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Objectives: The objective of this paper was to describe primary care prescribers' perspectives on electronic prescribing drug alerts at the point of prescribing.Design: We used a mixed-method study which included clinician surveys (web-based and paper) and focus groups with prescribers and staff.Participants: Prescribers (n = 157) working in one of 64 practices using 1 of 6 e-prescribing technologies in 6 US states completed the quantitative survey and 276 prescribers and staff participated in focus groups.Measurements: The study measures self-reported frequency of overriding of drug alerts; open-ended responses to: "What do you think of the drug alerts your software generates for you?"Results: More than 40% of prescribers indicated they override drug-drug interactions most of the time or always (range by e-prescribing system, 25% to 50%). Participants indicated that the software and the interaction alerts were beneficial to patient safety and valued seeing drug-drug interactions for medications prescribed by others. However, they noted that alerts are too sensitive and often unnecessary. Participant suggestions included: (1) run drug alerts on an active medication list and (2) allow prescribers to set the threshold for severity of alerts.Conclusions: Primary care prescribers recognize the patient safety value of drug prescribing alerts embedded within electronic prescribing software. Improvements to increase specificity and reduce alert overload are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of March Current Population Survey data from 1964 through 2002 shows that white women overtook white men in their rates of college completion and that this phenomenon occurred during a period in which women's standard-of-living gains from college completion grew at a faster rate than those for men. We assess whether these trends are related to changes in the value of education for men and women in terms of earnings returns to higher education, the probability of getting and staying married, education-related differences in family standard of living, and insurance against living in poverty. Although returns to a college education in the form of earnings remained higher for women than for men over the entire period, trends in these returns do not provide a plausible explanation for gender-specific trends in college completion. But when broader measures of material well-being are taken into account, women's returns to higher education appear to have risen faster than those of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical and analytic model of fertility intentions is proposed which treats "don't know" responses and other uncertain responses as distinct from more firm intentions. Methodologically, these analyses show that "don't know" responses need not be treated as missing data, but instead are both valid and meaningful responses. Furthermore, eliminating these uncertain respondents would have the negative effects of distorting across survey comparisons in intentions due to shifts in aggregate uncertainty, reducing the likelihood of accurately detecting shifts in fertility intentions, and lessening the representatives of the sample analyzed. Substantively, in conjunction with Morgan (1981), these results show that the sharp 1965-76 decline in the likelihood of intending more births at parities 2 through 5 occurred as women halted childbearing at minimal acceptable levels and postponed further childbearing. With time (or age), this delayed fertility became fertility about which the respondent was uncertain and, finally, fertility foregone. Since 1970, similar shifts are observed at parities 0 and 1, perhaps foreshadowing an increase in voluntary childlessness and one-child families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although disapproval of all justifications for abortion is rare in the United States, our analysis of numerous surveys taken in the 1960s and 1970s shows that support for the full prochoice platform is also rare. This means that respondents who endorse some justifications for abortion and reject others typically constitute about 50 percent of these samples. If forced to choose politically between polar positions, would these people be more likely to side with a positive or a negative extreme? Using Multiple Classification Analysis as a form of discriminant analysis, we examine whether people who appear to form a "middle" group actually are closer in their characteristics to those who are positive, or to those who are negative. Finally, we test to see whether those respondents who endorse all four justifications for abortion (health, child defect, financial stress, and elective abortion) also endorse additional prochoice positions, such as government payments for abortion, abortion without the husband's or the parent's consent, and abortion after the first trimester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]