When studying the effect of a factor of risk on the incidence of a critical event, the commonly u... more When studying the effect of a factor of risk on the incidence of a critical event, the commonly used 2x2 exposure-affection table reduces all the sample information to the pertinence of each individual to one of four table cells (A= exposed and affected, B= exposed not ...
We develop and evaluate an automated data-driven framework for providing reviewer recommendations... more We develop and evaluate an automated data-driven framework for providing reviewer recommendations for submitted manuscripts. Given inputs comprising a set of manuscripts for review and a listing of a pool of prospective reviewers, our system uses a publisher database to extract papers authored by the reviewers from which a Paragraph Vector (doc2vec ) neural network model is learned and used to obtain vector space embeddings of documents. Similarities between embeddings of an individual reviewer’s papers and a manuscript are then used to compute manuscript-reviewer match scores and to generate a ranked list of recommended reviewers for each manuscript. Our mainline proposed system uses full text versions of the reviewers’ papers, which we demonstrate performs significantly better than models developed based on abstracts alone, which has been the predominant paradigm in prior work. Direct retrieval of reviewer’s manuscripts from a publisher database reduces reviewer burden, ensures up...
Objective. The aim of this study is to explain the effect of important covariates on the health-r... more Objective. The aim of this study is to explain the effect of important covariates on the health-related quality of life (HRQol) in elderly subjects. Methods. Data were collected within a longitudinal study that involves 5256 subject, aged +or= 65. The Visual Analogue Scale inclused in the EQ-5D Questionnaire, tha EQ-VAS, was used to obtain a synthetic measure of quality of life. To model EQ-VAS Score a quantile regression analysis was employed. This methodological approach was preferred to an OLS regression becouse of the EQ-VAS Score typical distribution. The main covariates are: amount of weekly physical activity, reported problems in Activity of Daily Living, presence of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypercolesterolemia, hypertension, joints pains, as well as socio-demographic information. Main Results. 1) Even a low level of physical activity significantly influences quality of life in a positive way; 2) ADL problems, at least one cardiovascular disease and joint pain stron...
Starting from cross‐sectional European data coming from the Survey on Health,Ageing and Retiremen... more Starting from cross‐sectional European data coming from the Survey on Health,Ageing and Retirement (SHARE), the present study aims to investigate whether andhow several older‐adult (50+) individuals’ characteristics are associated with reportedQuality of Life (QoL). In particular, we analyze the variation in the associationsbetween QoL and older‐adults’ characteristics taking into consideration the full QoLdistribution. In doing so, we propose the use of quantile regression as alternativemethod of analysis compared to standard Ordinary Least Squares linear regressionmodels (OLS).To examine individuals’ quality of life we use the SHARE CASP‐12 scale, ameasurement based on 12 Likert scaled items crossing four theoretically deriveddimensions of QoL that are particularly important in early old age: (C)ontrol,(A)utonomy, (S)elf‐realization and (P)leasure. Each Likert scale question (three foreach dimension) was recoded so that the most positive response scores 4 and themost negative 1. F...
In recent years the role of grandparents has become the topic of several studies as many grandpar... more In recent years the role of grandparents has become the topic of several studies as many grandparents play an educational and social role in the lives of their grandchildren. The aim of the present study is to explore this role as perceived by grandparents. The study examines the relationships that grandparents have with children’s parents and the different roles they play. The study was conducted in the province of Bozen, in northern Italy, where three linguistic communities coexist: Italian, German and Ladin. A total of 865 grandparents completed a questionnaire on the time spent with their grandchildren, the relationship with their own children, the approach used in raising grandchildren and the level of emotion and love involved. Grandparents play an upbringing role and, mainly in the area of Mediterranean countries, a social role. The overall picture presented in this study is that most grandparents in South Tyrol have quite frequent contact with their grandchildren. In our stu...
