income ◽

Energy Star ◽

The Impact ◽

Industry Professionals

This paper shows Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified hospitality properties exhibit increased expenses and earn lower net operating income (NOI) than non-certified buildings. ENERGY STAR certified properties demonstrate lower overall expenses than non-certified buildings with statistically neutral NOI effects. Using a custom sample of all green buildings and their competitive data set as of 2013 provided by Smith Travel Research (STR), the paper documents potential reasons for this result including increased operational expenses, potential confusion with certified and registered LEED projects in the data, and qualitative input. The qualitative input comes from a small sample survey of five industry professionals. The paper provides one of the only analyses on operating efficiencies with LEED and ENERGY STAR hospitality properties.

Download Full-text

Does Tax Increment Financing Pass the “But-for” Test in Missouri?

Economic Development Quarterly ◽

10.1177/0891242419859097 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 33 (3) ◽

pp. 187-202

Author(s):

Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi ◽

T. William Lester

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

Kansas City ◽

Time Series Data ◽

Local Level ◽

Conclusive Evidence ◽

Series Data ◽

Tax Increment Financing ◽

Data Set ◽

Development Indicators ◽

The Impact

The use of tax increment financing (TIF) remains a popular, yet highly controversial, tool among policy makers in their efforts to promote economic development. This study conducts a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of Missouri’s TIF program, specifically in Kansas City and St. Louis, in creating economic opportunities. We build a time-series data set starting 1990 through 2012 of detailed employment levels, establishment counts, and sales at the census block-group level to run a set of difference-in-differences with matching estimates for the impact of TIF at the local level. Although we analyze the impact of TIF on a wide set of indicators and across various industry sectors, we find no conclusive evidence that the TIF program in either city has a causal impact on key economic development indicators.

Download Full-text

Evaluation of the Aging Behavior of High Density Polyethylene in Thermal Oxidative Environment by Principal Component Analysis

Key Engineering Materials ◽

10.4028/www.scientific.net/kem.727.447 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 727 ◽

pp. 447-449 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jun Dai ◽

Hua Yan ◽

Jian Jian Yang ◽

Jun Jun Guo

Keyword(s):

Principal Component Analysis ◽

Impact Strength ◽

High Density Polyethylene ◽

Tensile Modulus ◽

Principal Component ◽

Component Analysis ◽

High Density ◽

Aging Behavior ◽

Data Set ◽

The Impact

To evaluate the aging behavior of high density polyethylene (HDPE) under an artificial accelerated environment, principal component analysis (PCA) was used to establish a non-dimensional expression Z from a data set of multiple degradation parameters of HDPE. In this study, HDPE samples were exposed to the accelerated thermal oxidative environment for different time intervals up to 64 days. The results showed that the combined evaluating parameter Z was characterized by three-stage changes. The combined evaluating parameter Z increased quickly in the first 16 days of exposure and then leveled off. After 40 days, it began to increase again. Among the 10 degradation parameters, branching degree, carbonyl index and hydroxyl index are strongly associated. The tensile modulus is highly correlated with the impact strength. The tensile strength, tensile modulus and impact strength are negatively correlated with the crystallinity.

Download Full-text

Investigating the impact of pre-processing techniques and pre-trained word embeddings in detecting Arabic health information on social media

Journal Of Big Data ◽

10.1186/s40537-021-00488-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Yahya Albalawi ◽

Jim Buckley ◽

Nikola S. Nikolov

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Comprehensive Evaluation ◽

Classification Problem ◽

Data Sets ◽

Word Embeddings ◽

Data Set ◽

Lower Accuracy ◽

Health Related ◽

The Impact

AbstractThis paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of data pre-processing and word embedding techniques in the context of Arabic document classification in the domain of health-related communication on social media. We evaluate 26 text pre-processings applied to Arabic tweets within the process of training a classifier to identify health-related tweets. For this task we use the (traditional) machine learning classifiers KNN, SVM, Multinomial NB and Logistic Regression. Furthermore, we report experimental results with the deep learning architectures BLSTM and CNN for the same text classification problem. Since word embeddings are more typically used as the input layer in deep networks, in the deep learning experiments we evaluate several state-of-the-art pre-trained word embeddings with the same text pre-processing applied. To achieve these goals, we use two data sets: one for both training and testing, and another for testing the generality of our models only. Our results point to the conclusion that only four out of the 26 pre-processings improve the classification accuracy significantly. For the first data set of Arabic tweets, we found that Mazajak CBOW pre-trained word embeddings as the input to a BLSTM deep network led to the most accurate classifier with F1 score of 89.7%. For the second data set, Mazajak Skip-Gram pre-trained word embeddings as the input to BLSTM led to the most accurate model with F1 score of 75.2% and accuracy of 90.7% compared to F1 score of 90.8% achieved by Mazajak CBOW for the same architecture but with lower accuracy of 70.89%. Our results also show that the performance of the best of the traditional classifier we trained is comparable to the deep learning methods on the first dataset, but significantly worse on the second dataset.

