the role of qualitative methods in outcome research

... look forward to seeing relevant demonstration of the usefulness of this novel psychometric method in HRQOL research that fully encompasses the intent of the taxonomy, integrates the relevant properties ... addressed in the Hankins' paper, and there is no explanation for how the use of Ferguson's Delta would enhance interpretability Although the use of Ferguson's Delta may someday improve our understanding ... References Hankins M: How discriminating are discriminative instruments? Health and quality of life outcomes 2008, 6(1):36 Kirshner B, Guyatt G: A methodological framework for assessing health indices...

Ngày tải lên: 18/06/2014, 19:20

... 'Understanding the Role of Discriminative Instruments in HRQoL Research: Can Ferguson's Delta Help?' to which the answer is a definitive yes, subject to the constraints previously discussed Finally, ... Delta then indexes the degree to which the instrument makes valid discriminations Wyrwich suggests that the results of another study [6], in which the dichotomous scoring method of the GHQ-12 was ... were meaningful Recall that the value of Delta is derived from ordinal comparisons of persons that classify them as either the same or different Therefore, if a researcher doubts that an instrument...

Ngày tải lên: 18/06/2014, 19:20

... understanding of, and insight into, health outcomes Identification of a core set of psychological variables from the increasingly large number on offer, and consensus on the instruments used to measure them, ... emerging from the manuscript of Brionez and colleagues is how to deal with the role of psychological variables in self-reported outcomes in ankylosing spondylitis and likely in rheumatology in ... critically reading the manuscript and Dr Wojciechowski, clinical psychologist, for the interesting discussion Competing interests The author declares that they have no competing interests Published:...

Ngày tải lên: 12/08/2014, 11:22

... Adjustment and the Role of Bank Credit in Russia: Evidence from a 420 Firm's Qualitative Survey The main underlying question in the above-mentioned conclusions rather brings back to the issue of the adjustment ... access-to-input for the worst in this sub-pool Conversely, the overbearing influence of the financial constraints in the lower half is statistically associated with a rather low occurrence of real ... evolution of the same type of variables; their judgement on their actual and future behavior, including the type of constraints they face Some sets of answers are strongly cardinal, as for the current...

Ngày tải lên: 06/03/2014, 08:20

... of machine translation In Proceedings of HLT/NAACL Franz Josef Och and Hermann Ney 2002 Discriminative training and maximum entropy models for statistical machine translation In Proceedings of ... of a genuine improvement in translation quality This begs the question as to whether this is only a theoretical concern or whether Bleu’s inadequacies can come into play in practice In the next ... gives the interpretations of the scores When first evaluating fluency, the judges are shown only the hypothesis translation They are then shown a reference translation and are asked to judge the...

Ngày tải lên: 17/03/2014, 22:20

... i.e it is involved in the maintenance of an ongoing Th1 response rather than part of the initial immunological decision-making process In the current study, the finding that production of IL-12 ... Western blot technique [16], the former being able to offer the high throughput of EIA combined with the individual protein testing capacity of the Western blotting Discussion To extend our knowledge ... each other in a variety of ways [20,24,25] The dominance of one of these subsets results in either a predominantly cellular (Th1-mediated) or an antibody (Th2-mediated) response [9] Therefore, the...

Ngày tải lên: 20/06/2014, 00:20

... expectations in some domains explained up to 13% of the variance in total joint replacement outcome [11,12], measured using either generic, joint-specific or painscale instruments In neither of these ... combination of both Either way, these findings in relation to the overestimation of the probable result of surgery highlight the importance of both routine outcome assessment and longitudinal studies of ... appeared to offer one of the most comprehensive, but simple and efficient, means of assessing the many domains/constructs of interest in arthroplasty patients Most of the individual scales in the questionnaire...

Ngày tải lên: 09/08/2014, 14:22

... [3] The reason for these is based in a couple of problems First, there is a significant interobserver variability in histological typing [2,6] Second, determination of precise cut-off points ... Immunhistochemical Staging Hematoxylin-eosin-stained sections of all patients were available for the re-evaluation of the histologic diagnosis according to the commonly known WHO schema of 1999 [2-4] ... experience in clinical treatment of thymomas as a result of a retrospective single centre analysis done within a European university setting The role of a pseudocapsula and its clinical significance...

Ngày tải lên: 10/08/2014, 10:20

... (Ang-1) and angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2), play a fundamental role in the maintenance of vessel integrity Angiopoietin-1 (Ang-1) and Ang-2 are ligands of the endothelial receptor tyrosine kinase Tie-2, which ... regulator of endothelial function [14] Binding of circulating Ang-1 to the Tie-2 receptor protects the vasculature from inflammation and leakage, whereas binding of Ang-2 antagonizes Tie-2 signaling ... Although the number of controls in our study was small, the inclusion of a comparator group allows the assessment of possible effects of other asymptomatic coinfections, such as helminths and...

Ngày tải lên: 13/08/2014, 20:22

... raising the profile of women in management However, during this period of research, there was an emerging recognition of the importance of a concern for people in the behavioural theories as being ... anything towards raising the profile of women in management, as the theory was constructed as a male model at a time when women were not visible in paid employment One of the off shoots of the ... enabling of others to help achieve the goals of the organisation Furthermore, the ability to control others is given no prominence in this recent definition of leadership A brief review of early...

