This paper explores the social change of the past 40 years through reporting the results of a restudy. It argues that social change can be understood, culturally, as involving a process of de-institutionalisation and, structurally, as involving differentiation within elementary family groups as...

Healthcare decision-makers have always faced the challenge of allocating finite resources, but the global economic downturn places extra pressure on health systems to meet rising demands. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and UK government have therefore called on...

The negative impacts of previous economic recessions on suicide rates have largely been attributed to rapid rises in unemployment in the context of inadequate social and work protection programmes. We have investigated trends in indicators of the 2008 economic recession and trends in suicide...

Accurate resource-use measurement is challenging within an economic evaluation, but is a fundamental requirement for estimating efficiency. Considerable research effort has been concentrated on the appropriate measurement of outcomes and the policy implications of economic evaluation, while...

Trials that intend to conduct an economic analysis are less likely to report economic data than effectiveness data. Where economic results do appear, they are published later, and in journals with lower impact factors. These results suggest that economic output may be more susceptible than...

Recent research has derived preference scores from the SF-36. We compare the practicality and construct validity of SF-36 derived preference scores with directly elicited time trade off (TTO) and visual analogue scale (VAS) scores. In this observational study, low back pain (LBP), patients were...

A novel moving magnet linear compressor with clearance seals and flexure bearings has been designed and constructed. It is suitable for a refrigeration system with a compact heat exchanger, such as would be needed for CPU cooling. The performance of the compressor has been experimentally...

The viability of a fixed exchange rate system is shown to be state- or shock-dependent. We show, simply, Obstfeld's claim that there may be multiple equilibria - multiple shock values for which a regime switch becomes optimal. We distinguish between self-fulfilling and history-dependent crises....