Municipal performance in waste recycling: an empirical analysis based on data from the Lombardy region (Italy)

By using a large cross-sectional dataset that observes municipalities from one of the most populated and wealthiest regions in Europe (Lombardy, Italy), this paper investigates how municipal waste re-cycling is correlated with a wide set of municipallevel variables. Results show that municipal waste recycling is linked to geographical, demographic, socio-economic and political variables. They also reveal that these tendencies vary according to municipalities’ population size. This empirical analysis helps in identifying those municipalities that have higher probability of being virtuous in terms of waste recycling

Using Stories to Disseminate Research: The Attributes of Representative Stories

When researchers communicate their findings to patients, clinicians, policy-makers, or media, they may find it helpful to supplement quantitative data with stories about individuals who represent themes in their research. Whether such stories are gathered during the research itself or identified from other sources, researchers must develop strategies for assessing their representativeness. This paper proposes 5 attributes of representative stories: (1) expression of important themes in the research, (2) explicit location in the “distribution” of stories that exemplify the theme, (3) verifiability, (4) acknowledgment of uncertainty, and (5) compelling narration. This paper summarizes research on substance abuse among physicians, and uses these 5 attributes to assess the representativeness of a published case report and a fictional short story about addicted physicians. While neither story is fully representative of the research, the process of evaluating these stories illustrates an approach to identifying representative stories for use in disseminating research