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Purpose: Various dimensions of healthcare service quality were used and discussed in literature across the globe. This study presents an updated meaningful review of the extensive research that has been conducted on measuring dimensions of healthcare service quality.Data Sources: Systematic review method in current study is based on PRISMA guidelines. We searched for literature using databases such as Google, Google Scholar, PubMed and Social Science, Citation Index.Study Selection: In this study, we screened 1921 identified papers using search terms/phrases. Snowball strategies were adopted to extract published articles from January 1997 till December 2016.Data Extraction: Two-hundred and fourteen papers were identified as relevant for data extraction; completed by two researchers, double checked by the other two to develop agreement in discrepancies. In total, 74 studies fulfilled our pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for data analysis.Data Synthesis: Service quality is mainly measured as technical and functional, incorporating many sub-dimensions. We synthesized the information about dimensions of healthcare service quality with reference to developed and developing countries. 'Tangibility' is found to be the most common contributing factor whereas 'SERVQUAL' as the most commonly used model to measure healthcare service quality.Conclusion: There are core dimensions of healthcare service quality that are commonly found in all models used in current reviewed studies. We found a little difference in these core dimensions while focusing dimensions in both developed and developing countries, as mostly SERVQUAL is being used as the basic model to either generate a new one or to add further contextual dimensions. The current study ranked the contributing factors based on their frequency in literature. Based on these priorities, if factors are addressed irrespective of any context, may lead to contribute to improve healthcare quality and may provide an important information for evidence-informed decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of evidence and expertise in policy-making has been of interest to public health professionals and political scientists alike. The public health community often sees its efforts as part of a linear knowledge transfer process and tends to blame itself for inadequate communication or translation of its arguments to policy-makers' language when its efforts fail. Political science, especially theories of the policy process, offer alternative perspectives to explain the success or failure of experts' preferred policy goals. This paper focuses on the concept of epistemic communities (groups of experts with a common policy goal derived from their shared knowledge) in policy-making, drawing on examples from the field of health technology assessment in Europe. By combining the parsimony and the central focus on experts of the linear knowledge transfer model with the recognition of complexity of political science, the epistemic communities concept provides a useful structure for the public health community to analyze its efforts to influence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reinterprets practical approaches to masked performance to articulate design activities that make use of performances and embodied artefacts. In particular, the paper relies on examples from design research to explore the application of performance work based on ‘neutrality’, expressivity and ‘incompleteness’, which have been developed in theatre to devise performances with ‘neutral’, ‘characterised’ and ‘larval’ masks. A more general argument in the paper is that the project of applying the performing arts into interaction design can be usefully extended beyond the boundaries that have so far characterised such applications. These have been limited to the direct staging of the performances which are meant to provide the evidence for design inquiries. Instead, design activities can proceed by working in a more indirect way, by researching variations of the achieved performances, and by using multiple performance genres, including stylised performances and mask work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Cross-national inequality trends have historically been a crucial field of inquiry across the social sciences, and new methodological techniques of statistical inference have recently improved the ability to analyze these trends over time. This paper applies Monte Carlo, bootstrap inference methods to the income surveys of the Luxembourg Income Study database to identify patterns of distributional change in the global North from 1980 to 2000. While it is now generally accepted that inequality has increased in the United States and United Kingdom during this period, the extent to which other wealthy nations have been able to avoid this trend (or not) has generated some debate. This paper presents new evidence to address this discussion, demonstrating along the way how the ability to conduct formal statistical inference with statistics such as the Gini index provides an effective and important new evaluative tool for comparative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing methods of predicting and mapping the future locations of crime are intrinsically retrospective. This paper explores the development of a mapping procedure that seeks to Produce `prospective' hot-spot maps. Recent research conducted by the authors demonstrates that the risk of burglary is communicable, with properties within 400 metres of a burgled household being at a significantly elevated risk of victimization for up to two months after an initial event. We discuss how, using this knowledge, recorded crime data can be analysed to generate an ever-changing prospective risk surface. One of the central elements of this paper examines the issue of how such a risk surface could be evaluated to determine its effectiveness and utility in comparison to existing methods. New methods of map evaluation are proposed, such as the production of search efficiency rates and area-to-perimeter ratios; standardized metrics that can be derived for maps produced using different techniques, thereby allowing meaningful comparisons to be made and techniques contrasted. The results suggest that the predictive mapping technique proposed here has considerable advantages over more traditional methods and might prove particularly useful in the shift-by-shift deployment of police personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of scholarly papers in professional journals certifies new contributions to knowledge, as well as the skills of the authors