Validity of parent's self-reported responses to home safety questions

The aim of the study was to describe the validity of parent's self-reported responses to questions on home safety practices for children of 2–4 years. A cross-sectional validation study compared parent's self-administered responses to items in the Home Injury Prevention Survey with home observations undertaken by trained researchers. The relationship between the questionnaire and observation results was assessed using percentage agreement, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and intraclass correlation coefficients. Percentage agreements ranged from 44% to 100% with 40 of the total 45 items scoring higher than 70%. Sensitivities ranged from 0% to 100%, with 27 items scoring at least 70%. Specificities also ranged from 0% to 100%, with 33 items scoring at least 70%. As such, the study identified a series of self-administered home safety questions that have sensitivities, specificities and predictive values sufficiently high to allow the information to be useful in research and injury prevention practice.     

Why Global Policy Co-ordination Is Crucial?

How times change! Months ago,world leaders gathered at the London Summit and agreed to co-ordinate economic policies.     

Social inequalities in injury risk in Wales,U.K.

Road traffic accident data in Nigeria generally lack exact coordinate information. Accident analysis is, therefore, restricted to aggregate data on trends, magnitude and temporal dimensions. This article addresses the road accident problem in Jos between 1995 and 1999 through a road profiling approach. Results show that four gateway routes, seven multilane roadways (including two gateway routes) and seven road intersections accounted for 84% of all traffic accidents, 84% of injured casualties and 88% of fatalities. This approach allows for quantification of impacts of controlling for accidents by deliberate profiling of roads for close monitoring and policing. For example, reducing accident counts and fatalities by 50% each on gateway routes will amount to ～35 and 40% reduction in accident and fatality counts, respectively. Countermeasures must consider these roadways and intersections as important inputs in their accidents and casualty reduction targets.     

How is macro news transmitted to exchange rates?

Macro news can affect currency prices directly and indirectly via order flow. Past research shows that the direct effects of scheduled macro news account for less than 10% of daily price variance. This paper shows that the arrival of macro news can account for more than 30% of daily price variance. Two features of our analysis account for this finding: (1) We consider the broad spectrum of macro news items that market participants observe, not just scheduled announcements. (2) We allow the arrival of news to affect prices indirectly via its impact on the volatility of order flow. Our analysis shows that order flow variations contribute more to currency price dynamics following the arrival of public macro news than at other times. This is not consistent with news effects being common knowledge that is impounded in price directly. Roughly two-thirds of the total effect of macro news on the DM/$ exchange rate is transmitted via order flow.     

Fracture incidence among elderly people in institutional care: linking injury surveillance data with a postal code-based register of residential and nursing homes

Fracture prevention strategies will be most cost-effective if targeted at groups of frail elderly people who are at particularly high risk of falls and fractures. Elderly people living in residential and nursing homes are one potential target population, but fracture incidence in this setting remains poorly defined in many countries. We have used the All Wales Injury Surveillance System (AWISS) in a population-based study of people aged over 65 living in the city of Cardiff. We linked a postal code-based register of all care homes in the city with injury data from Cardiff’s only Accident and Emergency department. Cardiff has 47,520 residents aged over 65, and 1,874 (3.9%) live in residential or nursing homes. Fracture incidence was 25/1,000/year overall, and 5/1,000/year for hip fracture. During 1997, the care home residents suffered 162 fractures, 82 of which were of the hip; an incidence of 86/1,000/year overall, 44/1,000/year for hip fracture. Even after adjustment for the age and sex profile of the care home population, fracture incidence remained 2.3 times higher and hip fracture incidence 3.6 times higher than in the general elderly population. Such figures support the potential cost-effectiveness of strategies that prevent fractures in care homes, and are of special interest to those planning intervention studies in this setting.     

