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Stakeholder engagement is increasingly common in health research, with protocols for engaging multiple stakeholder groups becoming normative in patient-centered outcomes research. Previous work has focused on identifying relevant stakeholder groups with whom to work and on working with stakeholders in evidence implementation. This paper draws on the expertise of a team from four countries-Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA-to provide researchers with practical guidance for carrying out multi-stakeholder-engaged projects: we present a list of questions to assist in selecting appropriate roles and modes of engagement; we introduce a matrix to help summarize engagement activities; and we provide a list of online resources. This guidance, matrix, and list of resources can assist researchers to consider more systematically which stakeholder groups to involve, in what study roles, and by what modes of engagement. By documenting how stakeholders are paired up with specific roles, the matrix also provides a potential structure for evaluating the impact of stakeholder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children's developmental health at school entry, which to date has been used in more than a dozen countries. The EDI includes five developmental domains (Physical Health and Well-being, Social Competence, Emotional Maturity, Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge) and 16 subdomains. This paper examines the EDI's psychometric properties in four English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, United States and Jamaica) by evaluating both the internal consistency and factor structures, as well as exploring the association between the EDI's Language and Cognitive Development Domain and a direct assessment of children's receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, PPVT). Overall, the factor loadings and internal consistencies of domains and subdomains were similar across the countries. The comparisons of the Language and Cognitive Development Domain with the PPVT showed high specificity and low sensitivity. The results of this paper indicate that the EDI, a measure of children's developmental status at school entry, demonstrates similar psychometric properties in a number of countries, thus building the evidence for the instrument to be added to the limited array of internationally comparable child social indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study of recent fertility trends in the West has been dominated by examinations of Europe. A better perspective on twentieth-century fertility movements can be gained by giving an equal emphasis to trends in the 'Offshoots' (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). This paper focuses on the periods of rapid fertility decline and to a greater extent on the intervening periods of near-equilibrium. It is suggested that the 'late twentieth century compromise' is more stable than is suggested by reports on its internal strains, and that only massive government intervention could raise fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global expansion of access to higher education has increased demand for information on academic quality and has led to the development of university ranking systems or league tables in many countries of the world. A recent UNESCO/CEPES conference on higher education indicators concluded that cross-national research on these ranking systems could make an important contribution to improving the international market for higher education. The comparison and analysis of national university ranking systems can help address a number of important policy questions. First, is there an emerging international consensus on the measurement of academic quality as reflected in these ranking systems? Second, what impact are the different ranking systems having on university and academic behavior in their respective countries? Finally, are there important public interests that are thus far not reflected in these rankings? If so, is there a needed and appropriate role for public policy in the development and distribution of university ranking systems and what might that role be? This paper explores these questions through a comparative analysis of university rankings in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the fertility transition in Ireland during 1880-1911. The decline in Irish marital fertility was neither uniform nor universal. Between 1881 and 1911, there were increases in Counties Galway, Mayo, Roscommon and Donegal, while the decline in several other counties was small. Cohort parity analysis (CPA), a fertility measure devised by researcher Paul David and his research associates, provides a means of inferring the extent and timing of birth control within marriage from distributions of married women by number of children born. A key aspect of CPA is the extent to which married couples resort to contraception in order to "space" births. Ireland has played an important part in the development of CPA, because David and his colleagues believe that the rural Irish of 1911 provide a suitable model, not only for urban Ireland in 1911 and the United States around the turn of the century, but also for Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

With the increase in patient and consumer activism through the late twentieth century and into this century, patient roles in research evolved into a new model of research engagement, with patients serving as active advisors and co-leading or leading clinical research. By requiring active engagement of patients and other stakeholders, several government research funders have advanced this model, particularly in Canada, the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), and Australia. A consortium of individuals from these countries formed a Multi-Stakeholder Engagement (MuSE) consortium to examine critical issues in engaged research, establish consensus on definitions, and provide guidance for the field, beginning with an overview of how to involve stakeholders in health research (Concannon et al. J Gen Intern Med. 2019;34(3):458-463) and continuing here with an examination of definitions of research engagement. The political and advocacy roots of engaged research are reflected in definitions. Engagement is conceptualized with reference to research project goals, from informing specific clinical decisions to informing health-system level decisions. Political and cultural differences across countries are evident. Some of these government funders focus on empirical rather than ethical rationales. In countries with centralized health technology assessment, the link between societal values and engaged research is explicit. Ethical rationales for engagement are explicit in most of the published literature on research engagement. Harmonization of definitions is recommended so that research engagement elements, methods, and outcomes and impacts can be clearly examined and understood, and so that the field of research engagement can proceed from a clear conceptual foundation. Specific recommendations for terminology definitions are provided. Placing engaged research on a continuum from specific clinical decisions to more global public and social justice concerns clarifies the type of engaged research, supports appropriate comparisons, and improves the rigor of engaged research methods. The results help identify knowledge gaps in this growing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Objectives:As rates of obesity have increased throughout much of the world, so too have bias and prejudice toward people with higher body weight (that is, weight bias). Despite considerable evidence of weight bias in the United States, little work has examined its extent and antecedents across different nations. The present study conducted a multinational examination of weight bias in four Western countries with comparable prevalence rates of adult overweight and obesity.Methods:Using comprehensive self-report measures with 2866 individuals in Canada, the United States, Iceland and Australia, the authors assessed (1) levels of explicit weight bias (using the Fat Phobia Scale and the Universal Measure of Bias) and multiple sociodemographic predictors (for example, sex, age, race/ethnicity and educational attainment) of weight-biased attitudes and (2) the extent to which weight-related variables, including participants' own body weight, personal experiences with weight bias and causal attributions of obesity, play a role in expressions of weight bias in different countries.Results:The extent of weight bias was consistent across countries, and in each nation attributions of behavioral causes of obesity predicted stronger weight bias, as did beliefs that obesity is attributable to lack of willpower and personal responsibility. In addition, across all countries the magnitude of weight bias was stronger among men and among individuals without family or friends who had experienced this form of bias.Conclusions:These findings offer new insights and important implications regarding sociocultural factors that may fuel weight bias across different cultural contexts, and for targets of stigma-reduction efforts in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the real convergence hypothesis for 14 OECD countries looking at the fractional order of integration of the differences of real GDP per capita in these countries with respect to the United States. Using parametric procedures, the results vary depending on how we specify the I(0) disturbances. If they are white noise, convergence is achieved for Canada and Australia, and with autocorrelated disturbances, this hypothesis is satisfied for France and the Netherlands. However, allowing for a break at World War 11, evidence of convergence is obtained for all countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study reported here examines, in the context of Crawford's (1970) items, differences in research ethics attitudes among marketing professionals in Australia, Canada, Great Britian, and the United States. The study results indicate the lack of significant differences in research ethics attitudes among marketing professionals in the four countries. This finding is interpretable as implying the generalizability of the results of previous research ethics studies involving "domestic" (United States) marketing professionals as respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media, and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the approach to climate science. He says that climate science became the focus of right-wing political attack in the U.S., Australia, and Canada. He mentions that the key factor in the success of the U.S. special envoy for climate change is an effective communications strategy, which has yet to be learned or used by the climate-science community.