Knowledge and Prevention Practices Before Breast Cancer Diagnosis in a Cross-Sectional Study Among Survivors: Impact on Patients\u27 Involvement in the Decision Making Process

Disparities exist in breast cancer knowledge and education, which tend to influence symptom interpretation and decision to seek screening/care. The present project describes a cohort of women\u27s experiences, knowledge, and health behavior prior to and after a diagnosis of breast cancer. It also studies how knowledge and demographic factors are associated with level of involvement participants had in the treatment of their breast cancer. Women \u3e 18 years who have been diagnosed and treated for breast cancer within 10 years were recruited in Pittsburgh, PA, through the Healthy People Cohort Registry, a database of volunteers from the community, and Brooklyn, NY, through the American Cancer Society breast cancer survivor database. Subsequent to institutional ethics approval, a questionnaire was administered by mail and through an electronic interactive format. The study included 124 breast cancer survivors, one-quarter of whom were of African ancestry. Roughly half of the women indicated that their overall knowledge of breast cancer was limited before diagnosis; no significant association between overall knowledge before diagnosis and stage at diagnosis or an active role of the patient in treatment choices was observed. Two-third of the women reported using personal research on internet, books, and other media to increase knowledge on breast cancer after diagnosis; the improvement of knowledge was associated with an active role in therapy choice. White women\u27s self report of breast cancer knowledge prior to diagnosis was higher than that of women of African origin (p = 0.03); the latter experienced more delays in getting results about the diagnosis (p = 0.002), in starting treatment (p = 0.03), and in having treatment available at local facilities (p = 0.007) than white women. White women were more likely to improve their knowledge through their own research (p = 0.08) and through the contribution of their physician (p = 0.06) than women of African origin.There is still a need for addressing breast cancer knowledge among black women, and improvement in physician emotional support and in their contribution to the patient\u27s knowledge is necessary. These efforts may have a positive impact on breast cancer knowledge among black women in the US

Do UK universities communicate their brands effectively through their websites?

This paper attempts to explore the effectiveness of UK universities’ websites. The area of branding in higher education has received increasing academic investigation, but little work has researched how universities demonstrate their brand promises through their websites. The quest to differentiate through branding can be challenging in the university context, however. It is argued that those institutions that have a strong distinctive image will be in a better position to face a changing future. Employing a multistage methodology, the web pages of twenty UK universities were investigated by using a combination of content and multivariable analysis. Results indicated ‘traditional values’ such as teaching and research were often well communicated in terms of online brand but ‘emotional values’ like social responsibility and the universities’ environments were less consistently communicated, despite their increased topicality. It is therefore suggested that emotional values may offer a basis for possible future online differentiation

Comparative research: Persistent problems and promising solutions

The enduring importance and utility of comparative research in sociology are as old as the discipline itself. Although comparative research flourishes within this discipline, methodological problems persist. After defining comparative research, this article outlines some of its central problems, including: (1) case selection, unit, level and scale of analysis; (2) construct equivalence; (3) variable or case orientation; and (4) causality. The discussion finishes with a brief introduction of the critical and innovative articles within this special issue that not only address these problems, but also present promising solutions. © International Sociological Association

Work and intimacy: reassessing the career/couple norm through a narrative case approach

It is argued that ‘career’, as linear progression through one industry or two, and ‘coupledom’, as hetero, cohabitive, and moving towards marriage, have both been undermined by alternate arrangements for work and intimacy. In the face of these changes, this article considers how the hallmarks of coupling and the tenets of career manifest themselves in everyday interactions within partnerships. The article uses a narrative case approach to explore these interactions in depth. It reveals not only the persistence of normative assumptions within couple relationships but also how the ‘work’ of couple relationships draw on particular expectations surrounding what it means to negotiate a successful ‘career’. The paradigm of progress transects career/couple narratives, blurring the already opaque boundaries between productive and personal realms. This entanglement presents challenges for individuals, limiting prescriptions for what are considered ‘acceptable’ narratives of work and intimacy

