Tilburg University

BACKGROUND: Most older adults prefer to age in place, and supporting older adults to remain in their own homes and communities is also favored by policy makers. Technology can play a role in staying independent, active and healthy. However, the use of technology varies considerably among older adults. Previous research indicates that current models of technology acceptance are missing essential predictors specific to community-dwelling older adults. Furthermore, in situ research within the specific context of aging in place is scarce, while this type of research is needed to better understand how and why community-dwelling older adults are using technology. OBJECTIVE: To explore which factors influence the level of use of various types of technology by older adults who are aging in place and to describe these factors in a comprehensive model. METHODS: A qualitative explorative field study was set up, involving home visits to 53 community-dwelling older adults, aged 68-95, living in the Netherlands. Purposive sampling was used to include participants with different health statuses, living arrangements, and levels of technology experience. During each home visit: (1) background information on the participants' chronic conditions, major life events, frailty, cognitive functioning, subjective health, ownership and use of technology was gathered, and (2) a semistructured interview was conducted regarding reasons for the level of use of technology. The study was designed to include various types of technology that could support activities of daily living, personal health or safety, mobility, communication, physical activity, personal development, and leisure activities. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze interview transcripts. RESULTS: The level of technology use in the context of aging in place is influenced by six major themes: challenges in the domain of independent living; behavioral options; personal thoughts on technology use; influence of the social network; influence of organizations, and the role of the physical environment. CONCLUSION: Older adults' perceptions and use of technology are embedded in their personal, social, and physical context. Awareness of these psychological and contextual factors is needed in order to facilitate aging in place through the use of technology. A conceptual model covering these factors is presented.

This article examines the governance of organizational networks and the impact of governance on network effectiveness. Three basic models, or forms, of network governance are developed focusing on their distinct structural properties. Propositions are formulated examining conditions for the effectiveness of each form. The tensions inherent in each form are then discussed, followed by the role that management may play in addressing these tensions. Finally, the evolution of governance is explored.

Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality.

ABSTRACT We assess the impact of bank deregulation on the distribution of income in the United States. From the 1970s through the 1990s, most states removed restrictions on intrastate branching, which intensified bank competition and improved bank performance. Exploiting the cross‐state, cross‐time variation in the timing of branch deregulation, we find that deregulation materially tightened the distribution of income by boosting incomes in the lower part of the income distribution while having little impact on incomes above the median. Bank deregulation tightened the distribution of income by increasing the relative wage rates and working hours of unskilled workers.

This paper conducts the first empirical assessment of theories concerning risk taking by banks, their ownership structures, and national bank regulations. We focus on conflicts between bank managers and owners over risk, and we show that bank risk taking varies positively with the comparative power of shareholders within the corporate governance structure of each bank. Moreover, we show that the relation between bank risk and capital regulations, deposit insurance policies, and restrictions on bank activities depends critically on each bank’s ownership structure, such that the actual sign of the marginal effect of regulation on risk varies with ownership concentration. These findings show that the same regulation has different effects on bank risk taking depending on the bank’s corporate governance structure.

This discussion paper argues that both the use of Cronbach's alpha as a reliability estimate and as a measure of internal consistency suffer from major problems. First, alpha always has a value, which cannot be equal to the test score's reliability given the interitem covariance matrix and the usual assumptions about measurement error. Second, in practice, alpha is used more often as a measure of the test's internal consistency than as an estimate of reliability. However, it can be shown easily that alpha is unrelated to the internal structure of the test. It is further discussed that statistics based on a single test administration do not convey much information about the accuracy of individuals' test performance. The paper ends with a list of conclusions about the usefulness of alpha.

A meta-analysis of 45 studies of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles found that female leaders were more transformational than male leaders and also engaged in more of the contingent reward behaviors that are a component of transactional leadership. Male leaders were generally more likely to manifest the other aspects of transactional leadership (active and passive management by exception) and laissez-faire leadership. Although these differences between male and female leaders were small, the implications of these findings are encouraging for female leadership because other research has established that all of the aspects of leadership style on which women exceeded men relate positively to leaders' effectiveness whereas all of the aspects on which men exceeded women have negative or null relations to effectiveness.

This engaging 2005 introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). It covers topics such as text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity. Blommaert focuses on how language can offer a crucial understanding of wider aspects of power relations, arguing that critical discourse analysis should specifically be an analysis of the 'effects' of power, what power does to people, groups and societies, and how this impact comes about. Clearly argued, this concise introduction will be welcomed by students and researchers in a variety of disciplines involved in the study of discourse, including linguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language.