who have subjected their work to a process of critical review. The peer review process, designed to attract quality research with the use of objective practices, cannot avoid the infusion of particularistic judgments. This study examines how more than 600 manuscripts submitted to Social Problems were processed by its editor and associate editor. It traces the influences of manuscript, author, and reviewer characteristics as papers are judged, initially by the editor, subsequently by expert reviewers, and, once again, by the editor. The reviewers' recommendations, although often reflecting disagreement, outweigh all the other measured factors that may affect the editor's decisions. The editors, however, remain obligated to formulate credible accounts of the decision process, especially when a final disposition departs from the recommendation made by expert reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the deskilling hypothesis for temporal change in occupations. Case studies of occupations alleged to support the deskilling hypothesis have typically been insensitive to the internal heterogeneity found within occupations, and to the fact that the boundary between adjacent occupations located on the same functional hierarchy can shift over time. When these factors are explicitly taken into account, it is found that apparently compelling evidence for the thesis of clerical downgrading better supports an alternative explanation, which might be called the process of status redefinition, an aspect of the process of professionalization. The case of clerical workers in the federal government is examined in some detail, Available evidence supports the argument that status redefinition occurred. Status redefinition and des killing are not mutually exclusive explanations for change, though they do conflict in important respects. This paper suggests that case studies of occupations should focus on functional hierarchies, rather than specific occupations, in order to avoid the comparability problems which arise when occupational boundaries change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suburban exploitation of the central city was once a hotly contested issue, but the exodus of people and jobs from the city and the involvement of the federal government in urban service provision have moved it from the forefront of scholarly attention. Those same developments, however argue for more rather than less attention to exploitation, and the purpose of this paper is to offer some of that. Using data collected for 188 relatively comparable American SMS As for 1960, 1970, and 1980, the paper begins with a replication of an earlier study by Kasarda of suburban demands for city service spending. It then extends that research to 1980 and expands it to asses suburban participation in city retail sales generation as well. The results indicate a substantive narrowing over time of suburban demands for city services, but a sizeable and growing gap nonetheless between expenditures demanded and retail revenues provided. The paper than turns to an analysis that attempts to test empirically th relative merits of ecological and politicoeconomic explanation for these changes. The results of that test are more supportive of the former then the latter; hence, the paper concludes with an interpretation of them that links to underlying ecological processes the changing social psychological perspective on the city and its role in social life held by surrounding suburban dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the church's importance stems from its "span of ambiguity," the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration, It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with an argument that most measure development in the social sciences, with its reliance on correlational techniques as a tool, falls short of the requirements for constructing meaningful, unidimensional measures of human attributes. By demonstrating how rating scales are ordinal-level data, we argue the necessity of converting these to equal-interval units to develop a measure that is both qualitatively and quantitatively defensible. This requires that the empirical results and theoretical explanation are questioned and adjusted at each step of the process. In our response to the reviewers, we describe how this approach was used to develop the Game Engagement Questionnaire (GEQ), including its emphasis on examining a continuum of involvement in violent video games. The GEQ is an empirically sound measure focused on one player characteristic that may be important in determining game influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this literature review is to understand where Graphical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful to address security issues and how it has been used until now. While the geographic drivers of territorial conflicts have been extensively described by a number of political studies, the quantitative analysis of these drivers is quite new. This study traces an evolution from conceptual research to quantitative development. It then discusses the advantages and challenges of applying new geographic techniques to analyze spatial drivers of conflict. We identify the main spatial components in conflict and security, the existing types of information/data and the quantitative methods used. We describe the spatial component of security by looking at: (i) the main sociopolitical concepts linked to territory, (ii) the kind of geographic concepts linked to territory, (iii) measures used to describe such geographic concepts; and (iv) the issues raised in any attempt to integrate geographic concepts into a GIS. We conclude that GIS tools can be useful in the analysis of civil disputes, particularly where subnational level data exists. This paper shows that spatial processing tools in GIS allow us to represent some spatial components and to address new issues such as the fuzzy complexity of border permeability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character, or they may self-negate. And yet while social constructivists often make this point in epistemological debates, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines two prominent IR theories—the democratic peace and the commercial peace—arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense, as well as the potential of a currently self-negating thesis—the clash of civilizations—to become self-fulfilling; each theory is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The article also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating or self-negating. It is suggested that a number of frameworks developed outside political