Culture as a Variable in the Study of Leisure

Leisure researchers increasingly have invoked culture, either implicitly or explicitly, with the claim that it accounts for differences either in leisure behavior or in attitudes, motivations, or other feelings about leisure among putatively different cultural groups. Unfortunately, they have generally been unclear on what they mean by the term “culture.” Instead, they have relied on either presumably universally understood folk definitions or on proxy measures such as nationality, language, ethnicity or race to distinguish among “cultures” and, thereby, to understand how culture allegedly affects leisure.

Unfortunately, serious problems exist with this practice. The concepts of race and ethnicity, for example, are so heavily imbued with political meanings that their worth as scientific constructs is dubious at best (Brubaker, 2004 Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity without groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Chick et al., 2007 Chick, G., Li, C. L., Zinn, H. C., Absher, J. D. and Graefe, A. R. 2007. Ethnicity as a construct in leisure research: A rejoinder to Gobster. Journal of Leisure Research., 39: 554–556. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Moreover, whether they genuinely reflect cultural differences is an empirical issue, not one to be simply assumed. Finally, comparing leisure behavior between two or more allegedly culturally different groups is by itself not evidence that any observed variations are due to culture and not something else. Hence, I have two purposes in this research reflection. First, I urge leisure researchers to determine and then report if they are intentionally using culture as an explanatory variable in their studies and, if so, to define it. Second, I recommend a type of definition because recent advances theory and methods make the culture concept useful as an independent explanatory variable.     

Instructor Care and Consideration toward Students—What Accounting Students Report: A Research Note

This Research Note reports on a study of students' perceptions of care and respect in the student-instructor relationship. Students in a daytime accounting program at a university in the USA were given the opportunity to respond to questions such as: (1) Have you ever had the feeling that a faculty member or instructor had ‘given up’ on you and your learning in a course? (2) What did the faculty member do or not do to give you that feeling? and (3) What did you do as a result of that feeling, perception? Eighty-one students (50 in the autumn semester of 2009; 31 in the autumn semester of 2010) responded to all questions, with 35% of the total indicating that they felt at least one course instructor had given up on them and their learning in a higher education (post-secondary) course. We examine students' responses to the questions in the context of care, respect, and civility. This Research Note offers several recommendations to help instructors in improving instruction and building better relationships with students.     

Does the Theory of Irreversible Investments Help Explain Movements in Office–Commercial Construction?

Focusing on the relevance of the modern investment theory in explaining movements in office–commercial construction, we attempt to advance existing empirical work in two respects. First, building on recent theoretical advances, we offer an extended empirical model of new construction that takes into account the full opportunity cost of irreversible investments in uncertain environments. Second, using updated time series of office–commercial construction across the nation's largest markets, we empirically estimate such a model to (i) explore investment behavior during 1982–1998 and (ii) detect differences, if any, in such behavior between the pre- and post-recession years. Our empirical findings are fully consistent with the theory of irreversible investments. Such findings highlight both the relevance and the relative importance of uncertainty in underlying demand factors in shaping movements in office–commercial construction, while pointing altogether to more cautionary investment behavior during the post-recession years.     

Collaborative Planning in Multi-tier Supply Chains Supported by a Negotiation-Based Mechanism and Multi-agent System

Effective business process collaboration between companies operating in a supply chain can bring about important benefits, but several barriers need to be overcome. One important obstacle evidenced by professionals is related to the information and communication technologies used to support such collaboration. Although a supplier and a manufacturer may be willing to establish a closer relationship, a lack of easy-to-operate enterprise applications can thwart their collaborative ambitions. Specific technologies are required for each type of collaborative business process as generic applications do not lend themselves to addressing complex situations. Complexity lies in the need to consider common standards for information and decision exchanges, and for designing and implementing the right information and decision flow among supply chain members to support collaborative processes. This paper focuses on collaboration of demand, production and replenishment planning along a supply chain, and proposes a multi-tier, negotiation-based mechanism supported by a multi-agent system. The research hypothesis is that improvements in the service and profit level of supply chain members, and in the entire supply chain, can be achieved by implementing this form of collaboration. The proposed collaborative planning model was used to address a real automotive supply chain configuration for the purpose of testing its appropriateness and validating its performance.