In countries like Italy, where the lack of public childcare services is particularly acute, famil... more In countries like Italy, where the lack of public childcare services is particularly acute, families assistance typically flows down the generations and tend to turn to informal childcare provided by relatives. Thus, grandparents caring for grandchildren provide a critical service for both the children and the children’s parents. However, few studies have analyzed in depth the correlation between grandchild care and grandparents’ subjective well-being (SWB). The aim of our presentation is to illustrate a working project funded by the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen at the end of 2015. The project, which can be defined as a pilot study, aims to investigate the consequences of childcare on grandparent’s lives in terms of SWB levels in South Tyrol, through a specific quantitative survey. The main purpose of our contribution to the conference is to present the new survey to foster discussion and research on the effect of grandparenting on grandparents’ subjective measure of well-being....
Grandparents have acquired a more central position in family relationships, especially with resp... more Grandparents have acquired a more central position in family relationships, especially with respect to the care of grandchildren, but also as financial support. However Europe presents a big cultural divide between north and south on the role of grandparents. In Southern Europe to help grandchildren’s parents in looking after young grandchildren is considered a grandparent’s duty much more than in the North. (Glaser et al. 2013, Hank and Buber 2009, Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2005) To this day, the effect of this unprecedented grandparents´ family centrality on their quality of life is not clear in literature. On the other hand, healthy aging has become of the utmost importance in Europe. The WHO define health no longer as merely the absence of disease, but as a global wellbeing (bio-psycho-social) of the individual, that is, the quality of life related to health (WHO, 2008). The objective of the present study is to estimate variation in well-being of european grandparents over a p...
In this article we explore the last two decades of changes in the demography of grandparenthood i... more In this article we explore the last two decades of changes in the demography of grandparenthood in Italy, by means of a set of measures: the proportion of men and women becoming grandparents by age and time, the age at transition to grandparenthood and its crossing with a set of life events and the length of grandparenthood. We used data from the four waves of the Survey on Family and Social Subjects carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in 1998, 2003, 2009 and 2016. Overall, the median age at which half of the population over 35 is made up of grandparents moved forward by at least 5 years during the two observed decades. The postponement of grandparenthood is evident in middle age: between 55 and 64 the ratio of grandparents to non-grandparents decreased significantly by about 10 per cent. Overall, among people who had ever had children, the median age at the transition to grandparenthood advanced by three years from 1998 to 2016, both for men (59 to 62) and w...
Past research has documented the positive influence of frequent interactions with social networks... more Past research has documented the positive influence of frequent interactions with social networks on several health outcomes in later life, with different patterns by gender. In this study, we explore the association of frequent contact with different members of the social network (namely partner, grandchildren, siblings, friends and neighbours) on self-perceived health status and the limitation of illnesses among older grandparents in Italy, using a large national representative survey. Our results confirm the positive association between good health indicators and frequent contact with members of the “horizontal” network (partner, siblings and friends), while a more ambiguous association has been found with frequent face-to-face contact with children and grandchildren. The results hold for both male and female grandparents. The Mediterranean family-focused culture may possibly explain the distinctly Italian results.
Intergenerational transfers measured in several currencies (e.g. co-residence, contact, proximity... more Intergenerational transfers measured in several currencies (e.g. co-residence, contact, proximity and support) have been always considered important indicators for family solidarity. Most of the studies on intergenerational transfers examine the structural characteristics of such exchanges (as distance, frequency, type, motives), emphasising the potential positive association between the structure and the quality of parent–child relationships. Additionally, while most surveys include questions on the structural indicators of family exchanges, it is still uncommon for them to contain assessments of the relationships between parents and their adult children as well. Using the Italian 2009 Family Survey, this study analyses the satisfaction of parent–child relationships for parents aged 65 and older. After examining the association of such a variable with the structural indicators of intergenerational exchanges (frequency of contact), we explored the individual factors associated with ...
