Health disparities in military veterans with PTSD: influential sociocultural factors

Health disparities based on sociocultural factors such as gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, culture, and access to health care can potentially complicate the early diagnosis and effective management of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Research indicates that among those individuals affected by health disparities, there is a greater burden of illness and disability, higher morbidity and mortality rates, and increased behavioral risk factors. The purpose of this article is to highlight the sociocultural factors that affect the development of PTSD and to publicize health disparities in military combat veterans.     

Der Personalverantwortliche als strategischer Partner

Since Ulrich (Human resource champions: the next agenda for adding value and delivering results, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1997) shaped the strategic role of HR managers, his concept of an HR business partner has been controversially discussed by researchers and practitioners. Explanations about when and how HR managers act as strategic business partners have found limited attention in the literature. Based on the theory of reasoned action developed by Ajzen und Fishbein (Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1980; J Pers Soc Psychol 27(1):41?C57, 1973), we hypothesize a positive relation between personal attitudes as well as subjective norm and the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner. Results of the German Cranet survey in 2009 show that expected positive consequences influence the personal attitude, whereas the acceptance of the human resources as well as the existence of an HR strategy within the organisation is positively related with subjective norm. Hence, both attitude and subjective norm positively influence the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner.     

Family Demography,Social Theory,and Investment in Social Capital

The analytic models used by family demographers would be strengthened by the concept of social capital, placed in the context of social exchange theory. Using that concept to designate resources that emerge from social ties, the authors advance five propositions: 1) social capital is a multidimensional attribute of an individual; 2) the dimensions of social capital are the number of relationships a person has, their quality (strength), and the resources available through those relationships; 3) group membership and interaction facilitate the development of social capital; 4) the structural properties of groups influence the development of social capital; and 5) the acquisition and maintenance of social capital is a major motivator of human behavior. The formation of sexual partnerships, the birth and rearing of children, and both intragenerational and intergenerational transfers constitute major forms of investment in social capital in virtually all societies.     

Do cows belong in nature? The cultural basis of agriculture in Sweden and Australia

Within the now extensive recent literature on cultures of nature, agriculture has received less attention than might have been expected given its threshold role in transforming human relations with the earth and with plants and animals. The concept and practice of agriculture can be understood as central to the emergence and maintenance of the culture/nature dichotomy within Western thought and practice. In this paper we use the comparative cases of Sweden and Australia to examine the differential and contingent positioning of agriculture with respect to that which is understood as nature. Broadly speaking, some parts of agriculture are understood to belong to nature in Sweden through a long history. This is not the case in Australia, where the short agricultural history is positioned in contrast to nature. This affects the way in which biodiversity and environmental protection takes place - in Sweden as part of farming, - in Australia in spite of it. We argue that these cultural differences have been more important than generally recognised in debates over multifunctional agriculture. We discuss the environmental management implications of the two different models in a context made more dynamic by climate change.     

Racial Disparities in Hospital Length of Stay for Asthma: Implications for Economic Policies

Asthma is one of the most common health burdens on American families. An understanding of how the costs of asthma are distributed across communities is essential to realizing cost savings from preventative care. We model the household’s utilization of hospital services using Grossman’s health production framework. We then test for differences in asthma-related hospitalizations by race using inpatient records from the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance. On average black and nonwhite-Hispanic patients stayed between one-third and one-fourth of a day less than similar white patients which translates into a difference in expenditures of $8 million over 1994–2002. The difference in expenditures raises questions for market-based methodologies to value health and for policies directed at reducing inequalities in health outcomes.     

Working with the Experts: collaborative research with people with an intellectual disability

This paper reports on part of a wider study concerned with the collaborative efforts of an inquirer and six people with an intellectual disability, to develop a grounded theory explaining the processes by which these informants manage the relationships within their personal communities. The study was conducted through a series of in-depth interviews with each informant; a process characterised by information sharing, tentative theory development and elaboration, and informants' checking the accuracy of the emerging theory. This inductive approach allowed not only an insight into the lives of each informant, but recognised the informants' expertise in matters concerning their own lives and thus facilitated the emergence of theoretical elements of relevance to the informants themselves. The focus of the paper is on the collaborative or partnership approach adopted. The outcomes of the research partnership are detailed and implications drawn for the role of research in the lifestyles of people with an intellectual disability.     

Projection‐Based Statistical Inference in Linear Structural Models with Possibly Weak Instruments

It is well known that standard asymptotic theory is not applicable or is very unreliable in models with identification problems or weak instruments. One possible way out consists of using a variant of the Anderson–Rubin ((1949), AR) procedure. The latter allows one to build exact tests and confidence sets only for the full vector of the coefficients of the endogenous explanatory variables in a structural equation, but not for individual coefficients. This problem may in principle be overcome by using projection methods (Dufour (1997), Dufour and Jasiak (2001)). At first sight, however, this technique requires the application of costly numerical algorithms. In this paper, we give a general necessary and sufficient condition that allows one to check whether an AR‐type confidence set is bounded. Furthermore, we provide an analytic solution to the problem of building projection‐based confidence sets from AR‐type confidence sets. The latter involves the geometric properties of “quadrics” and can be viewed as an extension of usual confidence intervals and ellipsoids. Only least squares techniques are needed to build the confidence intervals.