Worries, 'weirdos', neighborhoods and knowing people: a qualitative study with children and parents regarding children's independent mobility.

This qualitative study involved focus groups with 132 children and 12 parents in primary and secondary schools in metropolitan and regional areas of Victoria, Australia, to explore experiences and perceptions of children's independent mobility. The study highlights the impact of family routines, neighborhood characteristics, social norms and reference points for decision making. Children reported a wider range of safety concerns than parents, including harm from strangers or traffic, bullying, or getting lost. Children expressed great delight in being independent, often seeking to actively influence parents' decision making. Children's independent mobility is a developmental process, requiring graduated steps and skill building.

Testing for the presence of multiple sources of informative dropout in longitudinal data.

Longitudinal studies tracking the rate of change are subject to patient dropout. This dropout process might not only be informative but also heterogeneous in the sense that different causes might contribute to multiple patterns of informative dropout. We propose a random-effects approach to test for homogeneity of informative dropout that accommodates the realistic situation where reasons for dropout are not fully understood, or perhaps are even entirely unknown. The proposed score test is robust in that it does not depend on the underlying distribution of the informative dropout random effects. The test allows for an additional level of clustering among participating subjects, as might be found in a family study, provided the informative dropout random effects have a known correlation structure.

Socioeconomic determinants of schistosomiasis in a poor rural area in Brazil

The objective of this paper is to identify and quantify socioeconomic determinants of Schistosoma mansoni infection in the rural area of Virgem das Graças in Minas Gerais State of Brazil. A cross-sectional study was carried out to examine the prevalence and intensity of schistosomiasis in relation to socioeconomic characteristics of the households. Log-binomial regression analysis was used to examine the data on both the household and individual levels, analyzing the prevalence ratios for the association of schistosomiasis and socioeconomic variables related to the head of the household. Multiple comparisons through mixed effect modeling were used to examine the relationship between intensity of infection (geometric mean egg counts) and different levels of socioeconomic variables, respectively. In the univariate analysis, place of residence, number of persons per room, and lack of motorized transport were associated with schistosomiasis at the household level and age and unsafe water contact at the individual level. Age, unsafe water contact, number of persons per room, household possessions and lack of education of head of household remained significant predictors of schistosomiasis in the multivariable analysis. Only age was significantly associated with intensity of infection of individuals. It is concluded that widespread poverty, the rural environment, and weak socioeconomic differentiation that result in intense contact with infective water appear to minimize the protective effect of piped water supply and other socioeconomic parameters on schistosomiasis found in other studies. The potential role of socioeconomic development in conjunction with schistosomiasis control is described and areas for further studies are identified.(AU)