risks and how to evaluate healthcare contracts? The research questions in this series of three articles focus on how reimbursement strategies (especially Pay for Performance P4P), evaluation of measures and methods of risk adjustment can best be integrated in healthcare contracting. This last article of the series will spot light on the specific topic of risk adjustment as well as evaluation an...

Although public sector expatriates are becoming increasingly common, research on them is very limited. There is reason to believe that public sector expatriates cross-culturally adjust differently than private sector expatriates. This study investigated U.S. Department of Defense administrators assigned to U.S. embassies worldwide. Results showed that self efficacy, role clarity and role discre...

Robust and reliable covariance estimates play a decisive role in financial and many other applications. An important class of estimators is based on factor models. Here, we show by extensive Monte Carlo simulations that covariance matrices derived from the statistical Factor Analysis model exhibit a systematic error, which is similar to the well-known systematic error of the spectrum of the sam...

A number of factors thought to influence psychological adjustment to multiple sclerosis were studied. Patients' knowledge about their disorder was assessed, but neither their knowledge, level of disability, nor demographic characteristics were related to adjustment. Better adjustment was however associated with having more contact with able-bodied people.

Racial socialization has been suggested as an important factor in helping African American adolescents cope effectively with racism and discrimination. Although multiple studies have reported a positive link between racial pride socialization and psychological adjustment among African American youth, assessments of the association between adolescent adjustment and another dimension of racial so...

Recent studies of peer victimization have demonstrated the importance of studying relational as well as physical forms of peer maltreatment for understanding children's social-psychological adjustment problems. Studies in this area have been limited thus far by a focus on school-age children (9-12-year-olds). Given the significance of early identification of children's social difficulties for i...

Medication adherence and persistence is recognized as a worldwide public health problem, particularly important in the management of chronic diseases. Nonadherence to medical plans affects every level of the population, but particularly older adults due to the high number of coexisting diseases they are affected by and the consequent polypharmacy. Chronic disease management requires a continuou...

Thelen and colleagues recently proposed a dynamic field theory (DFT) to capture the general processes that give rise to infants' performance in the Piagetian A-not-B task. According to this theory, the same general processes should operate in noncanonical A-not-B-type tasks with children older than 12 months. Three predictions of the DFT were tested by examining 3-year-olds' location memory err...

In this paper we present a technique to derive rules describing contrast sets. Contrast sets are a formalism to represent groups differences. We propose a novel approach to describe directional contrasts using rules where the contrasting effect is partitioned into pairs of groups. Our approach makes use of a directional Fisher Exact Test to find significant differences across groups. We used a ...