110,734 research outputs found
Is social capital associated with health ? Evidence from a study on the elderly italians
In the last decades there had been undoubted improvements in medicine and living conditions, still the distribution of health within and between regions is facing an increasing unbalance and many researchers from different fields have tried to understand why some individuals are more exposed to disease and mortality than others. An increasing interest on social capital as a key determinant for health has recently developed. This paper analyzes the association between social capital and self-perceived health among older adults in Italy. We used a multilevel approach to take into account the hierarchical structure of the population: individuals are nested in families which are nested into regions. Multilevel logistic regressions are performed using data on the fourth wave of the Survey on Health and Retirement in Europe. Two components of social capital are considered, bonding and bridging, in order to understand if relations inside or outside an individual’s inner circle are associated differentially with his/her health. The results demonstrate that both bridging and bonding are associated with self-reported health status. Consequently, in Italy, social capital plays an important role in explaining the heterogeneity in health perception among individuals
Channel Choice Determinants; an exploration of the factors that determine the choice of a service channel in citizen initiated contacts
Citizens have various service channels at their disposal to interact with governmental agencies. In this paper we explore citizens’ motives to choose a certain channel in a certain situation. We conducted a qualitative study to accumulate the most important behavioral determinants. Six groups of determinants were found; habit, channel characteristics, task characteristics, situational constraints, experiences and personal characteristics. People appear to generally follow two lines of decision making when choosing channels, the first is based on habits. When task complexity and ambiguity increase, people start reasoning and follow the second line; channel choice based on a thorough elaboration between task and channel characteristics
Drinking Behaviors and Health in Old Age
Alcohol abuse among the elderly population is rapidly becoming a widespread public health concern. As it goes undetected and undiagnosed in many within this age cohort, there is an increased need to further examine the effects of alcohol consumption on physical and mental health. This study investigated how and to what extent drinking behaviors affect physical and mental health in older people. Data came from the 2012 and 2014 Health and Retirement study, a nationally representative survey of Americans aged 51 and older. Our sample was restricted to people who participated in both waves of the survey from 2012 and 2014 (N=19,719). Drinking behavior was split into three groups: non-drinker, moderate drinker, and binge drinker. Three independent variables were examined to explore overall health of respondents: self-rated health, chronic conditions, and depression. Chi-squares and ANOVA testing were used to determine characteristics of binge drinkers in old age. OLS regression was used to examine how drinking behavior affected self-rated health and chronic conditions and logistic regression was used to explore how drinking behavior affected depression in old age.
We found that non-drinkers have the worst physical and mental health with a self-rated health score of 3.09 (SD = 1.07) and the highest number of chronic conditions (2.47; SD = 1.58). Moderate drinkers were found to be the most depressed (1.94, SD = 1.80). Binge drinkers were most likely to be Hispanic (26.16%), male (97.93%), unmarried (98.09%) elders. Additionally, binge drinkers were the youngest group of respondents (60.88, SD = 7.98) and had the least amount of education (11.81 years, SD = 2.86). The findings of this study once again suggest further research into the affects of drinking behavior on health in old age is needed to better serve this populatio
The Effects of Volunteering on the Volunteer
Wilson and Musick review some of the research on the supposed benefits of volunteering and describe briefly some of the results of their own work in this area. There is little doubt that there are individual benefits to be derived from doing volunteer work that reach far beyond the volunteer act itself and may linger long after the volunteer role is relinquished
Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field
Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe
For Whom the TEL Tolls: Can State Tax and Expenditure Limits Effectively Reduce Spending?
Can voters stop state governments from spending at high rates through the enactment of tax and expenditure limits (TELs), or do these laws become dead letters? We draw upon the principal-agent literature to theorize that TELs – one of the most frequent uses of the initiative process across the country – may be circumvented by the sorts of elected officials who would inspire their passage.
In order to investigate our claim, we conduct an event study. First, we test for the effectiveness of TELs across states using a differences-in-differences model. Second, we dissect our treatment variable using different legal provisions of the limits to test whether there is a uniform effect across different types of TELs. Finally, we compare state fiscal patterns before and after adoption on a state-by-state basis. Using this simple approach and other methods, we show that TELs are largely ineffective, and that state officials can circumvent them by raising money through fees or borrowing. Our finding is consistent with recent studies showing that policies passed through direct democracy can often be thwarted by the politicians charged with implementing them
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