Castes, or endogamous kinship relationships, are prevalent in communities across the world and particularly in developing countries. Caste plays a strong role in determining community structures and political power. However, the role of caste as a factor in shaping e-governance design and outcomes is absent in the literature. This paper addresses this particular gap by examining some cases from...

This paper examines the diagnosis related group-level (DRG) price effects of recent hospital mergers and acquisitions that occurred in Ohio and California. Empirical results indicate that hospital mergers and acquisitions increase prices at the DRG level. Further, price increases are greater in DRGs where the merging hospitals gained substantial market share compared to DRGs where the merging h...

The equilibrium outcome of a strategic interaction between two or more players may depend on the weight they place on each other’s payoff. A positive, negative or zero weight represents altruism, spite or complete selfishness, respectively. Paradoxically, the real, material payoff in equilibrium for a group of altruists may be lower than for selfish or spiteful groups. However, this can only be...

It has been suggested that certain theoretically important anomalous results in the area of verbal short-term memory could be attributable to differences in strategy. However there are relatively few studies that investigate strategy directly. We describe four experiments, each involving the immediate serial recall of word sequences under baseline control conditions, or preceded by instruction ...

We prove that a permutation group in which different finite sets have different stabilizers cannot satisfy any group law. For locally compact topological groups with this property we show that almost all finite subsets of the group generate free subgroups. We derive consequences of these theorems on Thompson’s group F , weakly branch groups, automorphism groups of regular trees and profinite gr...

Richard Redmond and Elizabeth Curtis describe the process of conducting focus groups. It is specifically aimed at students undertaking research methods modules and those planning to use focus groups as a means of collecting data. It begins with a discussion of the uses of focus groups before moving on to discuss some of the many activities associated with the planning, organising and conducting...

PURPOSE Supervisors play a key role in the development of postgraduate medical trainees both in the oversight of their day-to-day clinical practice but also in the support of their learning experiences. In the UK, there has been a clear distinction made between these two activities. In this article, we report on the development of a web-based multisource feedback (MSF) tool for educational supe...

Accurately detecting emotional expression in women with primary breast cancer participating in support groups may be important for therapists and researchers. In 2 small studies (N = 20 and N = 16), the authors examined whether video coding, human text coding, and automated text analysis provided consistent estimates of the level of emotional expression. In Study 1, the authors compared coding ...

This paper reports a qualitative evaluation study conducted to explore the perceptions of students who joined the Tier 1 Program of the Project P.A.T.H.S. A total of 92 students were randomly selected to participate in 10 focus groups, which provided qualitative data for the study. With specific focus on how the informants described the program, the descriptors used were primarily positive; the...