Ngày tải lên: 08/10/2013, 15:56

... relies on the securities booking system of the CGSDTC and the bond trading system of the inter-bank lending centre The trading system of the national inter-bank lending centre provides pricing information, ... source of financing for enterprises, if their own capital is excluded In summary, the deepening process of the financial markets has rendered the dominance of the banking sector in the financial ... in turn contributed to the financial stability not only in Asia but also in the whole world Role of the international financial institutions ( IFIs ) The IFIs have played an active role in financial...

Ngày tải lên: 18/10/2013, 07:15

... adults (39 ) The renewed interest in examining the indications for BCG vaccination in the United States included consideration of the wide range of vaccine efficacies determined by clinical trials ... explore the sources of the heterogeneity in the efficacy of the BCG vaccine reported in the individual studies Using a model that included the geographic latitude of the study site and the data ... efficacy of BCG vaccine in HCWs or b) the effects on efficacy of the vaccine strain administered Vol 45 / No RR-4 MMWR and the vaccinee’s age at the time of vaccination The protective efficacy of BCG...

Ngày tải lên: 15/02/2014, 13:20

... understanding issues facing community banks I THE CURRENT ROLE OF COMMUNITY BANKS The banking system in the United States has always been unique in the sense of containing large numbers of small ... were not there, other financial services providers might readily step in to take their place This article examines the role of community banks in the U.S economy The first section of the article ... While community banks still comprise the vast majority of banks, the question arises whether their role in the banking system has declined to the point of insignificance This section shows that...

Ngày tải lên: 16/02/2014, 11:20

... through the exchange between subunits of either their N-terminal, or their C-terminal ends [33–35] We found that the behavior with the model membrane of the dimer in which the C-terminal ends ... geometry of the hinge loop after ligation Also in this case no clashes were detected at Electrostatic interactions and antitumor RNases the dimer interface of the models or in the surroundings of the ... Nter are the C-terminal and N-terminal structural regions, respectively, of the two A and B monomers of the dimeric RNase The black circle between the monomers indicates the mass center of the dimer...

Ngày tải lên: 19/02/2014, 06:20

... N-linked oligosaccharide side-chains are important for the GABA transport activity 1-Deoxymannojirimycin inhibits the GABA-uptake of GAT1 In order to gain further insight into the role of the ... misfolding of this protein, resulting in its partial retention in the ER and its rapid digestion thereafter [16,19] Accordingly, our results indicate that the intracellular trafficking of N-glycosylation ... Aliquots were used for measurement of the remaining [3H]GABA and [14C]sucrose The protein concentration in the supernatant was determined using the bicinchoninic acid protein assay reagent (Pierce, USA)...

Ngày tải lên: 19/02/2014, 17:20

... t is the in interaction of the results of these asynchronous processes that the process of comprehension is defined 4.1 The processes are independent of the knowledge representations defined ... defined than through other methods, because i t enables one to develop a broader perspective of the questions within an analysis of the hypothesis in the cont e x t of a characterization of the ... activation of a l l meanings of each recognized word in HOPE, the determination of the phonetic representation of a recognized word determines the breadth of active competition amon meanings for...

Ngày tải lên: 21/02/2014, 20:20

... many of them have been pioneers in the Latin American microfinance industry As of today, out of 15 Latin American members are active in microfinance These members are involved in different ways in ... unrivalled in scale, and outreach continues to grow in terms of the number of microborrowers Institutions providing microfinance in Asia play a critical role in increasing the access to finance for ... very helpful in bringing microfinance into the spotlight not only in developing countries but also in the developed world The awareness by policy makers about the role of microfinance as a major...

Ngày tải lên: 06/03/2014, 10:20

... ambiguous the meaning of the visual image, the more influence is exerted by the musical score in the process of interpreting the scene Music can convey the scope of a film, effectively communicating ... meaning through sound (including music), taking into account the director’s – and, therefore, the composer’s – intentions, the narrative content of the film, and the overall strategy of the director ... the relationship is invertible without changing the perceived meaning (i.e., it is equally valid to say that the music projects the meaning of the image or the image projects the meaning of the...

Ngày tải lên: 07/03/2014, 14:20

... However, the mechanistic roles of several of these residues are not described well and there is no example of mutational analysis of all of these residues in the same enzyme To obtain an insight into ... 1), thereby confirming the crucial role of Asp142 Catalysis in family 18 chitinases (Eur J Biochem 271) 259 In most ChiB structures, Asp142 is clearly defined, being either in the ÔdownÕ or in the ... positioned in the ÔupÕ position rows and shows that in the presence of the substrate, rotation of Asp142 towards Glu144 lowers the pKa of the latter by 0.8 pH units The calculated effects of the D140N...

Ngày tải lên: 07/03/2014, 14:20

... properties of the document containing the sentence and properties of the sentence itself Regarding the former type, two features come into play: the relevance score of the document (from the IR engine) ... evaluating answers to definition questions In HLT/EMNLP 2005 J Lin and D Demner-Fushman 2006a The role of knowledge in conceptual retrieval: A study in the domain of clinical medicine In SIGIR ... the findings of Monz (2003), who made the same observation in the factoid QA task There are a few caveats to consider when interpreting these results First, the test set of 25 questions is rather...

Ngày tải lên: 08/03/2014, 02:21