1,721,250 research outputs found
The New Sociology of the Health Service
No full textHealth service policy and health policy have changed considerably over the past fifteen years and there is a pressing need for an up-to-date sociological analysis of health policy. Not only have policies themselves changed but new policy themes – such as evidence-based policy and practice, an increasing focus on a primary care led health service, a growing recognition of the need to address inequalities through public health policies and a focus on the views and the voice of the user and the public– have emerged alongside some of the old.
Following up the very successful The Sociology of the Health Service, this all-new volume covers a broad range of key contemporary health services issues. It includes chapters on consumerism, technology, evidence-based practice, public health, managerialism and social care among others, and incorporates references to new developments, such as regulation and incentivization, throughout.
The New Sociology of the Health Service provides a vital new sociological framework for analyzing health policy and healthcare. It is an important read for all students and researchers of medical sociology and health policy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Investigating the role of cultural and material influences in the persistence of socio-economic inequalities in smoking in England
Get PDFBackground and aims: Differential consumption patterns in health related behaviours such as smoking and drinking play an important role in contributing to health inequalities. It is therefore important to understand the underlying mechanisms that contribute to these behaviours, in order to reduce social inequalities in health. Since the early 1970’s, there has been a dramatic reduction in smoking in the UK and a noticeable decline in alcohol consumption from 2008, however, social inequalities in smoking and drinking have widened, with smoking and heavy drinking disproportionately concentrated amongst adults in the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Existing research on the relationship between SEP and smoking and drinking in the UK has tended to use SEP as a generic or interchangeable measure and has not investigated the different mechanisms that underlie different measures of SEP. This project was designed to address this gap in the literature through two specific aims. These were, a) to provide sociological explanations about long-term trends in the social patterning of smoking behaviour, and b) to determine how far social inequalities in drinking behaviour are similar to or distinctive from social
inequalities in smoking behaviour.
Methods: These aims were examined through analysis of data from the General Household and General Lifestyle Surveys from 1973 to 2011. The relationship between smoking and drinking and three socio-economic indicators (education level, occupation, equivalized household income) was analysed to assess the relative explanatory power of cultural and material explanations for the different elements of smoking and drinking behaviour.
Results: The results found that when all socio-economic indicators were mutually adjusted, education appeared to have the strongest relationship with most smoking outcomes, whilst income appeared to have the strongest relationship with most drinking outcomes. The results for whether the gaps between the lowest and highest socio-economic groups strengthened or weakened over time for smoking and drinking behaviour was mixed.
Discussion: The findings suggest that cultural factors appeared to have the strongest influence on smoking behaviours whilst material factors appeared to have the strongest influence on drinking behaviours. These findings can help inform the wider debate about social inequalities in health and the relative
influences of consumption-related factors such as smoking and drinking
Does knee pain in the community behave like a regional pain syndrome? Prospective cohort study of incidence and persistence
No full textOBJECTIVES: To investigate whether knee pain in the community behaves like a regional pain syndrome, as judged by its associations with mental health, self- rated health (SRH), and beliefs about prognosis. METHODS: An 18-month postal follow-up was conducted in 1,798 working-aged subjects, sampled from the community. At baseline questions were asked about pain in the knee lasting >/=1 day in the previous 12 months, mental health (Short-Form 36), somatising tendency (elements of the Brief Symptom Inventory), SRH, and concern about 12-month prognosis. At follow-up we asked about knee pain in the last four weeks, and whether it had been present on >/=14 days or prescription-treated. Associations with incidence and persistence were explored using logistic regression. RESULTS: The 1,256 participants (70% response) comprised 468 with knee pain at baseline and 788 without. Among the former, 49% had persistent knee pain at follow-up, while among the latter, 15% reported new symptoms. Incident prescription-treated knee pain was strongly associated with all of the mental health variables and with SRH. The odds of knee pain persisting were significantly raised in the least vs. most favourable bands of somatising tendency and SRH, and persistence was also significantly more common among those who at baseline were concerned that they would still have a problem in 12 months. CONCLUSIONS: Our observations support the hypothesis that knee pain in the community shares risk factors in common with other non-specific regional pain syndromes.<br/
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