science—especially diffusion theory, memetics, social contagion theories, George Lakoff’s metaphor-based model, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” approach and social network analysis—may in combination help us understand both how political ideas spread through academic and policy communities and why particular ideas “win out” over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many believe that agent-centred considerations, unlike agent-neutral reasons, cannot show that victims have the right to kill their attackers in self-defence, let alone establish that rescuers have the right to come to their help. In this paper, I argue that the right to kill in self- or other-defence is best supported by a hybrid set of reasons. In particular, agent-centred considerations account for the plausible intuition that victims have a special stake, which other parties lack, in being to thwart the attackers. That special stake plays an important part justifying victims' right to obtain help, and rescuers' right to give it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why probation emerged as an alternative to punishment throughout the world in a relatively short period of time at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. In doing so, it provides a detailed history of the process of its creation, an elucidation of its various forms, and a portrait of some of the key influential people and the part they played. In attempting an explanation for the proliferation of probation, it sets the history within a social, political, cultural and theoretical context, and, in particular, the context of the emergence of criminology as a social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the role of preferences in causing persistent patterns of racial residential segregation in the United States has a long history. In this paper, we bring a new perspective -- and new data from the 2004 Detroit Area Study -- to the question of how best to characterize black and white preferences toward living in neighborhoods with people of different races. White and black residents of the Detroit metropolitan area (n = 734) were asked in an area probability sample survey about their evaluations of 33 actual communities throughout their metro area. These evaluations are used as an indirect measure of racial residential preferences by viewing how race -- both of the respondent and of the community -- shapes them. We find modest racial agreement about which communities would be "seriously considered" and "never considered" as a place to live, but by and large perceptions of the metropolis are racialized. Whites are influenced by the percentage white in a community (net of the community's social class characteristics) and very unlikely to consider communities where they are anything but the strong majority. African Americans are also influenced by race, but in different ways and less fundamentally: 1.) Communities with high percentages of African Americans are among those most likely to be "seriously considered," but so are communities with just a handful of African Americans; 2.) African Americans are less likely to "never consider" all communities, and more likely than whites to consider both communities where they are in the majority and in the minority; 3.) African Americans are unaffected by a community's percent white net of community social class characteristics. We place these results in the context of the debate about racial residential preferences, arguing for the importance of grounding our understanding -- and measures -- of racial residential preferences in the context of real urban landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary claim of this paper is that sufficient consistencies can be shown in the cases studied here and in the related literature that gay sexual homicide constitutes a coherent object of study. That is, in itself a significant finding. Gay men are dying, and the circumstances under which that is taking place warrants analysis in its own right. The cases are of broader intellectual interest, however. The existing literature relating to sexual crime pre-supposes a male assailant and a female victim. This is true both of the sociology of masculinity and also the psychological literature. The cases in this study present sexual crime in a context in which women are absent, and, as such, raise questions about the scope, assumptions and findings of that literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health communication campaigns, as an outcome of and an input into the social process, can create unintended as well as intended effects. The present paper represents an initial conceptual treatment of the unintended effects, the less studied of the two. It suggests that unintended effects can manifest in multiple dimensions, including those of time lapse, levels of analysis, audience types, content specificity, and valence. On these dimensions, a typology organizes available evidence to offer an outlook on 11 types of unintended effects, including obfuscation, dissonance, boomerang, epidemic of apprehension, desensitization, culpability, opportunity cost, social reproduction, social norming, enabling, and system activation. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of criminology as an academic discipline was a post-war development in Australia as much as in Britain or the United States. Classical criminology had developed as a question about punishment—neo-classical criminology as a question about the criminal. Academic criminology pursued both questions and added others. Less systematic than pragmatic, less theoretical than eclectic, the criminology of post-war universities was both intellectually broader and politically more critical than once thought. This paper outlines the formation of the discipline in Australia during the war and post-war years, from the conditions of production of its first text, The ABC of Criminology (Melbourne University Press 1941), to its moment of governmental embrace around 1960. Who were the major players in this enterprise, what commitments, intellectual and political, did they bring to their work, and what did this local formation owe to its international affiliations? