Health literacy and consumer health information

The rigours of the past few years have demonstrated the importance of good health literacy levels with the imperative of being able to obtain and interpret information to maintain and improve one's health never more apparent. With this in mind, this issue is focused on consumer health information, the gender and population group differences that exist in information seeking behaviour, the challenges of understanding medical explanations and terminology, and existing criteria to assess and ultimately produce better consumer health information.     

Predicting persistence from the student adaptation to college questionnaire: Early warning or siren song?

With the currently dwindling traditional applicant pool, retention is higher education's holy grail of the nineties. Western Psychological Services is marketing its new Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) as providing early evidence of poor adjustment and potential attrition. While the SACQ closely parallels Tinto's model of institutional departure, no previously published research addresses its ability to differentiate persisters from nonpersisters. Using discriminant analysis, the present study examined (1) the extent to which the SACQ accurately predicts student departure for a private, comprehensive university; (2) SACQ items distinguishing nonpersisters; (3) use with an incoming class; and (4) evidence linking the SACQ with intervention strategies. The paper will appeal to a wide audience, especially those concerned with enrollment management and assessment.Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, May 26–29, 1991.     

组成于平行机和批处理机的二阶段混合流水作业问题

A hybrid two-stage flowshop scheduling problem was considered which involves m identical parallel machines at Stage 1 and a burn-in processor M at Stage 2, and the makespan was taken as the minimization objective. This scheduling problem is NP-hard in general. We divide it into eight subcases. Except for the following two subcases： （1） b≥ an, max{m, B} 〈 n; （2） a1 ≤ b ≤ an, m ≤ B 〈 n, for all other subcases, their NP-hardness was proved or pointed out, corresponding approximation algorithms were conducted and their worst-case performances were estimated. In all these approximation algorithms, the Multifit and PTAS algorithms were respectively used, as the jobs were scheduled in m identical parallel machines.     

Predicting infant outcome in families of employed and nonemployed mothers

Differences in infant outcome, predictor variables, and their relationships were explored as a function of maternal employment. Thirty 18-month-olds and their mothers were studied. Child intelligence, attachment security, and dependency were measured, as well as frequency of stressful events in the mother's life, quality of the parents' marital relationship, frequency of the mother's social contacts, and extent of the mother's emotional and parenting supports. Also included were the mother's ability to cope; satisfaction with emotional, parenting, and child care supports; and role satisfaction. For children of employed mothers, attachment and dependency were negatively correlated; securely attached children showed less dependency behavior. For employed mothers, satisfaction with child care and frequent social contacts predicted secure child attachment. Satisfaction with child care, role satisfaction, and ability to cope were strongly interrelated. For nonemployed mothers, maternal coping predicted attachment security, while frequent social contacts predicted greater child dependency. Predictors of child outcome were highly interrelated for nonemployed mothers, with satisfaction with emotional supports playing a pivotal role. These differences suggest that different models to predict infant outcome in employed and nonemployed mother families may be appropriate.