Research methods and methodologies are extremely important when conducting research and degree projects. The use and application of the methods and methodologies are considered to be “necessarily vicious” and, unfortunately, often applied after the research has been conducted. The need for applying methods before the actually research and the reasons for doing so are often stressed in the liter...

The emphasis on systematic methods of demonstrating accountability in health care is affecting the delivery of human services at all levels, from hospitals and community centers to individual private practitioners. New procedures are being proposed to meet the accountability demands encountered by therapists. Several recently developed methods for documenting clinical change in patient status a...

In response surface models the expected response is usually taken to be a low degree polynomial in the design variables that are coded from the factor settings. We argue that an overparameterized polynomial representation of the expected response ooers great economy and transparency. As an illustration, we exhibit a constructive path of design improvement relative to the Kiefer design ordering,...

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a general problem structuring approach that seeks to incorporate multiple stakeholder views in the analysis of a given problem. When applied to IS development, the method requires negotiation and debate between the stakeholders when exploring the feasibility of developing an information system. The applicability of this approach depends, however, on the willing...

A growing number of firms are competitively entering into e-Business because they see the high potential of e-Business growth as an opportunity. The positive expectation of the e-Business market leads most firms to go into e-Business, but it is not clear what kinds of benefits firms gain through e-Business. In this paper, we examine whether firms’ economic benefits are related to e-Business act...

In the last two decades Soft Sensors established themselves as a valuable alternative to the traditional means for the acquisition of critical process variables, process monitoring and other tasks which are related to process control. This paper discusses characteristics of the process industry data which are critical for the development of data-driven Soft Sensors. These characteristics are co...

We study an open text mining problem – discovering concept-level event associations from a text stream. We investigate the importance and challenge of this task and propose a novel solution by using event sequential patterns. The proposed approach can discover important event associations implicitly expressed. The discovered event associations are general and useful as knowledge for application...

Economists often use event study methodology to evaluate the impact of new regulations on firms before there is enough data to empirically estimate the effects. This research investigates the degree to which event study methodology can provide useful information in this regard by studying how accurately markets predict the actual benefits associated with a new law. Specifically, I utilize a uni...

BACKGROUND Improving health workers' performance is vital for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In the literature on human resource management (HRM) interventions to improve health workers' performance in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), hardly any attention has been paid to the question how HRM interventions might bring about outcomes and in which contexts. Such information is...

BACKGROUND Evidence-based standards for management of the seriously sick child have existed for decades, yet their translation in clinical practice is a challenge. The context and organization of institutions are known determinants of successful translation, however, research using adequate methodologies to explain the dynamic nature of these determinants in the quality-of-care improvement proc...