Psychology of Health - Biopsychosocial Approach [Working Title], 2019
Work is devoted to studying the quality of life parameters of children and adolescents with diffe... more Work is devoted to studying the quality of life parameters of children and adolescents with different forms of tuberculosis. Laboratory and instrumental methods of examination of patients do not cover all aspects of tuberculous infection and do not allow valuing the condition of children and adolescents with pulmonary tuberculosis. During the analysis of quality of life parameters, there is a possibility to define the influence of the disease on physical, psychological, and social aspects of the organism's functioning. The analysis of quantitative indexes children and adolescents quality of life was conducted depending on gender sign, area of residence, and form of tuberculosis. For research of quality of life in pediatric practice, the questionnaire of Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory-PedsQL-is used. The questionnaire of PedsQL 4.0. includes 23 questions, incorporated in 4 scales. Every question has 5 variants of answers: "no," "hardly ever," "sometimes," "often," and "almost always," from which one has to be chosen, most going near a situation.
Research on the choices of childcare arrangements in Italy shows the fundamental role of grandpar... more Research on the choices of childcare arrangements in Italy shows the fundamental role of grandparents in providing informal childcare. Therefore, it is important to understand how grandparents provide different types of childcare, especially in terms of differences in their socio-economic, demographic and physical status, jointly with the characteristics of their grandchildren. Grandparents aged 50 and over with at least one non-co-resident grandchild aged 13 years or less were selected from the 2009 Italian household survey. Multilevel multinomial logistic regression models for grandmothers and grandfathers were used to identify the determinants of the probability of providing childcare intensively, occasionally or during school holidays rather than never. The probability of a grandparent providing intensive childcare is significantly reduced by being: male, unmarried, in bad health and with inadequate economic resources. Nevertheless, when analysing the probability of providing childcare occasionally or during holidays, the individual characteristics of grandparents and grandchildren are less significant compared to intensive childcare, meaning that grandparents provide non-intensive care regardless of their individual characteristics, and this is particularly true for grandmothers. Results confirm the fundamental importance of grandparents in providing informal childcare in Italy, and they offer useful information to understand the individual characteristics associated with different types of grandparental childcare.
When studying the effect of a factor of risk on the incidence of a critical event, the commonly u... more When studying the effect of a factor of risk on the incidence of a critical event, the commonly used 2x2 exposure-affection table reduces all the sample information to the pertinence of each individual to one of four table cells (A= exposed and affected, B= exposed not ...
We develop and evaluate an automated data-driven framework for providing reviewer recommendations... more We develop and evaluate an automated data-driven framework for providing reviewer recommendations for submitted manuscripts. Given inputs comprising a set of manuscripts for review and a listing of a pool of prospective reviewers, our system uses a publisher database to extract papers authored by the reviewers from which a Paragraph Vector (doc2vec ) neural network model is learned and used to obtain vector space embeddings of documents. Similarities between embeddings of an individual reviewer’s papers and a manuscript are then used to compute manuscript-reviewer match scores and to generate a ranked list of recommended reviewers for each manuscript. Our mainline proposed system uses full text versions of the reviewers’ papers, which we demonstrate performs significantly better than models developed based on abstracts alone, which has been the predominant paradigm in prior work. Direct retrieval of reviewer’s manuscripts from a publisher database reduces reviewer burden, ensures up...
Objective. The aim of this study is to explain the effect of important covariates on the health-r... more Objective. The aim of this study is to explain the effect of important covariates on the health-related quality of life (HRQol) in elderly subjects. Methods. Data were collected within a longitudinal study that involves 5256 subject, aged +or= 65. The Visual Analogue Scale inclused in the EQ-5D Questionnaire, tha EQ-VAS, was used to obtain a synthetic measure of quality of life. To model EQ-VAS Score a quantile regression analysis was employed. This methodological approach was preferred to an OLS regression becouse of the EQ-VAS Score typical distribution. The main covariates are: amount of weekly physical activity, reported problems in Activity of Daily Living, presence of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypercolesterolemia, hypertension, joints pains, as well as socio-demographic information. Main Results. 1) Even a low level of physical activity significantly influences quality of life in a positive way; 2) ADL problems, at least one cardiovascular disease and joint pain stron...
