Self-criticism of physicians and patient participation are the pillars of modern medical ethics and medical programmes. Patients expect risk minimisation from physicians, mostly without realising how much they could actively do themselves in this respect. But what about the willingness of German people to take risks, how high is it really at present? Direct empirical data are not available, but...

Student participation in school life may be considered from the points of view of diverse theoretical frameworks that question different educational aspects related to such social involvement. Issues such as the construction of a democratic school, education for citizenship, active learning and student-centred education may be addressed when the object of one’s study focuses on student particip...

The rapid development of communication and information technology has made electronic voting technologically and economically feasible. In this study, we will examine the differential impact of four electronic voting system (EVS) characteristics (privacy, accessibility, mobility, and accuracy) on voter participation intention (i.e., EVS voting) and on preferred EVS mechanism (telephone, Web-bas...

Measuring clinicians' shared decision-making (SDM) performance is a key requirement given the intensity of policy interest in many developed countries - yet it remains one of the most difficult methodological challenges, which is a concern for many stakeholders. In this Viewpoint Article, we investigate the development of existing patient-reported measures (PRMs) of SDM identified in a recent r...

Although the importance of patient participation is acknowledged in today's healthcare, many challenges remain before patient participation can become an integral part of care provision. The ward round has traditionally been the forum for crucial decisions about patient care, but often with limited possibilities for patient participation. As part of the process of improving patient participatio...

Many countries are considering adopting political quotas for under-represented and disadvantaged minorities, but critics of the policy claim that it undermines political competition. Using evidence from India, I examine the impact of mandated political representation for disadvantaged minorities. Aggregate turnout falls by 9% of the baseline, but I find no negative impact on electoral competiti...

Methods for characterizing asynchronous text-based discussions have received significant attention in the literature. In this study, we examine student and instructor posts made in seventeen undergraduate mathematics courses over the duration of a fifteen-week semester (n=6964 posts). We apply our previously developed multifactor discussion board metric to compare differences in student partici...