Responsiveness of quality of life instruments : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Statistics in Statistics at Massey University

Quality of life (QoL) is a phrase that is intuitively meaningful. As a concept it distinguishes between the mere duration of life and a life that is in some sense 'worthwhile'. QoL measurement is thought to be important in the assessment of chronic health conditions and their treatment. It is difficult to create an operational definition of QoL that takes into account different concepts of QoL as well as the heterogeneity of subjects and diseases. Responsiveness is one aspect of instruments which measure QoL. A responsive instrument captures the change in QoL in response to interventions which change underlying health conditions. Internal responsiveness, measured by a variety of standardised mean changes, reflects change in a QoL instrument score measured on subjects who 'should have' changed. External responsiveness relates change in a QoL instrument score to a change in external criteria. Methods of determining external responsiveness include receiver operating characteristic curves, correlation and simple regression. Simple linear regression can be extended using linear mixed models which can estimate parameters either by maximum likelihood or by Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. This thesis critically examines methods of assessing responsiveness and demonstrates the methodology, including the extension to linear mixed models. The data set used for illustration is based on a study of subjects with rheumatoid arthritis who are assessed before and after a period of inpatient hospital treatment for their condition. Three new QoL instruments, the EuroQol, the Quality of Life Profile and the WHOQoL-Bref were found to be moderately responsive. However the available methodology and the extensions described in this thesis were unable to find any difference in responsiveness. Reasons for this could include that QoL instruments are relatively blunt instruments for the detection of change. The external criteria for change used may not have been ideal. The reasons for a choice of instrument for QoL assessment may be better related to ease of completion, interpretation and analysis, than on sophisticated assessment of responsiveness

Perceived School Style and Academic Outcomes among Ethnically Diverse College Students

Students’ perceptions of their schools play an important role in achievement. One framework for measuring students’ perceptions is an adaptation of Baumrind’s parenting typology, which measures perceived “school style” (Pellerin, 2005) along two dimensions of responsiveness (warmth) and demandingness (high academic expectations). Although research suggests that perceptions of authoritative styles (both responsive and demanding) correlate with better student outcomes (Dornbusch et al., 1987), no existing research has considered whether these findings apply to ethnically diverse samples. We surveyed 301 students from five Midwestern colleges who completed measures of perceived school style, perceived discrimination, and several academic outcomes. Academically stigmatized students (African Americans and Latinos) perceived similar levels of demandingness but significantly lower levels of responsiveness from their instructors than did their non-stigmatized peers. Importantly, perceived discrimination in college fully mediated this relationship. With regard to the academic outcome variables, we found a significant interaction between responsiveness and demandingness such that only students who perceived high levels of both showed higher levels of attendance and out-of-class engagement. Finally, we found a significant three-way interaction between responsiveness, demandingness, and academic minority status in predicting academic efficacy. High levels of responsiveness and demandingness were related to increased academic efficacy only for non-academically stigmatized students. These results imply not only that the benefits of perceived school responsiveness and demandingness often depend on one another, but also that these benefits do not always apply equally to all students

HOW GOVERNMENTS RESPOND TO BUSINESS DEMANDS FOR TAX CUTS: AN ANALYSIS OF CORPORATE AND INHERITANCE TAX REFORMS IN AUSTRIA AND SWEDEN. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019

This paper analyses government responsiveness to business demands for tax cuts, using case studies of reforms of corporate taxes and inheritance taxes in Austria and Sweden. We find a high level of government responsiveness in both policy fields, but much higher responsiveness on inheritance tax. We argue that this difference between the two policy fields is the result of an effort by governments to balance three conflicting goals: (i) attracting investments, (ii) maintaining a high level of tax revenues, (iii) and maintaining electoral popularity. The intensity of these goal conflicts varied between the two policy fields. It was higher on corporate taxation, which led governments to combine cuts to corporate tax with compensatory measures, the abolition of inheritance tax in both countries was not combined with compensatory measures, because goal conflicts were low. We show that differences in the expected electoral and fiscal impacts of reforms explain the different levels of government responsiveness. Government efforts to reconcile the three policy goals under conditions of heightened business power entailed sacrificing redistributive goals that have characterized tax policies in earlier periods.

Epistemic Sentimentalism and Epistemic Reason-Responsiveness

Epistemic Sentimentalism is the view that emotional experiences such as fear and guilt are a source of immediate justification for evaluative beliefs. For example, guilt can sometimes immediately justify a subject’s belief that they have done something wrong. In this paper I focus on a family of objections to Epistemic Sentimentalism that all take as a premise the claim that emotions possess a normative property that is apparently antithetical to it: epistemic reason-responsiveness, i.e., emotions have evidential bases and justifications can be demanded of them. I respond to these objections whilst granting that emotions are reason-responsive. This is not only dialectically significant vis-à-vis the prospects for Epistemic Sentimentalism, but also supports a broader claim about the compatibility of a mental item’s being reason-responsive and its being a generative source of epistemic justification

Codes and Virtues: Can Good Lawyers be Good Ethical Deliberators?

Regardless of its specific contents, any black letter statutory codification regulating lawyers\u27 conduct will be flawed as an instrument of ethics for lawyers. This is the central thesis of this Article. It is motivated by the idea that typical statutory prohibitions and permissions are likely to stunt sentimental responsiveness, a key feature of good ethical deliberation. Additionally, a certain technocratic mode of legal analysis heightens this tendency. Although other styles of lawyering might better engender sentimental responsiveness, statutory codes of lawyers\u27 ethics do not invite this style as readily as a welldeveloped common law of lawyers\u27 ethics would

Moral Hedging and Responding to Reasons

In this paper, I argue that the fetishism objection to moral hedging fails. The objection rests on a reasons-responsiveness account of moral worth, according to which an action has moral worth only if the agent is responsive to moral reasons. However, by adopting a plausible theory of non-ideal moral reasons, one can endorse a reasons-responsiveness account of moral worth while maintaining that moral hedging is sometimes an appropriate response to moral uncertainty. Thus, the theory of moral worth upon which the fetishism objection relies does not, in fact, support that objection

Rationality as Reasons-Responsiveness

John Broome argues that rationality cannot consist in reasons-responsiveness since rationality supervenes on the mind, while reasons-responsiveness does not supervene on the mind. I here defend this conception of rationality by way of defending the assumption that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind. Given the many advantages of an analysis of rationality in terms of reasons-responsiveness, and in light of independent considerations in favour of the view that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind, we should take seriously the backup view, a hypothesis that explains why reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind even though paradigmatic reasons are external facts. I argue that Broome’s objections to the backup view, as well as his more general objection to the thesis that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind, do not succeed

ASAP: The After Salesman Problem

The customer contacts taking place after a sales transaction and the services involved are of increasing importance in contemporary business models. The responsiveness to service requests is a key dimension in service quality and therefore an important succes factor in this business domain. This responsiveness is of course highly dependent on the operational scheduling or dispatching decisions made in the often dynamic service settings. We consider the problem of optimizing responsiveness to service requests arriving in real time. We consider three models and formulations and present computational results on exact solution methods. The research is based on practical practical work done with the largest service organization in The Netherlands.operations research and management science;