Ancestral-derived effects on the mutational landscape of laryngeal cancer

© 2015 Elsevier Inc.Laryngeal cancer disproportionately affects more African-Americans than European-Americans. Here, we analyze the genome-wide somatic point mutations from the tumors of 13 African-Americans and 57 European-Americans from TCGA to differentiate between environmental and ancestrally-inherited factors. The mean number of mutations was different between African-Americans (151.31) and European-Americans (277.63). Other differences in the overall mutational landscape between African-American and European-American were also found. The frequency of C > A, and C > G were significantly different between the two populations (p-value < 0.05). Context nucleotide signatures for some mutation types significantly differ between these two populations. Thus, the context nucleotide signatures along with other factors could be related to the observed mutational landscape differences between two races. Finally, we show that mutated genes associated with these mutational differences differ between the two populations. Thus, at the molecular level, race appears to be a factor in the progression of laryngeal cancer with ancestral genomic signatures best explaining these differences

Uji Kinerja Dan Analisis K-Support Vector Nearest Neighbor Terhadap Decision Tree dan Naive Bayes

Algoritma K-Support Vector Nearest Neighbor (K-SVNN) menjadi salah satu alternative metode hasil evolusi K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) yang bertujuan untuk mengurangi waktu yang digunakan pada saat prediksi tetapi diharapkan dapat tetap mempertahankan akurasi prediksi. Metode ini masih relatif muda sehingga baru dibandingkan hanya dengan metode-metode berbasis K-NN lainnya. Dalam penelitian ini dilakukan analisis perbandingan kesamaan, perbedaan, dan kinerja terhadap metode Decision Tree (DT) dan Naïve Bayes (NB). Pengujian dengan perbandingan ini penting untuk mengetahui keunggulan dan kelemahan relatif yang dimiliki oleh K-SVNN. Dengan mengetahui keunggulan dan kelemahan maka metode tersebut dapat dibuktikan baik tidaknya ketika diimplementasikan. Pengujian dilakukan baik pada saat pelatihan maupun prediksi. Kinerja pelatihan diukur dalam hal waktu yang digunakan untuk pelatihan, kinerja prediksi diukur dalam hal waktu yang digunakan untuk prediksi dan akurasi prediksi yang didapat. Hasil pengujian menunjukkan bahwa K-SVNN mempunyai akurasi yang lebih baik daripada DT dan NB. Sedangkan waktu yang digunakan untuk pelatihan dan prediksi K-SVNN lebih lama disbanding DT dan NB

But Not Both:The Exclusive Disjunction in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

The application of Boolean logic using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is becoming more frequent in political science but is still in its relative infancy. Boolean ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ are used to express and simplify combinations of necessary and sufficient conditions. This paper draws out a distinction overlooked by the QCA literature: the difference between inclusive- and exclusive-or (OR and XOR). It demonstrates that many scholars who have used the Boolean OR in fact mean XOR, discusses the implications of this confusion and explains the applications of XOR to QCA. Although XOR can be expressed in terms of OR and AND, explicit use of XOR has several advantages: it mirrors natural language closely, extends our understanding of equifinality and deals with mutually exclusive clusters of sufficiency conditions. XOR deserves explicit treatment within QCA because it emphasizes precisely the values that make QCA attractive to political scientists: contextualization, confounding variables, and multiple and conjunctural causation

Context and Implications Document for: School-based interventions for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review with multiple synthesis methods

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record

Knowledge-sharing, control, compliance and symbolic violence

Recent developments in control hold that professionals are best managed through normative and concertive as opposed to bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms. This post-structuralist approach appeals to the notion of congruent values and norms and acknowledges the role of ind ividuals' subjectivity in sustaining professional autonomy. Yet, there remains a risk of over-simplifying the manifestations of such control initiatives. By means of an in-depth case study, this article considers the challenge of implementing a knowledge-sharing portal for a community of R&D scientists through management control initiatives that relied on the rhetoric of a blend of 'facilitation' and presumed 'peer pressure'. Arguing that traditional approaches such as normative/concertive control and soft bureaucracy only partially explain this phenomenon, we draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of 'symbolic violence' to interpret a managerial initiative to appropriate knowledge and affirm the structure of social relations through the complicity of R&D scientists . We also examine how the scientists channelled resistance by reconstituting compliance in line with their sense of identity as creators of knowledge

Redefining Case Study

Abstract: In this paper the authors propose a more precise and encompass-ing definition of case study than is usually found. They support their defini-tion by clarifying that case study is neither a method nor a methodology nor a research design as suggested by others. They use a case study prototype of their own design to propose common properties of case study and demon-strate how these properties support their definition. Next, they present sev-eral living myths about case study and refute them in relation to their definition. Finally, they discuss the interplay between the terms case study and unit of analysis to further delineate their definition of case study. The target audiences for this paper include case study researchers, research de-sign and methods instructors, and graduate students interested in case study research