2995 research outputs found
Sort by
HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis uptake by advanced practice nurses: interplay of agency, community, and attitudinal factors
Get PDFAims: To identify associations among agency, community, personal and attitudinal factors that affect advanced practice nurses’ uptake of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, an intervention consists of emtricitabine/tenofovir once-daily pill, along with sexual risk reduction education. Design: Cross-sectional. Methods: During March-May 2017, randomly-selected Indiana advanced practice nurses were invited to complete an online survey, consisted of several validated self-rating measures (N=1,358; response=32.3%). Final sample (N=369) was predominantly White, non-Hispanic, female advanced practice nurses in urban practices (mean age=46). Conceptual model for structural equation model included 29 original/composite variables and 5 latent factors. Results: Final model consisted of 11 variables and 4 factors: agency, community, HIV prevention practices (including screening) and motivation to adopt evidence-based practices overall. Community had direct effects on HIV prevention practices (estimate=0.28) and agency (estimate=0.29). Agency had direct effects on HIV prevention practices (estimate=0.74) and motivation to adopt evidence-based practices (estimate=0.24). Community had indirect effects, through agency, on the two remaining factors. Conclusion: Barriers exist against pre-exposure prophylaxis implementation, although practice guidelines are available. HIV prevention practices must be integrated across organizational structures, especially in high-risk communities, whereas practice change is more effective when focused on changing providers’ attitudes toward intervention. When planning a pre-exposure prophylaxis intervention, advancing inputs from healthcare professionals, organizational leadership and community members, is crucial to success. Impact: In settings where advanced practice nurses are primary contact points for healthcare, they may be best positioned to have an impact on implementation of HIV risk reduction strategies. Further research is needed to optimize their contributions to pre-exposure prophylaxis implementation
Science Dialogue Mapping of Knowledge and Knowledge Gaps Related to the Effects of Dairy Intake on Human Cardiovascular Health and Disease
No full textDairy has been described as everything from a superfood to a poison; yet, arguments, assumptions, and data justifying these labels are not always clear. We used an issue-based information system, "dialogue mapping™," to summarize scientific points of a live panel discussion on the putative effects of dairy on cardiovascular diseases (CVD) from a day-long session among experts in nutrition and CVD. Dialogue mapping captures relations among ideas to explicitly, logically, and visually connect issues/questions, ideas, pro/con arguments, and agreements, even if discussed at different times. Experts discussed two propositions: for CVD risk, consumption of full-fat dairy products 1) should be minimized, in part because of their saturated fat content, or 2) need not be minimized, despite their saturated fat content. The panel discussed the dairy-CVD relation through blood lipids, diabetes, obesity, energy balance, blood pressure, dairy bioactives, biobehavioral components, and other putative causal pathways. Associations and effects reported in the literature have varied by fat content of dairy elements considered, study design, intake methods, and biomarker versus disease outcomes. Two conceptual topics emerged from the discussion: 1) individual variability: whether recommendations should be targeted only to those at high CVD risk; 2) quality of evidence: whether data on dairy-CVD relations are strong enough for reliable conclusions-positive, negative, or null. Future procedural improvements for science dialog mapping include using singular rather than competing propositions for discussion
Living, Learning, Engaging, Persisting
Get PDFLiving-learning communities are designed to maximize academic and social benefits for their residents through meaningful interactions with faculty, coordinated learning activities, and support for success. New evidence recently confirmed that these living arrangements and programs can be associated with effective learning and persistence in college
Customer-Supplier Relationships and Abnormal Accruals
No full textWe investigate the relationship between customer and supplier firms’ abnormal accruals to examine whether the supply chain is an important transmission channel of abnormal accruals. We propose “earnings management” hypothesis and “customer demand shock” hypothesis. Empirically, we examine the relation between a supplier’s estimated abnormal accruals and those of its major customers using Compustat Business Segment Files over the period 1987-2015. To further explore the demand shock channel, we directly test the impact of the bullwhip effect on the linkage in abnormal accruals along the supply chain. Following the literature in operation management, we construct the amplification ratio, measured as the coefficient of variation of a firm’s orders divided by the coefficient of variation of the firm’s demand. We find that customer firms’ demand shocks link customer and supplier abnormal accruals as they propagate along the supply chain, via the “bullwhip” effect. Our evidence supports “customer demand shock” hypothesis. Consistent with the view that improving predictions on orders from their customers would mitigate this bullwhip effect, we find that a customer’s abnormal accruals have a much smaller impact on those of its suppliers whose auditors have expertise in the customer’s industries. Overall, our results suggest that the supply chain is an important transmission channel of abnormal accruals, and auditor expertise serves to reduce information opaqueness during this process. Our paper contributes to the literature examining the impact of bullwhip effects on firms’ financial performance and the role of auditors’ expertise in reducing information opaqueness in supply chain
Mediated Senses: Translating Sensations for Media
No full textThis second issue on the theme Le Sens et les sens/Sense and the Senses gathers selected papers presented at the 20th-/21st- Century French and Francophone Studies’ colloquium in April 2017 at Indiana University, Bloomington. The conference proposed to interrogate literature and other arts as the privileged sites of the connection between sensation and interpretation, i.e. the multiple articulations and the many tensions and frictions between the meaningful apprehension of the world and it’s fictitious, but real, mediation. In other words, the aesthetic relation between senses and sense
