What about the men? Gender differences in utilisation of arthritis self-management services

As self-management programs for chronic illness increasingly become the domain of primary health care providers, it is important to consider gender inequities in access to these services and gender differences in patterns of use to inform the development and delivery of services. This study explores gender differences in levels and patterns of access to arthritis elf-management services by analyzing data collected from the Telephone Information Service of Arthritis Victoria, Contingency tables were analyzed and odds-ratios calculated to confirm gender differences in levels and patterns of service utilisation. Men were found to be significantly under-represented as users of the service, even after taking into account gender differences in prevalence of arthritis in the population. Women were more likely than men to contact the service on their own behalf. Men were more likely to have a family member or friend contact the services for them. Women showed more interest in learning about their condition while men focused more on symptom management. These gender differences in rates and patterns of services use indicate that services providers of self-management services for conditions such as arthritis need to take into account the interaction between gender and service utilisation.

Caregivers as managers of subjective wellbeing: a homeostatic perspective

Background: This paper proposes that the adequacy of service delivery and caregiving to people who are disabled should be assessed using two criteria. One is the objective circumstance of living, which should be at a standard acceptable to the community at large. The other is a level of subjective wellbeing (SWB) within the normal range. Method: This latter criterion is a novel conception based on an understanding that SWB is homeostatically managed to lie normally within a narrow range of values. Results: People who have a disability are more likely than usual to have a fragile homeostatic system because of the additional life challenges imposed by their disability. Conclusions: The role of a caregiver is to provide resources and protection against strong threats to homeostasis, thereby ensuring that the person in their care has a normal-range level of SWB.

Semantic and Personalised Service Discovery

One of the most pervasive classes of services needed to support e-Science applications are those responsible for the discovery of resources. We have developed a solution to the problem of service discovery in a Semantic Web/Grid setting. We do this in the context of bioinformatics, which is the use of computational and mathematical techniques to store, manage, and analyse the data from molecular biology in order to answer questions about biological phenomena. Our specific application is myGrid (www.mygrid.org.uk) that is developing open source, service-based middleware upon which bioinformatics applications can be built. myGrid is specifically targeted at developing open source high-level service Grid middleware for bioinformatics.

Semantic and Personalised Service Discovery

One of the most pervasive classes of services needed to support e-Science applications are those responsible for the discovery of resources. We have developed a solution to the problem of service discovery in a Semantic Web/Grid setting. We do this in the context of bioinformatics, which is the use of computational and mathematical techniques to store, manage, and analyse the data from molecular biology in order to answer questions about biological phenomena. Our specific application is myGrid (http: //www.mygrid.org.uk) that is developing open source, service-based middleware upon which bioin- formatics applications can be built. myGrid is specif- ically targeted at developing open source high-level service Grid middleware for bioinformatics.

Personalised Grid Service Discovery

The authors take a broad view that ultimately Grid- or Web-services must be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes. They argue that such processes must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. Examples of such metadata are reliability metrics, quality of service data, or semantic service description markup. This paper presents UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. They also discuss the use of a rich, graph-based RDF query language for syntactic queries on this data. Finally, they analyse the performance of each of these contributions in our implementation.

Personalised Grid Service Discovery

We take a broad view that ultimately Grid- or Web-services must be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes. We argue that such processes must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. Examples of such metadata are reliability metrics, quality of service data, or semantic service description markup. This paper presents UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. We also discuss the use of a rich, graph-based RDF query language for syntactic queries on this data. Finally, we analyse the performance of each of these contributions in our implementation.

Agents and the Grid: Service Discovery

The Grid is a large-scale computer system that is capable of coordinating resources that are not subject to centralised control, whilst using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces, and delivering non-trivial qualities of service. In this chapter, we argue that Grid applications very strongly suggest the use of agent-based computing, and we review key uses of agent technologies in Grids: user agents, able to customize and personalise data; agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium; and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements. In the second part of the chapter, we focus on Grid service discovery, which we have identified as a prime candidate for use of agent technologies: we show that Grid-services need to be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes, which must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. We present UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. The outcome is a flexible service registry which is compatible with existing standards and also provides metadata-enhanced service discovery.

Automated Negotiation Between Publishers And Consumers Of Grid Notifications

Notification Services mediate between information publishers and consumers that wish to subscribe to periodic updates. In many cases, however, there is a mismatch between the dissemination of these updates and the delivery preferences of the consumer, often in terms of frequency of delivery, quality, etc. In this paper, we present an automated negotiation engine that identifies mutually acceptable terms; we study its performance, and discuss its application to a Grid Notification Service. We also demonstrate how the negotiation engine enables users to control the Quality of Service levels they require.

Efficient Multi-Granularity Service Composition

Dynamic composition of services provides the ability to build complex distributed applications at run time by combining existing services, thus coping with a large variety of complex requirements that cannot be met by individual services alone. However, with the increasing amount of available services that differ in granularity (amount of functionality provided) and qualities, selecting the best combination of services becomes very complex. In response, this paper addresses the challenges of service selection, and makes a twofold contribution. First, a rich representation of compositional planning knowledge is provided, allowing the expression of multiple decompositions of tasks at arbitrary levels of granularity. Second, two distinct search space reduction techniques are introduced, the application of which, prior to performing service selection, results in significant improvement in selection performance in terms of execution time, which is demonstrated via experimental results.

