BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate whether physical activity (in general, and more specifically, walking and cycling during leisure time and for commuting purposes, sports and gardening) is an underlying mechanism in the relationship between the amount of green space in people's direct living environment and self-perceived health. To study this, we first investigated whether th...

SUMMARY In this study, Coxiella burnetii seroprevalence was assessed for dairy and non-dairy sheep farm residents in The Netherlands for 2009-2010. Risk factors for seropositivity were identified for non-dairy sheep farm residents. Participants completed farm-based and individual questionnaires. In addition, participants were tested for IgG and IgM C. burnetii antibodies using immunofluorescent...

This paper, in a first part, reviews current literature on the effects of ethnic and social segregation on children and adolescents. In a second part, it reports results of an empirical study on this issue conducted by the author in two German cities. In recent research, the effects of segregation have been framed as possible ‘contextual effects’ of neighbourhoods, i.e. as separate factors beyo...

OBJECTIVES Several studies have reported the relationship between residents' perceived neighbourhood safety and their health outcomes. However, those studies suffered from unreliability of neighbourhood safety measure and potential residual confounding related to crime rates. In this study, using multilevel analysis to account for the hierarchical structure of the data, we examined associations...

This paper examines whether the theory of planned behavior (TPB) provides an effective model for predicting the intention of hiring managers to use Information Technology (IT) certification in the employee selection process. Little academic research has examined IT certification, an area important to firms and their hiring managers, educational institutions and their professors and students, as...

This paper applies several well-known tricks from the numerical treatment of deterministic differential equations to improve the efficiency of the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and especially the Langevin equation. We use modified equations analysis as an alternative to strong-approximation theory for the integrator, and we apply this to intro...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this work was to elucidate aspects of organizational culture associated with hospital performance in perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis using quantitative data in a multicenter and multidimensional study. DESIGN Cross-sectional retrospective study using a survey data and administrative data. SETTING Eighty-three acute hospitals in Japan. PARTICIPANTS A total o...

This article expands on barriers to entry and repositioning theory by examining the moderating effects of small firm owner/manager characteristics on the relationship between their perceptions of capital access barriers and their firm's market penetration. Of particular interest was how these effects varied between public and commercial market segments and industrial sectors. Hierarchical regre...