Consumer notes clinical indicators : determining inter-rater reliability with multiple users, nominal categories and several cases

A method of determining inter-rater reliability when there are multiple raters, nominal rating categories and several cases is described and applied in the development of an instrument for auditing the ANZCMHN (1995) standards of practice for mental health nursing in New Zealand. Clinical statements (n=41) from the O’Brien et al (2002a, 2003) study, which reflected nursing behaviours contributing to the achievement of the standards of practice, were used to audit consumer files. During two Phases, the clinical indicator statements were refined and rules for judging the achievement of each statement from case note documentation were established. The resultant statements have adequate inter-rater reliability for the assessment of nursing practice with respect to the ANZCMHN (1995) standards of practice.

Are nominal exchange rates and price levels co-integrated? new evidence from threshold autoregressive and momentum-threshold autoregressive models

The goal of this paper is to examine evidence for co-integration between nominal exchange rates for Canada, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy and France (G6) vis-à-vis the US dollar, and the relative price ratios using monthly data over the period 1973:01 to 1997:04. Motivated by the fact that exchange rate adjustment may be asymmetric, we allowed for asymmetric adjustment in exchange rates by using the threshold autoregressive model and the momentum threshold autoregressive model. We do not find any evidence of a co-integrating relationship; hence, we fail to establish long-run purchasing power parity.

What hispanic parents do to encourage and discourage 3-5 year old children to be active : a qualitative study using nominal group technique

Purpose : Hispanic preschoolers are less active than their non-Hispanic peers. As part of a feasibility study to assess environmental and parenting influences on preschooler physical activity (PA) (Niños Activos), the aim of this study was to identify what parents do to encourage or discourage PA among Hispanic 3-5 year old children to inform the development of a new PA parenting practice instrument and future interventions to increase PA among Hispanic youth.

Methods : Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a structured multi-step group procedure, was used to elicit and prioritize responses from 10 groups of Hispanic parents regarding what parents do to encourage (5 groups) or discourage (5 groups) preschool aged children to be active. Five groups consisted of parents with low education (less than high school) and 5 with high education (high school or greater) distributed between the two NGT questions.

Results : Ten NGT groups (n = 74, range 4-11/group) generated 20-46 and 42-69 responses/group for practices that encourage or discourage PA respectively. Eight to 18 responses/group were elected as the most likely to encourage or discourage PA. Parental engagement in child activities, modeling PA, and feeding the child well were identified as parenting practices that encourage child PA. Allowing TV and videogame use, psychological control, physical or emotional abuse, and lack of parental engagement emerged as parenting practices that discourage children from being active. There were few differences in the pattern of responses by education level.

Conclusions : Parents identified ways they encourage and discourage 3-5 year-olds from PA, suggesting both are important targets for interventions. These will inform the development of a new PA parenting practice scale to be further evaluated. Further research should explore the role parents play in discouraging child PA, especially in using psychological control or submitting children to abuse, which were new findings in this study.

Understanding neighborhood environment related to Hong Kong children's physical activity: a qualitative study using nominal group technique

Relationships between the neighborhood environment and children's physical activity have been well documented in Western countries but are less investigated in ultra-dense Asian cities. The aim of this study was to identify the environmental facilitators and barriers of physical activity behaviors among Hong Kong Chinese children using nominal group technique.

Occupational therapy with people with depression: using nominal group technique to collate clinician opinion

AIMS: This aim of this study was to obtain a consensus from clinicians regarding occupational therapy for people with depression, for the assessments and practices they use that are not currently supported by research evidence directly related to functional performance. The study also aimed to discover how many of these assessments and practices were currently supported by research evidence.

METHODS: Following a previously reported systematic review of assessments and practices used in occupational therapy for people with depression, a modified nominal group technique was used to discover which assessments and practices occupational therapists currently utilize. Three online surveys gathered initial data on therapeutic options (survey 1), which were then ranked (survey 2) and re-ranked (survey 3) to gain the final consensus. Twelve therapists completed the first survey, whilst 10 clinicians completed both the second and third surveys.

MAJOR FINDINGS: Only 30% of the assessments and practices identified by the clinicians were supported by research evidence. A consensus was obtained on a total of 35 other assessments and interventions. These included both occupational-therapy-specific and generic assessments and interventions. Principle conclusion. Very few of the assessments and interventions identified were supported by research evidence directly related to functional performance. While a large number of options were generated, the majority of these were not occupational therapy specific.