Researchers using latent class (LC) analysis often proceed using the following three steps: (1) an LC model is built for a set of response variables, (2) subjects are assigned to LCs based on their posterior class membership probabilities, and (3) the association between the assigned class membership and external variables is investigated using simple cross-tabulations or multinomial logistic regression analysis. Bolck, Croon, and Hagenaars (2004) demonstrated that such a three-step approach underestimates the associations between covariates and class membership. They proposed resolving this problem by means of a specific correction method that involves modifying the third step. In this article, I extend the correction method of Bolck, Croon, and Hagenaars by showing that it involves maximizing a weighted log-likelihood function for clustered data. This conceptualization makes it possible to apply the method not only with categorical but also with continuous explanatory variables, to obtain correct tests using complex sampling variance estimation methods, and to implement it in standard software for logistic regression analysis. In addition, a new maximum likelihood (ML)—based correction method is proposed, which is more direct in the sense that it does not require analyzing weighted data. This new three-step ML method can be easily implemented in software for LC analysis. The reported simulation study shows that both correction methods perform very well in the sense that their parameter estimates and their SEs can be trusted, except for situations with very poorly separated classes. The main advantage of the ML method compared with the Bolck, Croon, and Hagenaars approach is that it is much more efficient and almost as efficient as one-step ML estimation.

Research summary : U ‐ and inverted U ‐shaped relationships are increasingly explored in strategy research, with 11 percent of all articles published in S trategic M anagement J ournal ( SMJ ) in 2008–2012 investigating such quadratic relationships. Moreover, a movement towards introducing moderation to quadratic relationships has emerged. By reviewing 110 articles published in SMJ from 1980 to 2012, we identify several critical issues in theorizing and testing of these relationships for which current practice falls short. These include insufficient causal argumentation, incorrect testing, mixing up two different types of moderation, and not realizing that the curve can flip completely. For these and other issues, a guideline is provided which, when followed, may bring clarity to theoretical motivation and rigor to empirical testing . Managerial summary : Too much can be as bad as too little. Many relationships in strategic management follow an inverted U ‐shaped pattern, where moderate levels of a strategy lead to optimal performance. To gain deeper insights into the conventional wisdom that too much of a good thing can be harmful to performance, we discuss how such relationships can be better theorized and tested based on a review of articles exploring U ‐shaped relationships in S trategic M anagement J ournal during 1980–2012. We identify several critical issues that require close attention and provide a guideline to further develop and validate this important managerial intuition . Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In recent years, a variety of nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques have been proposed, many of which rely on the evaluation of local properties of the data. The paper presents a review and systematic comparison of these techniques. The performances of the techniques are investigated on artificial and natural tasks. The results of the experiments reveal that nonlinear techniques perform well on selected artificial tasks, but do not outperform the traditional PCA on real-world tasks. The paper explains these results by identifying weaknesses of current nonlinear techniques, and suggests how the performance of nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques may be improved.

Cross-Cultural Psychology is a leading textbook offering senior undergraduate and graduate students a thorough and balanced overview of the whole field of cross-cultural psychology. The team of internationally acclaimed authors present the latest empirical research, theory, methodology and applications from around the world. They discuss all domains of behavior (including development, social behavior, personality, cognition, psycholinguistics, emotion and perception), and present the three main approaches in cross-cultural psychology (cultural, culture-comparative, and indigenous traditions) as well as applications to a number of domains (including acculturation, intercultural relations and communication, work and health). With new additions to the writing team, the third edition benefits from an even broader range of cross-cultural perspectives. Now in 2-colour, the format is even more reader-friendly and the features include chapter outlines, chapter summaries, further reading and an updated glossary of key terms. This edition also offers an accompanying website containing additional material and weblinks.

Service-oriented computing promotes the idea of assembling application components into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible, dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and computing platforms. An SOC research road map provides a context for exploring ongoing research activities.

