BACKGROUND The twelve step program is one of the programs that are administered for overcoming abuse of drugs. In this study, the effectiveness of chemical dependency counseling course was investigated using a hybrid model. METHODS In a survey with sample size of 243, participants were selected using stratified random sampling method. A questionnaire was used for collecting data and one sampl...

Simulation study is very important in model validation. It is invaluable and versatile tool especially in statistical problems and modeling where analytical technique is inadequate. In fitting to a model, problems will raise when there exists one or more high-leverage points in the data set. Due to the fact that the presence high-leverage points are commonly occurred in models fitting, we propo...

Adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP) is an increasingly advocated yet formidable challenge. Much work on EBP has implied simplistic solutions: if researchers would produce practice-relevant evidence-based approaches, practitioners would find, adopt, and use them. Blaming researchers for problems in supply, and practitioners for resistance in adoption, will only thwart progress at improving...

It is recognized that international water sector development work has issues with a lack of sustained positive outcomes. A large driver of this outcome is how NGOs work with communities to implement and then manage water services. Many NGOs tend to focus their efforts on improving their reach and organisational growth by continually engaging in new projects. This behaviour is largely driven by ...

The least squares linear regression estimator is well-known to be highly sensitive to unusual observations in the data, and as a result many more robust estimators have been proposed as alternatives. One of the earliest proposals was least-sum of absolute deviations (LAD) regression, where the regression coefficients are estimated through minimization of the sum of the absolute values of the re...