OBJECTIVE To determine whether an approach that assesses patient capabilities for self-management and then tailors coaching support based on this assessment would be more effective in improving outcomes than the usual disease management approach. STUDY DESIGN A quasi-experimental pre-post design was used, with an intervention group coached with a tailored approach and a control group coached ...

OBJECTIVES To develop a propensity score-based risk adjustment method to estimate the performance of 20 physician groups and to compare performance rankings using our method to a standard hierarchical regression-based risk adjustment method. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING Mailed survey of patients from 20 California physician groups between July 1998 and February 1999. STUDY DESIGN A cross-sect...

Teachers and instructors assign students homework of varying lengths. There is considerable evidence that factors such as cognitive load play a role in student performance and learning, but there has not been sufficient study of how these phenomena play out in the specific case of the length of homework. In this paper, we study the impact of assignment size on student performance. This paper re...

This study seeks to address the mixed findings of prior studies regarding the effect of online brand community on customer value. Based on the regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that participation in a brand community tend to increase both visit and purchase frequencies of customers with promotion-focus; on the contrary, the same would typically decrease visit and purchase frequencies of c...

I first wish to thank Dr Austin for an important paper on the use of propensity score methods in practice. It follows a series of papers by Dr Austin highlighting issues that applied researchers face in using propensity score methods—an area of research that deserves more attention. As Dr Austin shows, there has been considerable misuse and misunderstanding of propensity score methods. Papers s...

Although the plant and animal kingdoms were separated more than 1,6 billion years ago, multicellular development is for both guided by similar transcriptional, epigenetic and posttranscriptional machinery. One may ask to what extent there are similarities and differences in the gene regulation circuits and their dynamics when it comes to important processes like stem cell regulation. The key pl...

We have investigated the temporal and the causal basis of blood tissue specification in the chick embryo. Earlier workers have shown that the prospective blood-forming area is specified in a horseshoe-shaped area at the posterior side of the embryo. We found that cultured explants from the posterior marginal zone at stages XI to XIII (consisting of the posterior marginal zone and part of Koller...

Populism and beliefs in conspiracy theories fuel societal division as both rely on a Manichean us-versus-them, good-versus-evil narrative. However, whether constructs have the same dispositional roots is essentially unknown. Across three studies conducted two different countries using diverse samples (total N = 1,888), we show that populism mentality strong common core evidenced bifactor modeli...

Compared to high school graduates, adolescents who drop out of school are more likely to have a range of negative outcomes, including lower verbal capacities; however, the true nature of this association is not well-understood. Dropping out of school could have an important effect on reducing verbal skills, or the link between dropping out of school and diminished verbal skills could be a spuri...