BACKGROUND Patients cannot always share all necessary relevant information with doctors during medical consultations. Regardless, in order to ensure the best quality consultation and care, it is imperative that a doctor clearly understands each patient's agenda. The purpose of this study was to analyze the process of developing a shared-agenda during family physician consultations in Japan. M...

BACKGROUND By mid adolescence there is an excess in female physical and/or psychosomatic, as well as psychological morbidity. This paper examines the contribution of a range of factors (self-esteem, body image, gender-role orientation, body mass index, smoking and physical activity) to explaining the female excess in three psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, stomach ache/sickness, and dizziness)...

where such models are used to rule out derivations involving irrelevant factors (such as the hexed salt example) that are deemed explanatory by the deductive-nomological model. As I mentioned at the outset, my aim has not been to attack Lange’s general thesis that proofs by mathematical induction are not explanatory, but rather to undercut the argument that Lange provides for this thesis. To de...

This paper uses plant-level data from EPA and Census databases to incorporate spatial components in models of the environmental performance (compliance and emissions) of manufacturing plants. The spatial approaches include creating explanatory variables based on information related to the plant’s location and the location of nearby plants, testing for spatial autocorrelation in environmental pe...

Benchmarking energy-efficiency is an important tool to promote the efficient use of energy in commercial buildings. Benchmarking models are mostly constructed in a simple benchmark table (percentile table) of energy use, which is normalized with floor area and temperature. This paper describes a benchmarking process for energy efficiency by means of multiple regression analysis, where the relat...

Health services and health economics research articles commonly use multivariate regression techniques to measure the relationship of health service utilization and health outcomes (the outcomes of interest) with clinical characteristics, sociodemographic factors, and policy changes (usually treated as explanatory variables). Common regression methods measure differences in outcome variables be...

In the last two decades researchers from various disciplines have made attempts to model and estimate developments in the size and structure of the population of firms. Although these attempts give useful insights into possible explanatory factors of firm dynamics, the explanatory value, and hence predictive power of these models is usually not very high. In this paper we follow a pure demograp...