Starting from cross‐sectional European data coming from the Survey on Health,Ageing and Retiremen... more Starting from cross‐sectional European data coming from the Survey on Health,Ageing and Retirement (SHARE), the present study aims to investigate whether andhow several older‐adult (50+) individuals’ characteristics are associated with reportedQuality of Life (QoL). In particular, we analyze the variation in the associationsbetween QoL and older‐adults’ characteristics taking into consideration the full QoLdistribution. In doing so, we propose the use of quantile regression as alternativemethod of analysis compared to standard Ordinary Least Squares linear regressionmodels (OLS).To examine individuals’ quality of life we use the SHARE CASP‐12 scale, ameasurement based on 12 Likert scaled items crossing four theoretically deriveddimensions of QoL that are particularly important in early old age: (C)ontrol,(A)utonomy, (S)elf‐realization and (P)leasure. Each Likert scale question (three foreach dimension) was recoded so that the most positive response scores 4 and themost negative 1. F...
In recent years the role of grandparents has become the topic of several studies as many grandpar... more In recent years the role of grandparents has become the topic of several studies as many grandparents play an educational and social role in the lives of their grandchildren. The aim of the present study is to explore this role as perceived by grandparents. The study examines the relationships that grandparents have with children’s parents and the different roles they play. The study was conducted in the province of Bozen, in northern Italy, where three linguistic communities coexist: Italian, German and Ladin. A total of 865 grandparents completed a questionnaire on the time spent with their grandchildren, the relationship with their own children, the approach used in raising grandchildren and the level of emotion and love involved. Grandparents play an upbringing role and, mainly in the area of Mediterranean countries, a social role. The overall picture presented in this study is that most grandparents in South Tyrol have quite frequent contact with their grandchildren. In our stu...
In countries like Italy, where the lack of public childcare services is particularly acute, famil... more In countries like Italy, where the lack of public childcare services is particularly acute, families assistance typically flows down the generations and tend to turn to informal childcare provided by relatives. Thus, grandparents caring for grandchildren provide a critical service for both the children and the children’s parents. However, few studies have analyzed in depth the correlation between grandchild care and grandparents’ subjective well-being (SWB). The aim of our presentation is to illustrate a working project funded by the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen at the end of 2015. The project, which can be defined as a pilot study, aims to investigate the consequences of childcare on grandparent’s lives in terms of SWB levels in South Tyrol, through a specific quantitative survey. The main purpose of our contribution to the conference is to present the new survey to foster discussion and research on the effect of grandparenting on grandparents’ subjective measure of well-being....
Grandparents have acquired a more central position in family relationships, especially with resp... more Grandparents have acquired a more central position in family relationships, especially with respect to the care of grandchildren, but also as financial support. However Europe presents a big cultural divide between north and south on the role of grandparents. In Southern Europe to help grandchildren’s parents in looking after young grandchildren is considered a grandparent’s duty much more than in the North. (Glaser et al. 2013, Hank and Buber 2009, Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2005) To this day, the effect of this unprecedented grandparents´ family centrality on their quality of life is not clear in literature. On the other hand, healthy aging has become of the utmost importance in Europe. The WHO define health no longer as merely the absence of disease, but as a global wellbeing (bio-psycho-social) of the individual, that is, the quality of life related to health (WHO, 2008). The objective of the present study is to estimate variation in well-being of european grandparents over a p...
In this article we explore the last two decades of changes in the demography of grandparenthood i... more In this article we explore the last two decades of changes in the demography of grandparenthood in Italy, by means of a set of measures: the proportion of men and women becoming grandparents by age and time, the age at transition to grandparenthood and its crossing with a set of life events and the length of grandparenthood. We used data from the four waves of the Survey on Family and Social Subjects carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in 1998, 2003, 2009 and 2016. Overall, the median age at which half of the population over 35 is made up of grandparents moved forward by at least 5 years during the two observed decades. The postponement of grandparenthood is evident in middle age: between 55 and 64 the ratio of grandparents to non-grandparents decreased significantly by about 10 per cent. Overall, among people who had ever had children, the median age at the transition to grandparenthood advanced by three years from 1998 to 2016, both for men (59 to 62) and w...