Not the same : a comparison of female and male clients seeking treatment from problem gambling counselling services

Previous studies of problem gamblers portray this group as being almost exclusively male. However, this study demonstrates that females comprised 46% of the population (n = 1,520) of persons who sought assistance due to concerns about their gambling from the publicly-funded BreakEven counselling services in the state of Victoria, Australia, in one 12-month period. This suggests that the model of service delivery which is community based counselling on a non-residential basis may be better able to attract female clients than treatment centres where males predominate such as veterans centres. A comparative analysis of the social and demographic characteristics of female and male gamblers within the study population was undertaken. As with previous studies, we have found significant differences between males and females who have sought help for problems associated with their gambling. Gender differences revealed in this study include females being far more likely to use electronic gaming machines (91.1% vs. 61.4%), older (39.6 years vs. 36.1 years), more likely to be born in Australia (79.4% vs. 74.7%), to be married (42.8% vs. 30.2%), living with family (78.9% vs. 61.5%) and to have dependent children (48.4% vs. 35.7%), than males who present at these services. Female gamblers (A$7,342) reported average gambling debts of less than half of that owed by males (A$19,091). These gender differences have implications for the development and conduct of problem gambling counselling services as it cannot be assumed that models of service which have demonstrated effectiveness with males will be similarly effective with females.

Issues in IT service-oriented requirements engineering

Corporate information technology (IT) management is increasingly service-oriented, offering continuous evaluation and improvement of application, communication, delivery and support services to internal and external customers. Service-oriented requirements engineering (SoRE) plays a significant role in identifying and specifying service requirements, formally defined through service-level agreements (SLAs). However, the new frameworks and approaches emerging to guide these developments have not yet addressed how requirements for such services can be effectively developed, nor identified the diverse issues involved. We report a case study of a web services team development of requirements for an internal Service Desk service. The study revealed five main issues of concern when developing service provider requirements: service roles, responsibilities and accountability; service performance metrics; resolution of conflicting stakeholder service requirements; customer acceptance of service change; and service provider team structure. This study suggests that in the new IT services era, new techniques and approaches are needed for eliciting and determining provider and customer requirements that involve key stakeholder groups equitably and more closely negotiate the sometimes-conflicting provider and customer needs.

The need to vent and dissatisfactory self-service technology encounters

Reports of customer dissatisfaction with self-service technologies (SSTs) are becoming increasingly common. The SST context is characterised by customer participation in service production and delivery, independently of service personnel. With no opportunity for humanto- human interaction, feelings of customer irritation and frustration can have a tendency to build-up in dissatisfactory SST encounters. If SSTs do not perform as promised, customers can become angry and frustrated, and do not have the security or reassurance of human service personnel. With this in mind, it is argued that customers’ “need to vent” will be an important predictor of customers’ complaint behaviours (CCBs), i.e., voice, negative word of mouth, negative “word of mouse”, third party action, false loyalty and exit, in dissatisfactory SST encounters. The “need to vent” is defined as the need, when one has a problem, to seek relief by expressing one’s problem / “getting it off one’s chest”. This construct has been subject to little conceptual or empirical scrutiny, and to the researchers’ knowledge, has not been previously operationalised or measured. This paper begins to address this gap by presenting a conceptual model and hypotheses depicting the relationships between the need to vent and CCBs in the context of SSTs.

Organisational commitment of financial planners in Australia

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the demographic variables of age, gender and length of service can be shown to be related to the organisational commitment (OC) of financial planners in Australia. The financial planners were surveyed using an instrument derived from established questionnaires. It was mailed nationally to 312 financial planners. A response rate of 36% was achieved, equating to 113 useable responses. The analyses revealed statistically significant results at the 90% confidence level (p=0.10), that respondents over the age of 35 demonstrated a significantly higher level of OC than did those under the age of 35, and at the same level of confidence, females demonstrated a statistically significant higher level of OC than did their male counterparts.

Such findings contribute to our understanding of the organisational commitment of Financial Planners, and have implications for employers in terms of hiring and retention of employees. The analyses are also important from a public policy perspective in an era of increasing attention given to, and likely increased regulation of, the financial planning industry.

Exploring the relationship between customer loyalty to the service worker and customer citizenship behaviors to the service organization

This paper conceptualizes the positive relationship between customer loyalty to the service worker (personal loyalty) and customer citizenship behaviors to the service organization including: positive word of mouth; suggestions for improvements; customer participation in activities; benevolent acts of service facilitation; customer policing; customer flexibility; customer voice and displays of relationship affiliation.

How cultural differences cause dimensions of tourism satisfaction

This paper develops a conceptual model of the relationship between different cultural values and how they influence consumer satisfaction in the tourism industry. It is hypothesized that cultural differences manifest themselves in different levels of importance being placed upon different aspects of service, and the differences between the levels of importance and the actual service received cause differences in the levels of satisfaction. These hypotheses are tested using 269 independent samples of levels of importance and 411 independent samples of satisfaction of tourists from four cultural groups (Australian, USA/Canadian, Japanese, Mandarin speakers) who visited Melbourne, Australia in the period May-September, 1996. The analysis develops dimensions of importance and satisfaction separately for each cultural grouping, and uses structural equation modeling (Amos 3.6) to develop the causal model measuring the way in which importance of service dimensions cause dimensions of satisfaction. Conclusions from the analysis show little evidence of a causal relationship between importance of service quality attributes and satisfaction. However, significant differences are found between cultures for different levels of satisfaction resulting indirectly from differences in the importance and actual levels of service received.