Improving medical students' attitudes towards the chronic sick: a role for social science research

<b>Background</b> Many medical students are negatively disposed toward the elderly and chronic sick. The present study assessed the impact of a community-based teaching initiative, the Life History Project, on students' attitudes to these groups. <p></p> <b>Methods</b> A questionnaire including Likert based responses and free text comments was distributed to all first-year MBChB students after completion of their Life History coursework. Data was analysed using SPSS and content analysis. <p></p> <b>Results</b> A high proportion of students believed the Life History Project had increased their understanding of both psychological and social aspects of health and illness and the role of the humanistic social sciences within this. We discovered that the Life History Project not only gave students first-hand experience of the elderly and chronic sick but also had a positive effect on their attitudes towards these groups. The qualitative free text comments corroborated these views. <p></p> <b>Conclusions</b> It is possible to positively influence medical students' attitudes towards these stigmatised groups; it is therefore important that we continue to enhance opportunities for learning about the impact of chronic illness on individuals and society throughout the curriculum

The Choice of Incentive Stock Options vs. Nonqualified Stock Options: A Marginal Tax Rate Perspective

Compensation committees seeking to minimize the joint tax liability of executives and their firms will grant tax-qualified Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) when the corporate marginal tax rate is low. Otherwise, nonqualified stock options are tax-advantageous. We test the proposition that tax motivations determine the choice between ISOs and nonqualified options by examining a sample of 364 option grants by 195 firms during the 1981 to 1984 period. Our tests employ four alternative measures of tax status, ranging from a simple dummy variable based on the firm\u27s net operating loss carryforward position to a sophisticated simulation of expected exercise year and projected marginal tax rate in that year. We find that the univariate relation between tax status and option granting behavior is insignificant for all four tax variables. However, when we control for firm size in a multivariate logistic regression, we find that one of the four variables is significant in the direction predicted by the tax hypothesis. Interestingly, it is one of the simpler measures. Our results indicate that tax considerations offer only a partial explanation for the ISO/nonqualified option choice

Invariant Estimators for Market Share Systems and their Finite Sample Behavior

The sales-marketing mix relationships for brands of a product class are often modelled as a multiple equation system. Whenever sales are expressed as shares, such systems are sum-constrained and therefore singular. Singular systems can be calibrated by deleting one equation from the model and estimating the remaining equations using the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) technique. A two-step procedure is typically adopted whenever the disturbance covariance structure is unknown. This study highlights an issue often overlooked by marketing researchers. Traditional two-step estimators that delete one equation at the initial step usually lack invariance to the equation deleted. Invariant estimates are available using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) or iterated least squares. However, relative to simple, two-step procedures, these approaches require more computation and are often less accurate in small samples. We describe several ways to obtain invariant, two-step estimators and conduct a sampling experiment to compare the finite sample behavior of these and other estimators to an iterated solution. Our results show that a “balanced” two-step estimator which deletes no equations initially outperforms the iterated solution over a wide range of conditions. Our results also show that a constrained, single-step estimator which deletes no equations from the system frequently outperforms all two-step methods examined. Further, the results of our study also apply to nonlinear specifications of market share models since the invariance issue arises in this context as well.SVR, advertising, estimation, simulation