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This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcomes of bargaining over losses, the subject of this paper, have rarely been studied. But experimental studies of related situations, such as those involving bankruptcies or bequests in which the sum of the legal claims that can be made against a bank or firm or estate are greater than their values, have produced strong support for the proportionality principle. To test whether this principle would find support in other situations involving losses we designed an experimental game in which four players start out with differing initial endowments of real money. They are then informed that a certain amount of this resource has to be given back to the experimenter. How should the loss be shared among the agents? This game was run at different locations and under different treatments over a period of almost three years. We found that the proportionality principle was rarely proposed and even less frequently accepted as a solution to this problem. One of the main reasons for this result was that the two players with the smallest endowments opposed most of the proposals which asked them to contribute at least some positive amount of their own initial resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patient and public involvement (PPI) is a requirement for UK health and social care research funding. Evidence for how best to implement PPI in research programmes, such as National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaborations for Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs), remains limited. This paper reports findings from an action research (AR) project called IMPRESS, which aims to strengthen PPI within CLAHRC East of England (EoE). IMPRESS combines AR with Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) to explore PPI within diverse case study projects, identifying actions to implement, test and refine to further embed PPI. Methods: We purposively selected CLAHRC EoE case study projects for in-depth analysis of PPI using NPT. Data were generated from project PPI documentation, semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers and PPI contributors and focus groups. Transcripts and documents were subjected to abductive thematic analysis and triangulation within case. Systematic across case comparison of themes was undertaken with findings and implications refined through stakeholder consultation. Results: We interviewed 24 researchers and 13 PPI contributors and analysed 28 documents from 10 case studies. Three focus groups were held: two with researchers (n = 4 and n = 6) and one with PPI contributors (n = 5). Findings detail to what extent projects made sense of PPI, bought in to PPI, operationalised PPI and appraised it, thus identifying barriers and enablers to fully embedded PPI. Conclusion: Combining NPT with AR allows us to assess the embeddedness of PPI within projects and programme, to inform specific local action and report broader conceptual lessons for PPI knowledge and practice informing the development of an action framework for embedding PPI in research programmes. To embed PPI within similar programmes teams, professionals, disciplines and institutions should be recognised as variably networked into existing PPI support. Further focus and research is needed on sharing PPI learning and supporting innovation in PPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The participation of diverse demographics in higher education has risen over the last half-century; meanwhile, different political and social tiers have been assigning a more active role to institutions in terms of equality and social justice. This change in circumstances has led to the roll out of processes to institutionalise diversity outreach. This study was conducted for the clear purpose of assessing the current institutionalisation status of diversity outreach in 127 key universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities based on the opinions of diversity outreach managers and the information published on institutional websites, in turn measuring compliance with various indicators. A qualitative analysis of the institutional statements, the goals sought through strategic plans and the definitions of diversity itself was also conducted. The evidence reveals the early stage of the institutionalisation process in universities on account of the low percentage obtained for the proposed indicators. Furthermore, the study failed to exhibit significant differences in this process in terms of the institutional ownership or position held in the ranking; however, more prominent progress was noted in the North-American region when geographical differences were taken into account, likely as a result of the historical background in the advocacy for equal opportunities. Lastly, a change of approach to the conceptualisation of diversity is suggested in favour of equality and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development goals are used as a guidance for strategies development on local, regional and national levels. The importance of including young people in this complex process is recognized in all relevant documents (i.e. Agenda 21), however it is not an easy task to elicit opinions and preferences from the youth. Furthermore, the assessment of the sustainable development goals itself presents a challenge for the noisy data and nonlinear relationships in data. Popular approach is fuzzy set models where expert knowledge is presented with comprehensible rules; however expert knowledge elicitation takes a long time too. Several studies proposed an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system approach that combines the fuzzy set theory to model expert knowledge with neural networks for inferring rules and membership functions from data to assess the sustainable development performance. We base our assumptions that ANFIS can be used to predict the importance of sustainable development pillars from the demographic data of young people. For this purpose, we have conducted an online survey on sustainable development goals opinions and importance of young people in Serbia. The sample of 386 respondents has been split into a training sample of 300 instances (to generate membership functions and fuzzy rules) and a testing sample of 86 instances to predict the importance of the three pillars. We have conducted a trace-driven simulation test to validate the results of the proposed ANFIS model. Results of the study provided insights into how the young people in Serbia assess the importance of sustainable development goals. Secondly, the results suggest that ANFIS can be applied to predict values of importance of the three sustainable development pillars with the relative error of Rel Err < 5%. It must be noted that the considered model could be further improved by using training samples with more data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can participation in job-related training contribute to the formation and maintenance of adults’ literacy skills? Although evidence suggests that participation in training is related to higher literacy skills, it remains unclear whether this association reflects a causal effect of training participation on literacy (training effects), results from the self-selection of more high-skilled individuals into training (selection effects), or is due to other sources of endogeneity (e.g., omitted variable bias). To unravel these possibilities, we used data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and its German follow-up, PIAAC-Longitudinal (PIAAC-L). As these unique data offer repeated measures of literacy skills, spaced three years apart, in a large and representative sample, they allowed us to disentangle training effects from selection effects and to account for potential endogeneity. Analyses revealed that, even after taking account of formal education and a host of job characteristics, individuals with higher literacy skills were more likely to participate in training. By contrast, no evidence for effects of training on literacy skills emerged in any of our models, which comprised lagged-dependent, fixed effects, and instrumental-variable models. These findings suggest that, rather than job-related training contributing to literacy development, individuals with higher literacy skills are more likely to participate in training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to reliable and timely information ensures that decision-makers can operate effectively. The motivations and challenges of parliamentarians and policy-makers in accessing evidence have been well documented in the policy literature. However, there has been little focus on research-providers. Understanding both the demand- and the supply-side of research engagement is imperative to enhancing impactful interactions. Here, we examine the broader experiences, motivations and challenges of UK-based research professionals engaging with research-users relevant to policy-making and scrutiny in the UK using a nationwide online questionnaire. The context of the survey partly involved contributing to the UK Evidence Information Service (EIS), a proposed rapid match-making service to facilitate interaction between parliamentary arenas that use evidence and research-providers. Our findings reveal, at least for this sub-sample who responded, that there are gender-related differences in policy-related experience, motivations, incentives and challenges for research professionals to contribute to evidence-informed decision-making through initiatives such as the EIS. Male and female participants were equally likely to have policy experience; however, males reported both significantly broader engagement with the research-users included in the survey and significantly higher levels of engagement with each research-user. Reported incentives for engagement included understanding what the evidence will be used for, guidance on style and content of contribution, and acknowledgement of contributions by the policymaker or elected official. Female participants were significantly more likely to select the guidance-related options. The main reported barrier was workload. We discuss how academia-policy engagement initiatives can best address these issues in ways that enhance the integration of research evidence with policy and practice across the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]