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Many countries have some kind of energy-system transformation either planned or ongoing for various reasons, such as to curb carbon emissions or to compensate for the phasing out of nuclear energy. One important component of these transformations is the overall reduction in energy demand. It is generally acknowledged that the domestic sector represents a large share of total energy consumption in many countries. Increased energy efficiency is one factor that reduces energy demand, but behavioral approaches (known as “sufficiency”) and their respective interventions also play important roles. In this paper, we address citizens’ heterogeneity regarding both their current behaviors and their willingness to realize their sufficiency potentials—that is, to reduce their energy consumption through behavioral change. We collaborated with three Swiss cities for this study. A survey conducted in the three cities yielded thematic sets of energy-consumption behavior that various groups of participants rated differently. Using this data, we identified four groups of participants with different patterns of both current behaviors and sufficiency potentials. The paper discusses intervention types and addresses citizens’ heterogeneity and behaviors from a city-based perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the process of adapting the Stanford Coreference resolution module to the Basque language, taking into account the characteristics of the language. The module has been integrated in a linguistic analysis pipeline obtaining an end-to-end coreference resolution system for the Basque language. The adaptation process explained can benefit and facilitate other languages with similar characteristics in the implementation of their coreference resolution systems. During the experimentation phase, we have demonstrated that language-specific features have a noteworthy effect on coreference resolution, obtaining a gain in CoNLL score of 7.07 with respect to the baseline system. We have also analysed the effect that preprocessing has in coreference resolution, comparing the results obtained with automatic mentions versus gold mentions. When gold mentions are provided, the results increase 11.5 points in CoNLL score in comparison with results obtained when automatic mentions are used. The contribution of each sieve is analysed concluding that morphology is essential for agglutinative languages to obtain good performance in coreference resolution. Finally, an error analysis of the coreference resolution system is presented which have revealed our system’s weak points and help to determine the improvements of the system. As a result of the error analysis, we have enriched the Basque coreference resolution adding new two sieves, obtaining an improvement of 0.24 points in CoNLL F1 when automatic mentions are used and of 0.39 points when the gold mentions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the well-known triadic relationship between kin state, resident state and national minority needs to take into account a fourth dimension: that of European institutions. This is illustrated through a study of relational identities on the EU’s Eastern border where the reconfiguration of ethnic relations followed the end of the iron curtain and EU accession. It considers two neighbouring ethnic minorities. One minority is part of the EU – the Belarusians in Poland – and the other is not part of the EU – the Poles in Belarus. The paper argues that the intersection of these four relational dimensions result in contrasting kinds of ethnic identification for the two minority groups leading to either fluidification or solidification under different circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The outcomes of bargaining over losses, the subject of this paper, have rarely been studied. But experimental studies of related situations, such as those involving bankruptcies or bequests in which the sum of the legal claims that can be made against a bank or firm or estate are greater than their values, have produced strong support for the proportionality principle. To test whether this principle would find support in other situations involving losses we designed an experimental game in which four players start out with differing initial endowments of real money. They are then informed that a certain amount of this resource has to be given back to the experimenter. How should the loss be shared among the agents? This game was run at different locations and under different treatments over a period of almost three years. We found that the proportionality principle was rarely proposed and even less frequently accepted as a solution to this problem. One of the main reasons for this result was that the two players with the smallest endowments opposed most of the proposals which asked them to contribute at least some positive amount of their own initial resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patient and public involvement (PPI) is a requirement for UK health and social care research funding. Evidence for how best to implement PPI in research programmes, such as National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaborations for Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs), remains limited. This paper reports findings from an action research (AR) project called IMPRESS, which aims to strengthen PPI within CLAHRC East of England (EoE). IMPRESS combines AR with Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) to explore PPI within diverse case study projects, identifying actions to implement, test and refine to further embed PPI. Methods: We purposively selected CLAHRC EoE case study projects for in-depth analysis of PPI using NPT. Data were generated from project PPI documentation, semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers and PPI contributors and focus groups. Transcripts and documents were subjected to abductive thematic analysis and triangulation within case. Systematic across case comparison of themes was undertaken with findings and implications refined through stakeholder consultation. Results: We interviewed 24 researchers and 13 PPI contributors and analysed 28 documents from 10 case studies. Three focus groups were held: two with researchers (n = 4 and n = 6) and one with PPI contributors (n = 5). Findings detail to what extent projects made sense of PPI, bought in to PPI, operationalised PPI and appraised it, thus identifying barriers and enablers to fully embedded PPI. Conclusion: Combining NPT with AR allows us to assess the embeddedness of PPI within projects and programme, to inform specific local action and report broader conceptual lessons for PPI knowledge and practice informing the development of an action framework for embedding PPI in research programmes. To embed PPI within similar programmes teams, professionals, disciplines and institutions should be recognised as variably networked into existing PPI support. Further focus and research is needed on sharing PPI learning and supporting innovation in PPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Due to changes in Polish society resulting from a significant inflow of immigrants to Poland, the need to develop the cultural competences of various professional groups who have contact with immigrants in their work has increased. These groups should include healthcare professionals, especially because of the significant increase in the number of culturally diverse patients. Therefore, medical education in Poland has had to rapidly adapt to this novel situation. For instance, the teaching process should be now more focused on the development and evaluation of the cultural competences of prospective health care workers. However, there is still a lack of standardized, valid and reliable instruments to assess cross-cultural competences among healthcare professionals. The purpose of the present paper was to describe, for the first time, the translation, adaptation, and psychometric evaluation of the Polish version of the Cross-Cultural Competence Inventory. Methods: Across two studies, we examined psychometric properties of the Cross-Cultural Competence Inventory (CCCI) such as reliability (i.e. internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor structure) and validity (i.e. theoretical, criteria, convergent). In the first study, 408 participants (75% were healthcare professionals) completed the Polish version of the CCCI and the Positive/Negative Attitude Towards Culturally Divergent People Questionnaire. In the second study, 317 participants (97% were healthcare professionals) completed the CCCI twice, with an interval of at least 22 days. In addition, across two study sessions, participants completed questionnaires constructed to measure (a) cultural intelligence, (b) need for cognitive closure, (c) emphatic sensitiveness, (d) emotional intelligence, (e) self-esteem, (f) social desirability, and (g) personality. Finally, to additionally examine the theoretical validity, 36 professional cross-cultural competence trainers completed the CCCI during a one-session study. Results: Our findings confirm the reliability and validity of the CCCI. More precisely, in study 1 we proved the theoretical validity and reliability (i.e. internal consistency) of the CCCI. While the assumed structure did not fit the data well, all items were significantly related to the general factor, thus providing strong support for the usage of the total score of the CCCI. In study 2, we additionally estimated the test-retest reliability and theoretical, criterion and convergent validity. Across two studies we were able to successfully confirm these psychometric properties. The reliability was satisfactory and ranged from .83 to .86. We also observed a high and significant positive correlation between CCCI and the Cultural Intelligence Scale, which measures a concept similar to the one measured by CCCI. In addition, a significant relationship between intercultural competences (CCCI) and other variables such as personality, empathic sensitivity, emotional intelligence, self-esteem (positive correlations) and the need for cognitive closure (mainly negative correlation) were demonstrated. Conclusions: The obtained results support the usage of the CCCI questionnaire in scientific research, such as, for example, among healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors) and students of medical fields (nursing, medicine). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The aim of the paper is to examine the role of income inequality and redistribution for income-related health inequalities in Europe. This paper contributes in two ways to the literature on macro determinants of socio-economic inequalities in health. First, it widens the distinctive focus of the research field on welfare state regimes to quantifiable measures such as social policy indicators. Second, looking at income differences completes studies on socio-economic health inequalities, which often analyse health inequalities based on educational differences. Methods: Using data from the European Values Study (2008/2009), 42 European countries are available for analysis. Country characteristics are derived from SWIID, Eurostat, and ILO and include indicators for income inequality, social policies, and economic performance. The data is analysed by using a two-step hierarchical estimation approach: At the first step--the individual level--the effect of household income on self-assessed health is extracted and introduced as an indicator measuring income-related health inequalities at the second step, the country-level. Results: Individual-level analyses reveal that income-related health inequalities exist all across Europe. Results from country-level analyses show that higher income inequality is significantly positively related to higher health inequalities while social policies do not show significant relations. Nevertheless, the results show the expected negative association between social policies and health inequalities. Economic performance also has a reducing influence on health inequalities. In all models, income inequality was the dominating explanatory effect for health inequalities. Conclusions: The analyses indicate that income inequality has more impact on health inequalities than social policies. On the contrary, social policies seemed to matter to all individuals regardless of socio-economic position since it is significantly positively linked to overall population health. Even though social policies are not significantly related to health inequalities, the power of public redistribution to impact health inequalities should not be downplayed. Social policies as a way of public redistribution are a possible instrument to reduce income inequalities which would in turn lead to a reduction in health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper provides a consolidated overview of public and healthcare professionals' attitudes towards vaccination in Europe by bringing together for the first time evidence across various vaccines, countries and populations. The paper relies on an extensive review of empirical literature published in English after 2009, as well as an analysis of unpublished market research data from member companies of Vaccines Europe. Our synthesis suggests that hesitant attitudes to vaccination are prevalent and may be increasing since the influenza pandemic of 2009. We define hesitancy as an expression of concern or doubt about the value or safety of vaccination. This means that hesitant attitudes are not confined only to those who refuse vaccination or those who encourage others to refuse vaccination. For many people, vaccination attitudes are shaped not just by healthcare professionals but also by an array of other information sources, including online and social media sources. We find that healthcare professionals report increasing challenges to building a trustful relationship with patients, through which they might otherwise allay concerns and reassure hesitant patients. We also find a range of reasons for vaccination attitudes, only some of which can be characterised as being related to lack of awareness or misinformation. Reasons that relate to issues of mistrust are cited more commonly in the literature than reasons that relate to information deficit. The importance of trust in the institutions involved with vaccination is discussed in terms of implications for researchers and policy-makers; we suggest that rebuilding this trust is a multi-stakeholder problem requiring a co-ordinated strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Purpose: To summarize the data published over the last 5 years in the European Union related to the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with psoriasis and its conditioning factors.Methods: International electronic databases and gray literature were searched to identify studies conducted on patient-reported outcomes in patients with psoriasis, published in Europe between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2013. Bibliographic references were hand-searched. Editorials, letters, commentaries, opinion papers, and studies related to specific treatments were excluded.Results: A total of 46 studies met the inclusion criteria, 27 of them reporting data related to HRQoL or its conditioning factors. The publications reviewed highlighted the substantial negative impact of psoriasis on patients' HRQoL. Most of the studies that analyzed the relationship between HRQoL and sociodemographic characteristics described a relation between gender (female) and age (young patients) and poorer HRQoL. An association between HRQoL impairment and visibility of skin lesions and disease activity and severity was also established. Skin discomfort and pruritus were identified as elements that negatively influenced HRQoL. Use of biological agents had a positive impact on HRQoL and on treatment satisfaction, a better HRQoL being seen in patients treated with systemic therapies and biologics.Conclusions: HRQoL has been broadly addressed in patients with psoriasis in Europe. Several disease- and patient-related factors contributed to its deterioration. Therapeutic measures with proven effectiveness in controlling disease symptoms and reducing PASI should be considered in patients with a severe disease who have a poorer HRQoL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the introduction, in the mid-1990s, of the concept of European identity for the analysis of citizens' attitudes towards European integration. It argues that this notion was imported from social psychology without appropriate theoretical adaptation to the political democratic nature of the social group that a European polity would be. As a consequence, the current notion of European identity does not contribute very much to an understanding of the long-standing national and social differences of citizens' attitude towards the EU. The paper argues that for the time being, the identification process with a work-in-progress European polity should be conceived following three principles: First, European identity refers to a democratic community, that is, a special kind of social group whose vocation is self government. Thus, the link between citizens matters as much as differentiation with the others. Second, European identity is very definitively a work in progress. Lastly, it is developing in industrial societies, characterised by growing individualism but also remaining strong national identities. Building on Tilly's concept of identity and major works on national identity, this paper suggests a concept of identification with Europe that acknowledges the complexity of competitive processes at stake in identity change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A specific case of group threat theory states that the size of a given minority has a direct bearing on anti-immigrant attitudes amongst the majority, a hypothesis that has been shown to have some merit, especially in the USA. This article embarks on group threat theory by focusing on the actual as well as the perceived size of a minority under different political circumstances. Data are drawn from the European Social Survey. After using multilevel analysis for 20 European countries, the paper concludes that neither actual nor perceived size matter for anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. Nor does size have any effect under different economic or political contexts. This challenges both the theoretical foundation of this specific case of group threat as well as the European political discourse that claims that immigration needs to be reduced in order to lessen tension and, in the long run, preserve a stable democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]