Essays on the monetary aspects of the term structure of nominal interest rates

Interest rates are key economic variables to much of finance and macroeconomics, and an enormous amount of work is found in both fields about the topic. Curiously, in spite of their common interest, finance and macro research on the topic have seldom interacted, using different approaches to address its main issues with almost no intersection. Concerned with interest rate contingent claims, finance term structure models relate interest rates to lagged interest rates; concerned with economic relations and macro dynamics, macro models regress a few interest rates on a wide variety of economic variables. If models are true though simplified descriptions of reality, the relevant factors should be captured by both the set of bond yields and that of economic variables. Each approach should be able to address the other field concerns with equal emciency, since the economic variables are revealed by the bond yields and these by the economic variables.

Concordância nominal de número na fala infantil : análise variacionista

Este trabalho tem como proposta investigar aspectos relacionados à concordância nominal de número na fala de crianças monolíngües no português do Brasil. O parâmetro analítico segue as descrições sobre o fenômeno na fala adulta, sob o arcabouço da Sociolingüística Quantitativa. Dessa forma, a investigação que aqui se apresenta estrutura-se tanto em aspectos lingüísticos quanto sociais. Nosso objetivo é observar, se tal como na fala adulta, a concordância nominal de número caracteriza-se como uma regra variável na fala infantil. Nossa análise organiza-se em dois momentos. O primeiro, denominado análise atomística, focaliza as motivações estruturais do sistema lingüístico condicionantes da presença da marca formal de plural em cada constituinte sintagmático. A segunda parte, denominada análise não atomística, analisa o sintagma nominal como um todo e averigua os condicionamentos extralingüísticos no que diz respeito à produção de SNs plurais padrão e não-padrão na fala da criança, nos termos estipulados pela norma gramatical. Para tal propósito, tomamos para análise quatro coletas transversais de crianças, recobrindo um período etário dos quatro aos oito anos de idade. De modo geral, os resultados encontrados sugerem um comportamento verbal semelhante ao dos adultos, embora muitos dos fatores discutidos não tenham significância estatística, conforme a análise realizada com o pacote de programas estatístico VARBRUL.

AI, LA, ALI e AQUI: gramaticalização de um paradigma emergente no domínio funcional da especificação nominal

In the light of the Functional Linguistic Theory, in its North-American version (HOPPER, 1987, 1991, 1998, 2008, 2010; GIVÓN, 2001; LEHMANN, 2002; HOPPER; TRAUGOTT, 2003; FURTADO DA CUNHA; OLIVEIRA; MARTELOTTA, 2003, among others), the general objective of this research is to demonstrate, based on morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic properties, that AQUI (HERE), AÍ, ALI and LÁ (THERE) are part of an emerging paradigm in Brazilian Portuguese recently constituted and still developing of forms indicating specificity in indefinite noun phrases (NP). The data that make up the corpus of this research were collected in the following large Brazilian oral corpora: the Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade de Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), the Banco Conversacional de Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 2010), the Projeto Variação Linguística no Estado da Paraíba VALPB (HORA, 2005) and the Projeto Variação Linguística Urbana na Região Sul do Brasil VARSUL (VANDRESEN, 2002). Firstly, the behavior of the specificity markings AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ is described with respect to many factors of morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic nature: type of construction in which the markers appeared; existence or not of intervening material between the specificity marker item and the NP s nuclear noun; type of noun to which AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ are linked; syntactic function of the specified SN; informational status of the NP to which the specificity markers AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ are attached; occurrence of conversational implicatures (GRICE, 1982) in the context of use of these specificity markers. Next, a possible grammaticalization trajectory is outlined, according to which AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ would had gone from an early spatial deictic indication to the specificity indication. The results point to the existence of forms with varying degree of emergence in this new paradigm of nominal specification, with AÍ being, probably, the item most grammaticalized, followed by LÁ, then ALI and AQUI, which permanence in the paradigm do not yet appear to be consolidated

Caracterización y clasificación de la red hidrográfica de la cuenca del río Bobo, departamento de Nariño - Colombia

The object of this work was to make a morphometric characterization of the Bobo river watershed in the Nariño department in Colombia. A map was created from topographical maps (1:25.000 scale) using the drainage network and the limit of each 2nd order microbasin as database. Dimensional, drainage network and relief morphometric parameters were evaluated for a later hy-drological study. The drainage area was 224.97 km2, having a 71.31 km perimeter. The Bobo river watershed is considered to be 6th order and has 176 2nd order drainage channels, 34 3rd order drainage channels, 9 4th order drainage channels and 3 5th order drainage channels. Average drainage density is 3.71km/km2, reflecting its high density, having strong, dissected geological formation. The area has a typical Andean land-use pattern, having native wooded vegetation, traditional transitory potato and vegetable growing predominating.