Efficient cooperation relies on good coordination. Individually, existing workflow, hypermedia, and groupware systems can only manage some types of dependency between activities. Furthermore, these systems provide either formal or informal mechanisms for coordination. We argue that comprehensive and flexible coordination support is needed to manage all types of dependency and to cover the whole...

BACKGROUND One essential element of research is the successful recruitment of participants. However, concerns are obvious regarding the ethical implications of involving terminally ill and even dying patients and their informal caregivers as research participants. This study aims to illustrate central issues encountered when recruiting bereaved informal caregivers for a questionnaire validation...

BACKGROUND Participation in population-based preventive health check has declined over the past decades. More research is needed to determine factors enhancing participation. The objective of this study was to examine the association between two measures of neighborhood level social capital on participation in the health check phase of a population-based lifestyle intervention. METHODS The st...

This paper discusses the elements of socialist and post-socialist (un)employment and informal economy. A growing economic crisis and a reduced participation in the formal labor market in the newly-formed Croatian state in the early 1990s brought about an increase in unemployment and gave rise to informal economy. However, informal economy had been widespread even before, in the late socialist p...

This paper uses household data to test whether microfinance institutions created by the Malawian government in the mid-1990s under its Poverty Alleviation Programme crowded out access to informal loans. As in several recent studies, the paper adopts policy evaluation techniques to identify a causal relationship between access to government-sponsored credit programmes and informal loans. After t...

Social connections in the community ("social capital") represent an important source of resilience in the aftermath of major disasters. However, little is known about how residential relocation due to housing destruction affects survivors' social capital. We examined changes in social capital among survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. People who lost their homes were r...

This article examines the participation of Spanish older people in formal, non-formal and informal learning activities and presents a profile of participants in each kind of learning activity. Method: We used data from a nationally representative sample of Spanish people between 60 and 75 years old (n = 4703). The data were extracted from the 2007 Encuesta sobre la Participación de la Población...

Outcomes and benefits of cooperative education (co-op) participation have been well documented; however, they have focused primarily on grade point averages (GPA) and career outcomes. Previous work on predictors of participation shows no significant differences by gender in the aggregate, but there are significant differences by ethnicity and major. One reason students may not participate in co...