Social identity is a constant and permanent process that changes social situations based on individual experiences in these situations. Religious and ethnic identities are two dimensions of social identity that are of great importance in Iranian society. Due to the ethnic diversity in Iran and the proximity of ethnic cultures through migration, ethnic identity is noticeable. Religious identity ...

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Implementing public health measures with obvious benefits becomes a complex struggle when commercial interests are paramount T he evening of 25 March 2009 was cool for the community consultation — a necessary step before the implementation of fluoridation of the Cobram water supply. There were only a few people present in the Civic Centre, but they warmly applauded the initiative. None of the e...

A descriptive survey was conducted to determine the self-perceived needs of physically disabled persons as a preliminary step toward establishing or designing a knowledge base for occupational therapy intervention at a community college. Demographic and needs data were statistically compared with those from a sample of nondisabled college students. Significant differences in the confidence to p...

Opinion dynamics focuses on the opinion evolution in a social community. Recently, some models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence were proposed by Deffuant and Krause, et al. In the literature, agents were generally assumed to have a homogeneous confidence level. This paper proposes an extended model for a group of agents with heterogeneous confidence levels. First, a socia...

BACKGROUND In response to the increasing complexity of the health care system, the field of health advocacy has emerged. However, little is known about factors that may influence a person's likelihood of hiring a health advocate. PURPOSE This study was designed to examine factors that influence a person's likelihood of hiring a health advocate. METHODS The participants were 889 randomly sel...

Continuous-time Markov processes over finite state-spaces are widely used to model dynamical processes in many fields of natural and social science. Here, we introduce a maximum likelihood estimator for constructing such models from data observed at a finite time interval. This estimator is dramatically more efficient than prior approaches, enables the calculation of deterministic confidence in...