Applied Latent Class Analysis introduces several innovations in latent class analysis to a wider audience of researchers. Many of the world's leading innovators in the field of latent class analysis contributed essays to this volume, each presenting a key innovation to the basic latent class model and illustrating how it can prove useful in situations typically encountered in actual research.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) is an emerging approach that addresses the requirements of loosely coupled, standards-based, and protocol- independent distributed computing. Typically business operations running in an SOA comprise a number of invocations of these different components, often in an event-driven or asynchronous fashion that reflects the underlying business process needs. To build an SOA a highly distributable communications and integration backbone is required. This functionality is provided by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that is an integration platform that utilizes Web services standards to support a wide variety of communications patterns over multiple transport protocols and deliver value-added capabilities for SOA applications. This paper reviews technologies and approaches that unify the principles and concepts of SOA with those of event-based programing. The paper also focuses on the ESB and describes a range of functions that are designed to offer a manageable, standards-based SOA backbone that extends middleware functionality throughout by connecting heterogeneous components and systems and offers integration services. Finally, the paper proposes an approach to extend the conventional SOA to cater for essential ESB requirements that include capabilities such as service orchestration, “intelligent” routing, provisioning, integrity and security of message as well as service management. The layers in this extended SOA, in short xSOA, are used to classify research issues and current research activities.

This paper examines the longevity of foreign entries. Hypotheses are developed on the mode (start-ups vs. acquisitions) and ownership structure (wholly owned vs. joint ventures) in relation to cultural distance. The hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning, using data on 225 entries that 13 Dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards. Results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization's learning. Cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm, requiring the firm to engage in ‘double layered acculturation.’ We also identify locational ‘paths of learning.’ The longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country. Similarly, the longevity of foreign entries, in which the firm has a majority stake, improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block.

Kaufman and Rousseeuw (1990) define cluster analysis as the classification of similar objects into groups, where the number of groups, as well as their forms are unknown. The “form of a group ” refers to the parameters of cluster; that is, to its cluster-specific means, variances, and covariances that also have a geometrical interpretation. A similar definition is given by Everitt

BACKGROUND: We studied to what extent internet-based cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) programs for symptoms of depression and anxiety are effective. METHOD: A meta-analysis of 12 randomized controlled trials. RESULTS: The effects of internet-based CBT were compared to control conditions in 13 contrast groups with a total number of 2334 participants. A meta-analysis on treatment contrasts resulted in a moderate to large mean effect size [fixed effects analysis (FEA) d=0.40, mixed effects analysis (MEA) d=0.60] and significant heterogeneity. Therefore, two sets of post hoc subgroup analyses were carried out. Analyses on the type of symptoms revealed that interventions for symptoms of depression had a small mean effect size (FEA d=0.27, MEA d=0.32) and significant heterogeneity. Further analyses showed that one study could be regarded as an outlier. Analyses without this study showed a small mean effect size and moderate, non-significant heterogeneity. Interventions for anxiety had a large mean effect size (FEA and MEA d=0.96) and very low heterogeneity. When examining the second set of subgroups, based on therapist assistance, no significant heterogeneity was found. Interventions with therapist support (n=5) had a large mean effect size, while interventions without therapist support (n=6) had a small mean effect size (FEA d=0.24, MEA d=0.26). CONCLUSIONS: In general, effect sizes of internet-based interventions for symptoms of anxiety were larger than effect sizes for depressive symptoms; however, this might be explained by differences in the amount of therapist support.

A global game is an incomplete information game where the actual payoffstructure is determined by a rairdom draw from a given class of games and where each player makes a noisy observation of the selected game.For 2 x 2 games, it is shown that equilibrium play in a global game with vanishing noise forces the players to conform to Harsanyi and Selten's risk dominance criterion.When the uncertainty is one-dimensional, the result may be obtained by repeated elimination of dominated strategies in the global game."1'his pxper is a combinat.ion,and a subatantial generalization, of Carlxson (19R9) and Carlason and Van Damme (1989).Some basic ideas on global games and their telation to risk dominance originate from a note, written by Cadseon in 1985.The suthora thank R.einhard Selten, Lars-Gunnar Svensson, Jdrgen Weibull and various seminar audiences Cor helpful comments.The conatructive criticiam of several referees considerably improved the paper's quality.

This study brings a fresh approach—a learning perspective—to the literature examin-ing whether firms expand internationally through start-ups or acquisitions. Hypothe-ses concern how this strategic choice is influenced hy a firm's multinational diversity and product diversity. The results show that multinational diversity leads to foreign start-ups rather than acquisitions. Product diversity has a curvilinear efiect on the tendency to use start-ups. The curvilinear effect becomes weaker at higher levels of multinational diversity. Firms can internationalize in a number of ways, including through exports, licensing, and foreign direct investments (e.g.. Dunning, 1980,1988). For-eign direct investments (FDIs) have increased dra-matically over the last few decades, both in relative and absolute terms, reaching annual growth rates of nearly 30 percent and a worldwide total of about $1.5 trillion in the late 1980s (United Nations,