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I undertake a critical evaluation of the central claims of cultural criminology. In particular, I argue that the project is characterized by important confusions over what is meant by 'culture' in the analysis of deviant and criminal activity. These confusions are found both in cultural criminology `s key empirical works and in the emerging theoretical frameworks that seek to interpret crime through the lens of culture. I suggest that the absence of detailed engagement with classic debates in social anthropology serves to undermine cultural criminology `s assertion that the lens of culture provides a critical tool for understanding criminal acts and note that the project is characterized by a contradiction between its ethnographic imagination and its anthropological imagination. The absence of a detailed theoretical account of culture renders cultural criminology vulnerable to Gouldner's (1975) charge that its Practitioners represent contemporary 'zoo-keepers' of deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay documents the main currents of visual studies in communication. After a brief history of the emergence of the field, we review the record of published research in books and journals during the past 5 years, identifying major strains of theory, key issues, and topical categories. We then apply the strains of thought to classify papers presented at the ICA conferences, noting patterns and shifts across and within ICA divisions and interest groups. Based on these patterns, as well as on informal input from colleagues, we map the discipline formation of visual studies and identify trends in institutional development. We conclude by exploring future directions for the field now that the visual interest group has grown to become the Visual Studies Division of ICA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious life has long been global. Contemporary migrants extend these ties by transnationalizing everyday religious life. While much has been written about transnational economic and political practices, transnational religious life is not well understood. This paper examines the institutional characteristics of transnational religiosity and has three broad goals. First, it reviews this emerging body of literature and proposes an approach to the study of transnational migrants' religious practices. Second, it proposes three types of extended, negotiated, and recreated transnational religious organizations. Finally, it begins to untangle the relationship between transnational religion and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the importance of testing empirical models in samples appropriate to the theories the models are intended to test. While social science appears to mandate that we prefer general theories to limited ones, the generality of a theory rests in its logical application to a set of observations, not solely to its statistical survival in a large data set. Theories in international relations, especially those linking domestic turmoil and international conflict, are advancing, but are sometimes applied to samples larger than the related theories indicate. This paper examines the statistical consequences of estimation in overexpansive samples with unmodeled treatment effects; we argue that samples containing cases that cannot experience the causal phenomenon in question produce unmodeled treatment effects, and we reexamine three published articles whose samples are perhaps broader than their theories suggest they should be. The empirical analyses demonstrate that overexpansive samples can produce somewhat misleading results: the new models produce interesting findings that emerge as treatment effects are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main objectives. One is to consider the central place of human rights in today's global order and the other is to articulate a theoretical framework that will make sociological sense out of current human rights discourse and practice. Human rights emerged from, but need to be distinguished from, societal rights, and they are to be viewed as social claims upon social power arrangements. In advancing our perspective, special attention is given to the place of organizations in human rights theorizing; at the same time, we delineate some of the highly contested aspects of the endeavor to institutionalize a set of human rights principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the hypothesized inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and conservatism on a wide range of so-called social issues. This relationship is important in itself as well as in some theories that link political dealignment to features of postindustrial society. We examine this relationship by looking at the net effects of education, occupation, income, and class (owner, supervisor, or worker) on nine issues. Our results suggest that the hypothesized relationship is absent for most dimensions of socioeconomic status and most social issues. The most consistent exception to this is that liberalism on social issues tends to increase with education, but even here the relationship varies considerably from issue to issue. The lack of a consistent relationship reflects both the diversity of the social issues and the fuzziness of the social/economic distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper gives a cross-national comparison, involving West German, Dutch, and United States data, on the use of social ties in the job-search process. Data for West Germany and the Netherlands are compared with the Lin et al. research on Albany-Schenectady and Troy. The findings show that (1) there is more use of informal sources in the U.S. than in West Germany and the Netherlands; (2) informal sources do not generally lead to higher occupational prestige and income; (3) for the Dutch data (no West German data are available for this question) greater social resources, that is, a contact person with relatively high prestige, do lead to a job with a higher prestige, though effects are less pronounced than found by Lin et al.; and (4) an extension of the Lin et al. analysis shows that these social resources do not have a significant impact on income. This last finding is consistent with the recent results of Marsden and Hurlbert's analysis of Detroit Area Study data. Institutional differences that might be relevant to the explanation of cross-national differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper examines interrelationships among attitudes toward a wide range of political and social topics. The issue under investigation is whether, and how, social attitudes are organized or structured among the general public. While many assume that attitudes are organized in terms of a single underlying ideology of liberalism/conservatism, others argue that attitudes show little organization, or that attitude structure is bidimensional. To address this issue, this study analyzes data from two separate national surveys, each containing information about a large number of attitude topics. In both data sets, confirmatory factor analyses support a bidimensional model. Social