Consumer involvement in health research: a UK scoping and survey

Consumer involvement or patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research is a UK policy imperative and a prerequisite for many funders. PPI in research is defined as research carried out with or being carried out by the public (or service users), rather than research on patients and public as subjects or participants. Despite the clear policy driver, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the extent, processes and impact of user involvement in research. This paper aims to add to the international evidence base on PPI in research by providing a key overview of current trends and impacts. In order to understand the current extent and variation of PPI in research, a scoping exercise and survey were carried out on selected UK studies. Six research topic areas (cystic fibrosis, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and public health) were selected to ensure a range of designs, study populations and histories of PPI in research. A total of 838 studies (non‐commercial studies and not older than 2 years) were contacted. The response rate for the scoping was 38% and the survey 28%. In the scoping, 51% of studies had some evidence of PPI and in the survey 79%. The most common PPI activity was steering committee membership and reviewing patient information leaflets. There appeared to be some blurred roles with patients participating as research subjects as well as carrying out patient involvement roles. A major finding was the limited amount of available information about PPI in publicly accessible research documents. We suggest that the invisibility of this type of involvement and the lack of routinely collected information about PPI results in a lack of shared understanding of what optimal PPI in a study should look like, with important implications for practice. Furthermore, without a framework to review PPI it is difficult to know if different approaches to PPI have a different impact on key outcomes of the research.     

Do People Value The Welfare Of Farm Animals?

Public concern over farm animal welfare has led to the banning of a number of intensive farming methods such as sow stalls, battery cages (by 2012) and veal crates, and the development of high welfare status products sold at a price premium. This indicates that consumers value farm animal welfare. In addition satisfaction can also be derived, by consumers and non‐consumers of animal products, from the knowledge that all animals are experiencing welfare‐enhancing husbandry practices. Consequently farm animal welfare can be considered a complex good, sought partly for private consumption and as a public good. However, improving the welfare of all farm animals through legislation incurs costs ‐ are these increased costs of food production justified? We use contingent valuation to determine the economic value of improving the welfare of farm animals and find that people are willing to pay extra on their weekly food bill to ensure that laying hens, broiler chickens dairy cows and pigs have improved welfare conditions. The benefits of improving animal welfare are shown to exceed the costs of implementing these schemes. We conclude that improving the standards of legislation for farm animal welfare so that all farm animals experience higher standards of welfare can be economically justified.     

How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project Star

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings. Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3—as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores—have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades, but gains in noncognitive measures persist.     

Reacting to the demands of service work: emotional resistance in the Coaching Inn Company

This paper discusses employee resistance to the emotional labour of face-to-face service work. It identifies a difficulty with the extension of the concept of resistance from the more traditional manufacturing industries to service work, asking how far apparently resistant behaviours can sensibly be conceptualised as a challenge to management control of the labour process. This difficulty is explored through a discussion of data drawn from ethnographic research into a chain of public houses. Various forms of resistant behaviour are identified, although the precise nature of this resistance is often blurred by the complex relations between employee, management and customer.     

LIFE IN THE CELL: SUPERVISION AND TEAMWORK IN A ‘MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS ENGINEERING’ ENVIRONMENT

David Buchanan, Professor of Human Resource Management and Diane Preston, Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour, at the University of Loughborough Business School present the findings of a case study which explores the implications of manufacturing systems engineering (MSE) for the role of foremen and for shopfloor autonomy in an engineering company, Moore Components. MSE is a currently fashionable socio-technical systems approach to production facility design, combining aspects of group technology, cell autonomy, ‘facilitative’ supervision, and just-in-time workflow. The case is used to identify key aspects of emerging new manufacturing methods, to indicate the potential of these methods for developments in work organisation and management practice, and to demonstrate how specific HRM policies can inhibit or facilitate the changes in supervision and teamwork which MSE ostensibly encourages.     

The Transformation of Work on the Family Farm

The family farm is not simply a structure — it is also an adjustment and negotiation process that has varying degrees of success. In our society, formal training is becoming a prerequisite — many believe one needs a diploma to become a competent farmer. However, the denigration of “on-the-job training” undermines an essential facet of learning to be a farmer and debases the acquired skills of many farmer “artisans”. With the strong swing to link formal training and identity, many farmers create negative identities for themselves because they feel forced to define themselves socially on the basis of their level of formal schooling. The challenge for the future is to recognize, to integrate and to valorize formal abstract knowledge and the know-how that is acquired and passed to the next generation through practice.     

Wage and Nonwage Discrimination in Professional Basketball: Do Fans Affect It?

A bstract . Recent research suggests there is substantial wage discrimination against blacks in professional basketball , and that fans are the source of this discrimination. The use of multiple regression analysis does indicate a salary shortfall for black players of fourteen to sixteen percent compared with salaries of white players with comparable on-court performance. To see whether this shortfall is likely to be due to fan discrimination as the relatively scarce white talent is bid into cities with many white fans, the racial composition of teams is related to the proportion of black residents among the populations of franchise cities. There is statistically significant evidence of geographical sorting by race. Evidence of racial bias is less obvious in contexts where a team's performance would be jeopardized, however. Thus, no evidence is found that fan attendance moves inversely with the percentage of playing time accorded black players, and only weak evidence is found that black players have to be better than white players to enter the National Basketball Association (NBA).     

Survivor Swaps

A survivor swap (SS) is an agreement to exchange cash flows in the future based on the outcome of at least one survivor index. This article discusses the possible uses of SSs as instruments for managing, hedging, and trading mortality‐dependent risks. SSs are especially useful for insurance companies, but also offer other interested parties low beta avenues into the acquisition of mortality risk exposure. The article also investigates vanilla SSs in some detail, and suggests how their premiums and values might be determined in an incomplete market setting.     

The importance of gender for participation in and attitudes to trade unionism

This article attempts to establish the main determinants of an employee's involvement in trade unionism, and to explain the male/female differential in union participation. Women, especially parttime workers, are less likely to participate in union meetings than men, which seems largely attributable to women's lower favourability to trade unions, although women are as likely as men to believe in the principles of trade unionism.