Social marketing to eliminate leprosy in Sri Lanka

Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease which, if untreated, can lead to permanent and progressive nerve damage and thus to deformities of the limbs, eyes, and face. People with leprosy have long been ostracized by society. The clinical signs of leprosy include insensitive skin lesions and thickened peripheral nerves. Untreated infectious leprosy cases are the main source of infection, transmitting the disease through nasal secretions. People with low cell-mediated immunity are at risk of developing clinically active leprosy irrespective of gender, age, or social class. The World Health Organization (WHO) has, since 1982, recommended multiple drug therapy (MDT) against leprosy, an approach capable of curing the disease within 1 year and interrupting its transmission. According to WHO, leprosy is currently a public health problem in 55 countries and more than 20% of the estimated 1.15 million cases of leprosy worldwide remain undetected. Although Sri Lanka was the first country in South Asia to provide MDT to all registered leprosy patients, first making it available in 1984, the disease continues to be transmitted due to the large number of undetected cases in the country. An ongoing social marketing program was therefore launched in 1990 by the local health ministry and the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development to eliminate leprosy from Sri Lanka. The program encourages people with suspicious skin lesions to seek diagnosis and care, teaches health care providers to recognize leprosy and refer cases for treatment, and helps the general public to understand that leprosy is just a normal disease. The socially marketed product is MDT, provided free-of-charge by the Novartis Foundation to all leprosy patients.     

Market Orientation, Innovativeness, Product Innovation, and Performance in Small Firms

Most research on market orientation, innovation and performance is related to big enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this study a model is developed to investigate the combined effect of market orientation and innovativeness on product innovation and company performance, for small firms. A specific feature of our research is that we use an objective measure for product innovation in contrast to the self-reported measures commonly used in research on innovation. To test our model data from 152 rose growers were used. This study's results show that the owner's innovativeness permeates all variables in the model and has a positive influence on market orientation, innovation, and performance. An interesting research result is also that customer market intelligence influences product innovation positively or negatively, depending on whether the innovativeness of the owner in the new product domain is weak or strong.     

Capital market efficiency and the relationship between equity returns, interest rates, and monetary aggregates in Australia

This paper examines the efficiency with which the Australian share market incorporates new information relating to interest rates and the monetary aggregates into share prices. It finds a strong relationship between medium term government security yields and equity returns although little relationship could be found between unanticipated changes in the monetary aggregates and share returns. Furthermore, the interest rate relationship involved long lags and suggests inefficiency in stock market pricing in Australia.     

Gender disparities: a medical detoxification program

Significant gaps exist in health care regarding gender in the United States. Health status, social roles, culturally patterned behavior and access to health care can be influenced by gender. Women have been the primary users of health care and minority women usually have received poorer quality care than Non-Hispanic White (NHW) females. The objectives of this study were to identify gender, racial and ethnic disparities in access to substance abuse treatment in a Texas hospital. Secondary data collected on 1,309 subjects who underwent detoxification were studied. Gender, race/ethnicity, drug of abuse, relapse and financial classification were included in the analysis. Results indicate Hispanic females and Non-Hispanic Black (NHB) females were about 5 and 3.5 more likely than NHW females to use Medicaid services respectively (p < .05). NHW and NHB males were more likely to use Medicare than females (p < .05). NHB and Hispanic females were 5.8 and 2.1 times more likely to receive care for abuse of cocaine when compared to NHW females respectively (p < .05). Hispanic females were 2.3 times more likely to relapse than Non-Hispanic females, and uninsured NHB females were 7.1 times at a higher risk to abuse multiple drugs compare to NHW females (p < .05). Socio-economic factors, lower labor force participation rates, and less financial independence can explain females utilizing more often Medicaid regardless of their race/ethnicity. These results can be also explained by aggressive case management utilization, socio cultural barriers and/or discriminatory practices, both intentional and unintentional.     

Value Congruence Awareness: Part 2. DNA Testing Sheds Light on Functionalism

Part 1 of this exploratory study demonstrated that for terminal, instrumental, and work values, supervisors could only accurately assess the extent to which their terminal values are congruent with their employees, whereas, employees could only accurately describe degrees of alignment with their supervisors' work values. Thus, supervisors appear to possess conscious awareness of the terminal values held by their employees and employees similarly possess conscious awareness of their supervisors' work values. Part 2 of the study examined what each of these two parties might do with their conscious knowledge concerning value congruence with the other member. Supervisor ratings and employee self-ratings concerning employee job performance, citizenship, climate fit, working relationship (LMX), and other issues, were correlated with supervisor terminal value congruence estimates and employee work value congruence estimates respectively. For supervisors, only one significant finding was noted, indicating a positive relationship between the supervisors' awareness of terminal value congruence with the employee and the supervisors' estimate of the employee's potential for future promotion. For employees, seven hypotheses received support demonstrating relationships between the employees' 0awareness of supervisor/employee work value congruence and self-ratings of work behaviours, citizenship behaviours, volunteerism behaviours, work climate behaviours, work climate attitudes, work climate organizational-wide attitudes, and the supervisor/employee working relationship. Implications for management and future research are discussed.     

Decline and variability in brand loyalty

In this paper, we examine the over-time behavior of brand loyalty for a large set of brands drawn from 21 consumer packaged goods categories. Using the brand-loyalty operationalization of Colombo and Morrison (1989), the following conclusions are obtained. First, little support is found for the often-heard contention that brand loyalty is gradually declining over time. Second, while the short-run variability around a brand's mean loyalty level is not negligible, no evidence is found that this variability has systematically increased over time, and it can be reduced considerably through a simple smoothing procedure. Finally, the brand-loyalty pattern for market-share leaders is found to be more stable than for other brands. The study findings were robust to variation in the time interval used to construct the switching matrices, and to different treatments of multiple purchases.