and political attitudes are organized along at least two uncorrelated dimensions: economic welfare policy, on the one hand, and individual liberty, on the other. Results point to qualifications in Kerlinger's (1984) criterial referents theory of attitude structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper compares political activists from four community protest organizations, formed in response to the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Using survey data, newsletters, and fieldwork, we document the existence of two separate paths to protest involvement. In two communities, recruitment was less likely to occur along the lines of established social networks. Instead, utilitarian alliances grounded on shared grievances were constructed. A second distinct path accounted for activism in two larger communities where many of the activists reported previous protest experience. In these communities, existing friendship networks were utilized. Two years after the accident, significant network and ideological differences between the groups persisted. We suggest that analysts work to specify the conditions for different paths to activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the determinants of domestic well-being in less-developed countries. In particular, we examine the impact of both penetration of foreign investment and levels of domestic political protest on economic growth and the provision of basic needs. Our work is an attempt to explore the effects of both: international economic processes and international political processes on development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the current religious mood in the tinned States and reflects upon its manifestations in the mid-1990s. It is argued that the religious mood has shifted -- away from the cognitive and fixed beliefs and toward the experiential arid expressive. It is further argued that given this change it is difficult to assess the current religious situation, especially given sociology-of-religion's reliance upon institutional categories and empirical indicators. Religious capital, like social capital, is not easily gauged without attention to new forms of community allowing individuals opportunity to express themselves as whole persons. A plea is made for a sociology of religion more attuned to body, mind, and self and thus to the dynamic and experiential qualities of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's opinion on social science writing. Remember that the author carries the burden of proof that a manuscript makes a substantial enough contribution to knowledge to justify publication. Therefore, one would do well to get the opinions of one or more sympathetic but candid colleagues before finally submitting the paper for publication. Be sure that the manuscript is in conformity with the style and format specifications required by the particular journal to which the submission is going. Before discussing the analysis of the data, construct and present some kind of general theoretical framework, which will generate testable hypotheses and will guide the analysis and the explanation of results. A literature review is certainly appropriate and it can be provided either before the theoretical framework or as part of it. In general, multivariate analysis is preferable to simple bivariate analysis, since alternative explanations for outcomes can rarely be eliminated without controls for intervening variables. One would perhaps like to think that social science writing at its best is also good journalism, but it does not follow that even the best journalism is social science.

This paper presents the author's opinion on an article by Myers and Thyer in the 1997 issue of Social Work that argued the right of social work clients to effective treatment. They started their article by presenting medical practice as analogous to social work practice. Although there are similarities between social work and medicine, the differences are significant. Even if the analogy were appropriate, medicine rarely conforms to Myers and Thyer's portrayal as the simple application of technology. Mostly, they have chosen to ignore the voluminous critiques that pepper the social work and social science literature. When Myers and Thyer talk about effective treatment, they are expressing one narrow formulation of this concept in which highly structured social relations are represented as asocial techniques. Although they claim to discuss social work practice, their article primarily addresses individuals in clinical situations. In fact, their model of social work seems indistinguishable from clinical psychology. Rights claims are social acts, entitlements that create a social relation others are obligated to respect. Implicit in the right to effective treatment is the right to treatment.

The article focuses on the impact the paper "The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology," written by Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne in 1985, had on the study and teaching of sociology. The paper argued that sociology, in contrast to other social sciences, had warded off attempts by feminist scholars to transform the field's theoretical and conceptual frameworks. A discussion of a study of the paper, which took place at the 2005 meeting of the American Sociological Association is presented.

This section introduces the articles featured in the June 2004 issue of Social Forces. In the June issue, the editor Richard L. Simpson retires from his position as co-editor. Judith Blau will become editor on July 1, 2004. 2004 was a year of many changes at Social Forces. The editors are extremely sad to lose Paul Mihas as the Managing Editor at the end of June 2004, when the Journal moves completely to the Department of Sociology. The journal is well on its way to implementing electronic management of manuscripts and reviews, anticipating the full transition to online-submission capability sometime in Summer 2004. The first article in the issue is Patricia Yancey Martin's presidential address that she delivered at the 2003 meetings of the Southern Sociological Society: Gender as Social Institution. Following the peer-reviewed articles is a section that includes a paper by Michael Burawoy, Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas and Possibilities, along with rejoinders by Francois Nielsen, David Brady, and Charles Tittle. Catherine Zimmer, President of the North Carolina Sociological Association (NCSA), introduces these four papers that are based on a session at the NCSA. Judith will continue to devote a short, bracketed section of each issue of Social Forces devoted to Commentary and Debate.