Past research has documented the positive influence of frequent interactions with social networks... more Past research has documented the positive influence of frequent interactions with social networks on several health outcomes in later life, with different patterns by gender. In this study, we explore the association of frequent contact with different members of the social network (namely partner, grandchildren, siblings, friends and neighbours) on self-perceived health status and the limitation of illnesses among older grandparents in Italy, using a large national representative survey. Our results confirm the positive association between good health indicators and frequent contact with members of the “horizontal” network (partner, siblings and friends), while a more ambiguous association has been found with frequent face-to-face contact with children and grandchildren. The results hold for both male and female grandparents. The Mediterranean family-focused culture may possibly explain the distinctly Italian results.
Intergenerational transfers measured in several currencies (e.g. co-residence, contact, proximity... more Intergenerational transfers measured in several currencies (e.g. co-residence, contact, proximity and support) have been always considered important indicators for family solidarity. Most of the studies on intergenerational transfers examine the structural characteristics of such exchanges (as distance, frequency, type, motives), emphasising the potential positive association between the structure and the quality of parent–child relationships. Additionally, while most surveys include questions on the structural indicators of family exchanges, it is still uncommon for them to contain assessments of the relationships between parents and their adult children as well. Using the Italian 2009 Family Survey, this study analyses the satisfaction of parent–child relationships for parents aged 65 and older. After examining the association of such a variable with the structural indicators of intergenerational exchanges (frequency of contact), we explored the individual factors associated with ...
Psychology of Health - Biopsychosocial Approach [Working Title], 2019
Work is devoted to studying the quality of life parameters of children and adolescents with diffe... more Work is devoted to studying the quality of life parameters of children and adolescents with different forms of tuberculosis. Laboratory and instrumental methods of examination of patients do not cover all aspects of tuberculous infection and do not allow valuing the condition of children and adolescents with pulmonary tuberculosis. During the analysis of quality of life parameters, there is a possibility to define the influence of the disease on physical, psychological, and social aspects of the organism's functioning. The analysis of quantitative indexes children and adolescents quality of life was conducted depending on gender sign, area of residence, and form of tuberculosis. For research of quality of life in pediatric practice, the questionnaire of Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory-PedsQL-is used. The questionnaire of PedsQL 4.0. includes 23 questions, incorporated in 4 scales. Every question has 5 variants of answers: "no," "hardly ever," "sometimes," "often," and "almost always," from which one has to be chosen, most going near a situation.
Research on the choices of childcare arrangements in Italy shows the fundamental role of grandpar... more Research on the choices of childcare arrangements in Italy shows the fundamental role of grandparents in providing informal childcare. Therefore, it is important to understand how grandparents provide different types of childcare, especially in terms of differences in their socio-economic, demographic and physical status, jointly with the characteristics of their grandchildren. Grandparents aged 50 and over with at least one non-co-resident grandchild aged 13 years or less were selected from the 2009 Italian household survey. Multilevel multinomial logistic regression models for grandmothers and grandfathers were used to identify the determinants of the probability of providing childcare intensively, occasionally or during school holidays rather than never. The probability of a grandparent providing intensive childcare is significantly reduced by being: male, unmarried, in bad health and with inadequate economic resources. Nevertheless, when analysing the probability of providing childcare occasionally or during holidays, the individual characteristics of grandparents and grandchildren are less significant compared to intensive childcare, meaning that grandparents provide non-intensive care regardless of their individual characteristics, and this is particularly true for grandmothers. Results confirm the fundamental importance of grandparents in providing informal childcare in Italy, and they offer useful information to understand the individual characteristics associated with different types of grandparental childcare.
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