Evaluating trends in time series of distributions: A spatial fingerprint of human effects on climate
No full textWe analyze a time series of global temperature anomaly distributions to identify and estimate persistent features in climate change. We employ a formal test for the existence of functional unit roots in the time series of these densities, and we develop a new test to distinguish functional unit roots from functional deterministic trends or explosive behavior. Results suggest that temperature anomalies contain stochastic trends (as opposed to deterministic trends or explosive roots), two trends are present in the Northern Hemisphere while one stochastic trend is present in the Southern Hemisphere, and the probabilities of observing moderately positive anomalies have increased. We postulate that dierences in the pattern and number of unit roots in each hemisphere may be due to a natural experiment which causes human emissions of greenhouse gases and sulfur to be greater in the Northern Hemisphere, decreasing the mean temperature anomaly but increasing the spatial variance relative to the Southern Hemisphere. Together, these results are consistent with the theory of anthropogenic climate change
The Collective Trolling Lifecycle
Get PDFThis study examines the online collective process of global trolling of Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. The goal is to identify global trolling behaviors, patterns of global CI, and the role that national culture plays in this context. We performed thematic content analysis of 60 videos (each represents a country) that were posted over a three-week period in 2017, following Trump’s inauguration speech. We found that regardless of country, all the videos exhibit repetitive, provocative, pseudo-sincere, and satirical trolling behaviors; while these trolling behaviors cross national boundaries, the use of certain trolling behaviors correlated with a few of Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural differences. For example, videos from individualistic countries included significantly more instances of trolling behaviors than those from collectivistic countries. We found that in global trolling CI patterns of replication, innovation, and customization were prominent along with the impact or omission of the original idea. While most of these patterns have been documented by other scholars, we identified the additional pattern of omission that in an extreme case led to a minimalist approach excluding the original idea. This study is unique and timely in that it focuses on global trolling, analyzing internet videos as a medium of trolling
Looking at nonprofit board performance through the lens of gendered leadership
No full textDespite an active stream of “good governance” research, there is not yet much nonprofit scholarship examining how the gender composition of a board or its leadership relates to board performance. This article helps to fill this gap, focusing on the governance practices of U.S.-based nonprofits serving a domestic or international membership. A structural equation model finds that the presence of female leaders relates to the performance of nonprofit boards both directly, and indirectly through these leaders’ presumed influence on board characteristics and operation. This research advances the field by empirically testing a longstanding theory that board performance is both multi-dimensional and contingent on the market and labor environment, organizational capacity and other characteristics—in this case, gender dynamics. These findings also suggest that a strategy to balance a board’s gender may serve many nonprofits
Policy Regimes and Economic Accountability in Latin America
Get PDFThe shifts from state-led development to neoliberalism in Latin America have prompted debates on the quality of democracy. While most discussions focus on responsiveness, we examine how economic policy regimes influence accountability. We argue that the policy regime matters for policy responsibility Citizens’ ability to hold executive to accounts strengthens where policy regimes are more statist and weakens where policy regimes are more market oriented. Time-series analyses of policy orientations, economic conditions, and presidential approval in 18 countries support this proposition, while complementary analyses at the individual-level support claims that a responsibility mechanism links policy regimes to accountability. Study findings imply that by embracing heterodox policy regimes, recent Latin American executives have improved accountability compared to the era in which the “Washington Consensus” held sway
Mountaintop removal mining and multiple illness symptoms: A latent class analysis
No full textBackground: Mountaintop removal mining has been associated with multiple types of disease outcomes for populations living nearby. The current study tested whether latent classes identifying people with symptoms from multiple organ systems were associated with residence in mountaintop mining communities. Methods: We used data from three cross-sectional household community surveys conducted in three Appalachian states (N = 2756). The surveys contained information on 29 recent illness symptoms grouped into eight organ systems (respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, skin, eye-ear-nose-throat, neurological, and other.) We identified latent classes, and then tested whether classes with higher probabilities of multiple symptoms would be associated with residence in mountaintop removal areas after control for covariates. Results: Three latent classes were identified, including a low-symptom referent class, an intermediate class, and a class with high symptom probability across organ systems. Controlling for covariates, latent classes characterized by intermediate and high multi-symptom probabilities were significantly associated with residence near mountaintop removal mining, with the highest odds ratio for the MTR versus control condition for the high multi-symptom group (OR = 2.17, 95% CI = 1.80–2.61). Conclusions: Symptoms across multiple organ systems were related to residential proximity to mountaintop removal mining. Prior research has established multiple environmental contaminants related to mining that may contribute to poor population health through more than one exposure route or chemical of concern