Reducing Nursing Home Use Through Consumer-Directed Personal Care Services

Highlights findings on how the Cash and Counseling program, which allows Medicaid enrollees with personal care services to hire their own care workers, affected nursing facility use and expenditures as well as personal care and Medicaid costs in Arkansas

Attitudes Toward Seeking Help from Instructors

This thesis reports research concerning the attitudes of students toward seeking help from an instructor outside of regular classroom sessions. The following hypotheses were tested: (1) there will be a positive relationship between the student\u27s academic achievement level and the degree to which he perceives seeking help from an instructor outside of class as complex, and (2) there will be a positive relationship between the student\u27s academic achievement level and the degree to which he perceives seeking help from an instructor outside of class as desirable and beneficial. The population for this research was 216 freshman women who were living in the women\u27s dormitories at Fort Hays Kansas State College at the time of the investigation. The following areas were investigated: (a) the complexity with which the student perceives seeking help from an instructor, (b) the degree with which the student perceives seeking help from the instructor as desirable and beneficial, and (c) the degree with which the student perceives his peers seeking help from instructors. These areas of investigation were studied in their relationship with academic achievement level, operationally defined as grade point average. Both hypotheses were supported, the data being statistically significant beyond the .01 level of confidence. Other interesting data were obtained and discussed; further areas of research were suggested

Government Sponsored Health Care: A Cluster Profile of Supporters and Nonsupporters

While there has been a great deal of information revealing the public\u27s dissatisfaction with our current health care system, there is little detailed analysis of these attitudes, and of the individuals who are most likely to support or reject such a system. This becomes more and more important as health policy debates shift toward a questioning of the viability of the current health care system and possible alterations to that system. In this paper we use cluster analytic methods on data collected from a public opinion survey of Louisiana residents to develop profiles of those people who support and who reject government-sponsored health care for all citizens. We then use these profiles to develop informed strategies for use by sociologists to impact health care policy. Much of the literature on attitudes toward human resource spending were confirmed by the multivariate analysis we performed. However, the cluster analysis illuminated the true diversity that exists. Quite often, rather weak statistical relationships tend to be overgeneralized. In attempting to develop these profiles, the cluster analysis allowed us to regain the diversity in a comprehensive fashion. We found that there are clear groupings of both supporters and nonsupporters, but probably of greater importance is that there is more similarity between supporters and nonsupporters than distinctiveness

The Concept of Social Exclusion and Rural Development Policy

Since the early 1970s rural research and public education programs have been intensified in efforts to improve living conditions and strengthen community life in rural America (Southern Perspectives 2000). During much of the 1990s, the nation, including the rural South, experienced a growing economy, a booming stock market, and declining unemployment rates (Gibbs 2001). However, many serious social problems traditionally associated with the rural South remain to this day (Gibbs 2001). This paper introduces the concept of social exclusion, used extensively in European countries and now part of the European Union\u27s official lexicon. Social exclusion is defined as the process and the resulting condition in which specific social entities are fully or partially prevented from acquiring the basic necessities of life. Further components are that it is seen as a product of the social system, not an individual attribute, and that it is multi-dimensional and dynamic in time and space. It is argued that the concept of social exclusion should be incorporated into rural development policy discourse in the United States. This would aid in countering the predominant pattern of neglect in rural development policies and programs in addressing the persistent problems which exist

PLS Pluses and Minuses_x000D_ In Path Estimation Accuracy

PLS Pluses and Minuses Abstract: In this paper we ask three questions. Do PLS path estimates compensate for measurement error? Do they capitalize on chance? And is PLS able to more accurately weight measurement indicators so as to make path estimations more accurate? The evidence is quite convincing that PLS path estimates do have all three of these characteristics. Our analysis suggests, however, that measurement error has by far the largest impact, followed by capitalization on chance, with better weighting of indicators having the smallest influence. MIS researchers need to consider how to respond to these findings._x000D_ _x000D

Elastic Wave Scattering from Griffith Cracks

To model elastic wave scattering from fatigue cracks in metals, studies were conducted of wave scattering from artificial cracks using ultrasonic spectroscopy. The cracks are of two dimensional planar strips oriented at various angles and embedded in diffusion bonded titanium alloy. The crack is assumed to behave as a Griffith crack and expressions (derived by Achenbach) to describe diffracted field of elastic waves are used to analyze experimental results

Changing the Health Care System: Opinions of Rural and Urban Residents

This paper examines the opinions of rural and urban residents toward a full health care system provided by the government. The data used in the study come from a statewide poll conducted by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. Because of a greater need for health care reform in rural areas, it was assumed that rural Louisianians might be more supportive of a government health care system than their urban counterparts. However, analysis of the data indicates that a person\u27s residence had no statistically significant effect on attitudes toward government sponsored health care

Dual Band Electrodes in Generator-Collector Mode: Simultaneous Measurement of Two Species

A computational model for the simulation of a double band collector-generator experiment is applied to the situation where two electrochemical reactions occur concurrently. It is shown that chronoamperometric measurements can be used to take advantage of differences in diffusion coefficients to measure the concentrations of both electroactive species simultaneously, by measuring the time at which the collection efficiency reaches a specific value. The separation of the electrodes is shown to not affect the sensitivity of the method (in terms of percentage changes in the measured time to reach the specified collection efficiency), but wider gaps can provide a greater range of (larger) absolute values of this characteristic time. It is also shown that measuring the time taken to reach smaller collection efficiencies can allow for the detection of smaller amounts of whichever species diffuses faster. The case of a system containing both ascorbic acid and opamine in water is used to exemplify the method, and it is shown that mole fractions of ascorbic acid between 0.055 and 0.96 can, in principle, be accurately measured.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure