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Background: Norwegian public health nurses prevent diseases and promote health in children and young people aged 0–20 and their families. Public health nursing programs prepare students for their practical role and provide relevant theoretical knowledge. Objectives: To gain knowledge of the literature in the Norwegian public health nursing curricula, and to examine further the nursing base in these curricula. Design: An explorative and descriptive design was chosen. Sample: Reading lists based on syllabus documents from the 10 higher educational institutions in Norway offering programs in public health nursing. Measurements: A summative content analysis and a categorization of content from reading lists were performed. Results: Numerical information on the content and categorization of reading lists shows that social science and humanities literature dominates, followed by psychology and medicine. Nursing texts, theories and philosophy comprise only a minor part of the curricula. Conclusion: The paper provides valuable data on the theoretical focus in Norwegian public health nursing and raises important questions about the paucity of nursing texts in the curriculum. The imbalance in reading lists in Norway should be studied further and similar studies conducted in other countries to encourage reflection on the theoretical content of public health nursing education globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accompanying the ageing of contemporary ageing societies is an increase in age associated morbidity, with dementia having an important impact. Mental frailty in later life is a source of fear for many and a major policy concern to all those concerned with health and welfare services. This introduction to the special issue on 'Ageing, dementia and the social mind' situates the selected papers within the context of debates about dementia and its social relations. In particular it draws attention to the importance of the social imaginary of the fourth age and what this means for the issue of personhood, care, social representations of dementia and its social contextualisation. The papers illuminating these themes draw on a variety of disciplines and approaches; from the social sciences to the humanities and from the theoretical to the empirical in order to help orientate future researchers to the complexities of dementia and the social and cultural matrix in which it exists. This paper provides an introduction to the potential for a more extended sociology of dementia; one which could combine the insights from medical sociology with the concerns of social gerontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The Demand-Control (DC) and Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) models predict health in a work context. Self-report measures of the four key constructs (demand, control, effort, and reward) have been developed and it is important that these measures have good content validity uncontaminated by content from other constructs. We assessed relevance (whether items reflect the constructs) and representativeness (whether all aspects of the construct are assessed, and all items contribute to that assessment) across the instruments and items.Methods: Two studies examined fourteen demand/control items from the Job Content Questionnaire and seventeen effort/reward items from the Effort-Reward Imbalance measure using discriminant content validation and a third study developed new methods to assess instrument representativeness. Both methods use judges' ratings and construct definitions to get transparent quantitative estimates of construct validity. Study 1 used dictionary definitions while studies 2 and 3 used published phrases to define constructs.Results: Overall, 3/5 demand items, 4/9 control items, 1/6 effort items, and 7/11 reward items were uniquely classified to the appropriate theoretical construct and were therefore 'pure' items with discriminant content validity (DCV). All pure items measured a defining phrase. However, both the DC and ERI assessment instruments failed to assess all defining aspects.Conclusions: Finding good discriminant content validity for demand and reward measures means these measures are usable and our quantitative results can guide item selection. By contrast, effort and control measures had limitations (in relevance and representativeness) presenting a challenge to the implementation of the theories. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? While the reliability and construct validity of Demand-Control and Effort-Reward-Imbalance (DC and ERI) work stress measures are routinely reported, there has not been adequate investigation of their content validity. This paper investigates their content validity in terms of both relevance and representativeness and provides a model for the investigation of content validity of measures in health psychology more generally. What does this study add? A new application of an existing method, discriminant content validity, and a new method of assessing instrument representativeness. 'Pure' DC and ERI items are identified, as are constructs that are not fully represented by their assessment instruments. The findings are important for studies attempting to distinguish between the main DC and ERI work stress constructs. The quantitative results can be used to guide item selection for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pretest-posttest studies are an important and popular method for assessing treatment effects or the effectiveness of an intervention in many areas of scientific research. There are two distinct features for this type of study: availability of baseline information for all subjects in the study and missingness by design of measures of the responses. Important recent research advances on this topic include Leon et al. (2003) on efficient estimation of the treatment effect, and Huang et al. (2008) on a semi-parametric estimation procedure based on empirical likelihood (EL) where the mean responses for the treatment group and the control group are handled separately. EL ratio confidence intervals or tests for the treatment effect, however, cannot be constructed under the approach used by Huang et al. (2008). In this paper, we use an alternative EL formulation, which directly involves the parameter of interest, i.e., the treatment effect, and incorporates baseline information through an imputation approach. Our focus is to derive the EL ratio confidence intervals and tests for the treatment effect under the proposed imputation-based framework. Theoretical results are developed, and finite sample performances of the proposed methods with comparison to existing approaches are investigated through simulation studies. An application to a real data set is also presented. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 43: 378-402; 2015 © 2015 Statistical Society of Canada [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]