INTRODUCTION The EQ-5D is a widely-used, standardised, quality of life measure producing health profiles, indices and states. The aims of this study were to assess the role of various factors in how people with Multiple Sclerosis rate their quality of life, based on responses to the EQ-5D received via the web portal of the UK MS Register. METHODS The 4516 responses to the EQ-5D (between May 2...

313 tables labour market Table 1: Changes in employment rates between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 (percentage points) ......................................... 22 Table 2: Workers registering as job seekers after being laid off as part of mass layoffs by region .... 23 Table 3: Employment rate across various subgroups in the Visegrád countries, 2008 ................ ...

Childhood socioeconomic status (cSES) is a powerful predictor of adult health, but its operationalization and measurement varies across studies. Using Health and Retirement Study data (HRS, which is nationally representative of community-residing United States adults aged 50+ years), we specified theoretically-motivated cSES measures, evaluated their reliability and validity, and compared their...

Questionnaire Data from the PIRLS 2006 study in Italy provided a number of indices in order to summarize factors of educational context influencing reading achievement. The aim of the present secondary study is to explore the relationship between these indices at school as well as pupil levels and the Rasch-scaled score for overall reading achievement. A multilevel analysis was conducted using ...

Multidimensional poverty concentrates on deprivations in the living standard of a population in terms of functioning failures of different quality of life attributes such as per capita real GDP, life expectancy at birth and educational attainment. More precisely, a threshold level is specified for each attribute and shortfalls of quantities of different attributes from respective thresholds for...

Background: As suggested by the Minorities’ Diminished Returns (MDRs) theory, educational attainment shows a weaker protective effect for racial and ethnic minority groups compared to non-Hispanic Whites. This pattern, however, is never shown for hospitalization risk. Objectives: This cross-sectional study explored racial and ethnic variations in the asso...

In this study, we examined the relationship between various indices of socioeconomic status (SES) and counseling outcomes among clients at a university counseling center. We also explored links between SES and three factors that are generally regarded as facilitative of client change in counseling: motivation, treatment expectancy and social support. Regression analyses showed that, overall, SE...

The paper proposes an integrated approach to the design optimization of parallel manipulators, which is based on the concept of the workspace grid and utilizes the goal-attainment formulation for the global optimization. To combine the non-homogenous design specification, the developed optimization technique transforms all constraints and objectives into similar performance indices related to t...

Color dispersion, i.e., the dependency of refractive index of any transparent material on the wavelength of light, has important consequences for the function of optical instruments and animal eyes. Using a multi-objective goal attainment optimization algorithm, a dispersion model was successfully fitted to measured refractive indices of various ocular media and the longitudinal chromatic aberr...