Advancing Long-Term Care Science Through Using Common Data Elements: Candidate Measures for Care Outcomes of Personhood, Well-Being, and Quality of Life

To support the development of internationally comparable common data elements (CDEs) that can be used to measure essential aspects of long-term care (LTC) across low-, middle-, and high-income countries, a group of researchers in medicine, nursing, behavioral, and social sciences from 21 different countries have joined forces and launched the Worldwide Elements to Harmonize Research in LTC Living Environments (WE-THRIVE) initiative. This initiative aims to develop a common data infrastructure for international use across the domains of organizational context, workforce and staffing, person-centered care, and care outcomes, as these are critical to LTC quality, experiences, and outcomes. This article reports measurement recommendations for the care outcomes domain, focusing on previously prioritized care outcomes concepts of well-being, quality of life (QoL), and personhood for residents in LTC. Through literature review and expert ranking, we recommend nine measures of well-being, QoL, and personhood, as a basis for developing CDEs for long-term care outcomes across countries. Data in LTC have often included deficit-oriented measures; while important, reductions do not necessarily mean that residents are concurrently experiencing well-being. Enhancing measurement efforts with the inclusion of these positive LTC outcomes across countries would facilitate international LTC research and align with global shifts toward healthy aging and person-centered LTC models

Opinion dynamics and wisdom under conformity

Buechel B, Hellmann T, Klößner S. Opinion dynamics and wisdom under conformity. Working Papers. Center for Mathematical Economics. Vol 469. Bielefeld: Center for Mathematical Economics; 2013.We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an agent's social influencev on the long-run group opinion is increasing in network centrality and decreasing in conformity. For efficiency of information aggregation (\wisdom"), misrepresentation of opinions need not undermine wisdom. Given the network, we provide the optimal distribution of conformity levels in the society and show which agents should be more conforming in order to increase wisdom

What matters for life satisfaction among the oldest-old? Evidence from China

The world population is aging rapidly and the well-being of older people is of great interest. Therefore, this study investigates the determinants of life satisfaction among the oldest-old (i.e. individuals aged 80 or over) in China. Materials and methods We use the 2011/2012 Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey data (n = 6530) for this paper. Logistic regression is used to analyse the effects of socio-demographic, economic, health, instrumental activities of daily living, family and community factors on life satisfaction and depression among the oldest-old in China. Results Our analysis confirms the significance of many factors affecting life satisfaction among the oldest-old in China. Factors that are correlated with life satisfaction include respondent’s sex, education, place of residence, self-rated health status, cognitive ability (using mini mental state examination), regular physical examination, perceived relative economic status, access to social security provisions, commercialized insurances, living arrangements, and number of social services available in the community (p<0.05 for all these variables). Although life satisfaction is negatively associated with instrumental activities of daily living (β = -0.068, 95%CI = -.093—.043), and depression (β = -0.463, 95%CI = -.644—.282), the overall effect of self-rated health status is positive (p<0.001). This confirms the primacy of health as the determinant of well-being among the oldest-old. Conclusions Majority of the oldest-old in China rated their life satisfaction as good or very good. Our findings show that health and economic status are by far the most significant predictors of life satisfaction. Our finding on the primacy of health and relative income as determinants of well-being among the oldest-old, and the greater influence of self-rated health status over objective health measures is consistent with the findings of many past studies. Our results suggest that efforts should be directed at enhancing family support as well as health and social service provisions in the community to improve life satisfaction of older people

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rankorder tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research. (author's abstract