Download Full-text

Recruiting hard-to-reach pregnant women at high psychosocial risk: strategies and costs from a randomised controlled trial

Trials ◽

10.1186/s13063-021-05348-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Alice MacLachlan ◽

Karen Crawford ◽

Shona Shinwell ◽

Catherine Nixon ◽

Marion Henderson

Keyword(s):

Pregnant Women ◽

Randomised Controlled Trials ◽

Social Care ◽

Early Years ◽

Controlled Trials ◽

Recruitment Strategies ◽

Recruitment Activities ◽

Research Nurses ◽

Randomised Controlled ◽

The Impact

Abstract Background Recruiting participants to randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is often challenging, particularly when working with socially disadvantaged populations who are often termed ‘hard-to-reach’ in research. Here we report the recruitment strategies and costs for the Trial for Healthy Relationship Initiatives in the Very Early years (THRIVE), an RCT evaluating two group-based parenting interventions for pregnant women. Methods THRIVE aimed to recruit 500 pregnant women with additional health and social care needs in Scotland between 2014 and 2018. Three recruitment strategies were employed: (1) referrals from a health or social care practitioner or voluntary/community organisation (practitioner-led referral), (2) direct engagement with potential participants by research staff (researcher-led recruitment) and (3) self-referral in response to study advertising (self-referral). The number of referrals and recruited participants from each strategy is reported along with the overall cost of recruitment. The impact of recruitment activities and the changes in maternity policy/context on recruitment throughout the study are examined. Results THRIVE received 973 referrals: 684 (70%) from practitioners (mainly specialist and general midwives), 273 (28%) from research nurses and 16 (2%) self-referrals. The time spent in antenatal clinics by research nurses each month was positively correlated with the number of referrals received (r = 0.57; p < 0.001). Changes in maternity policies and contexts were reflected in the number of referrals received each month, with both positive and negative impacts throughout the trial. Overall, 50% of referred women were recruited to the trial. Women referred via self-referral, THRIVE research nurses and specialist midwives were most likely to go on to be recruited (81%, 58% and 57%, respectively). Key contributors to recruitment included engaging key groups of referrers, establishing a large flexible workforce to enable recruitment activities to adapt to changes in context throughout the study and identifying the most appropriate setting to engage with potential participants. The overall cost of recruitment was £377 per randomised participant. Conclusions Recruitment resulted from a combination of all three strategies. Our reflections on the successes and challenges of these strategies highlight the need for recruitment strategies to be flexible to adapt to complex interventions and real-world challenges. These findings will inform future research in similar hard-to-reach populations. Trial registration International Standard Randomised Controlled Trials Number Registry ISRCTN21656568. Retrospectively registered on 28 February 2014

Download Full-text

The patient advisor, an organizational resource as a lever for an enhanced oncology patient experience (PAROLE-onco): a longitudinal multiple case study protocol

BMC Health Services Research ◽

10.1186/s12913-020-06009-4 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

Author(s):

M. P. Pomey ◽

M. de Guise ◽

M. Desforges ◽

K. Bouchard ◽

C. Vialaron ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Cancer Patients ◽

Clinical Oncology ◽

Patient Experience ◽

Emotional Support ◽

Social Care ◽

Legal Issues ◽

Care Services ◽

Health And Social Care ◽

Ethical And Legal Issues ◽

The Impact

Abstract Background Quebec is one of the Canadian provinces with the highest rates of cancer incidence and prevalence. A study by the Rossy Cancer Network (RCN) of McGill university assessed six aspects of the patient experience among cancer patients and found that emotional support is the aspect most lacking. To improve this support, trained patient advisors (PAs) can be included as full-fledged members of the healthcare team, given that PA can rely on their knowledge with experiencing the disease and from using health and social care services to accompany cancer patients, they could help to round out the health and social care services offer in oncology. However, the feasibility of integrating PAs in clinical oncology teams has not been studied. In this multisite study, we will explore how to integrate PAs in clinical oncology teams and, under what conditions this can be successfully done. We aim to better understand effects of this PA intervention on patients, on the PAs themselves, the health and social care team, the administrators, and on the organization of services and to identify associated ethical and legal issues. Methods/design We will conduct six mixed methods longitudinal case studies. Qualitative data will be used to study the integration of the PAs into clinical oncology teams and to identify the factors that are facilitators and inhibitors of the process, the associated ethical and legal issues, and the challenges that the PAs experience. Quantitative data will be used to assess effects on patients, PAs and team members, if any, of the PA intervention. The results will be used to support oncology programs in the integration of PAs into their healthcare teams and to design a future randomized pragmatic trial to evaluate the impact of PAs as full-fledged members of clinical oncology teams on cancer patients’ experience of emotional support throughout their care trajectory. Discussion This study will be the first to integrate PAs as full-fledged members of the clinical oncology team and to assess possible clinical and organizational level effects. Given the unique role of PAs, this study will complement the body of research on peer support and patient navigation. An additional innovative aspect of this study will be consideration of the ethical and legal issues at stake and how to address them in the health care organizations.

Download Full-text