• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.344-355
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• 2021

Purpose: With low birth rates and aging population problems in Korea, the number of foreign workers grows rapidly. The purpose of this study was to identify factors influencing physical activity of foreign workers based on a Health Promotion Model by examining relationships between acculturation, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, exercise self-efficacy, activity-related affect, social support, and physical activity. Methods: The participants were foreign workers aged 18 to 60 who were employed at eight shipyards. A questionnaire was distributed to 216 participants. Results: As a result of the multivariate ordinal logistic regression analysis, factors affecting physical activity of foreign workers were perceived benefits (B=.65, 95% CI=0.08~1.22), exercise self-efficacy (B=.16, 95% CI=0.05~0.26), integration (B=.41 95% CI=0.14~0.69), and social support for physical activity (B=.48, 95% CI=0.12~0.83). The total explanatory power was 17.7% (x²=41.95, p<.001). Conclusion: Based on these results, there is a need to develop a customized program to increase physical activities of foreign workers by enhancing integration, perceived benefits, exercise self-efficacy and social support.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.1143-1152
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• 2021

The study aims to assess the impact of factors on the access to financial services by Vietnamese farmers. The number of respondents in this study is 402 household heads participating in six diverse agricultural value chains in Vietnam. The explanatory variables of the Multinomial Logit model estimates variables at the individual characteristics while the Mixed Logit model can combine the two types of variables together to estimate the effects simultaneously. On the other hand, the Ordinal Logit model is used to evaluate the determinants of the increase in the quantity of financial services used by individuals. The estimation results show that male-headed households have more access to financial services than females. Younger farmers are more likely to use formal financial services than the elderly. Financial literacy, land ownership, and shocks in agricultural production all have a positive impact on the probability of dealing with banks. In addition, the degree of linkage and credibility of the value chain have a significant positive impact on the accessibility of financial services to farmers. The findings of this study suggest that limiting gender inequality, focusing on youth marketing and developing agricultural value chains will have a positive impact on farmers' access to financial services.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.927-940
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• 2023

Online shopping has been undergoing significant developments in the South Asian region in the last decade. Using a representative sample of Sri Lankan consumers, this study explored online food purchasing behavior in Sri Lanka, a developing nation and island in South Asia. Data were collected from 562 respondents from all nine provinces in Sri Lanka using an online survey. Consumer attitudes were evaluated using factor analysis, and factor scores were added as explanatory variables to the final model. An ordered logistic regression model was used to examine the impact of consumer demographics, economic variables, and consumer attitudes on online food purchases. Online food purchasing intensity was categorized into four groups that suited ordinal rankings: zero for never, low for rarely, medium for occasionally, and high for regularly. Results indicated that age, income, education, and living in urban areas affect the online food purchasing behavior of Sri Lankan consumers. In addition, trust, convenience, and attitudes toward price were powerful drivers of online food purchasing. The findings have a number of significant managerial ramifications for creating strategies to promote online food purchases in developing South Asian nations like Sri Lanka. Moreover, promoting online shopping could be a potential solution for traffic congestion, ultimately helping to mitigate the negative externalities associated with it, such as carbon emissions and air pollution.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.2-8
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• 2011

Objectives: Public release of and feedback (here after public release) on institutional (clinics and hospitals) cesarean section rates has had the effect of reducing cesarean section rates. However, compared to the isolated intervention, there was scant evidence of the effect of repeated public releases (RPR) on cesarean section rates. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effect of RPR for reducing cesarean section rates. Methods: From January 2003 to July 2007, the nationwide monthly institutional cesarean section rates data (1 951 303 deliveries at 1194 institutions) were analyzed. We used autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time-series intervention models to assess the effect of the RPR on cesarean section rates and ordinal logistic regression model to determine the characteristics of the change in cesarean section rates. Results: Among four RPR, we found that only the first one (August 29, 2005) decreased the cesarean section rate (by 0.81 percent) and continued to have an impact period through the last observation in May 2007. Baseline cesarean section rates (OR, 4.7; 95% CI, 3.1 to 7.1) and annual number of deliveries (OR, 2.8; 95% CI, 1.6 to 4.7) of institutions in the upper third of each category at before first intervention had a significant contribution to the decrease of cesarean section rates. Conclusions: We could not found the evidence that RPR has had the significant effect of reducing cesarean section rates. Institutions with upper baseline cesarean section rates and annual number of deliveries were more responsive to RPR.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.106-118
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• 1983

The main purpose of this study is to systematically classify words indicating pain in terms of their ranks in each subclass. This study is a part of developing a Korean Pain Measurement Tool. This study didnot include exploration of each word's dimension such as sensory or affective. Eighty three Korean words tentatively classified in 19 subclasses in previous study were used for this study. At least three to six words were included in each subclass and the words were randomly placed in which each subject indicates their rank of pain degree. One hundred and fifty nursing students and one hundred clinical nurses were requested to indicate the rank of each word. One hundred and sixteen students and eighty three nurses completed the ratings for analysis. The data were collected from June 1983 to July 1983. The data using ordinal scale were analyzed by Friedman ANOVA to test significant difference between rank means. All of pain words indicated significant rank mean difference in all of 19 subclasses. Some of the words were either cancelled or replaced by other words, or rearranged for their ranks. Subclasses of which words were cancelled were 1) Simple stimulating pain, 2) Punctuate pressure, 3) peripheral nerve pain, 4) radiation pain, 5) punishment-related pain, and 6) suffering-related pain. Subclasses of which words were replaced or rearranged were 1) incisive pressure, 2) constrictive pressure, 3) dull pain, 4) tract pain, 5) digestion-related pain and 6) fear-related pain. Four subclasses such as traction pressure, thermal, cavity pressure, and fatigue- elated pain indicated significant differences among rank means in each subclasses and showed no visible overlaps of the ranks among means. Further research is needed using high level measurement of pain degree of each word and more sophisticated analysis of the pain degrees. Three pain words which would be related to chemical stimulation were newly explored and included as a new subclass. Through this study, the total number of subclasses increases from 19 to 20 and the total number of Korean words in the scale decreases from 83 to 80.

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.44-53
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• 2008

The purpose of this preliminary study was to develop a measurement for assessing risk factors for falling in community-dwelling elderly persons. Rasch analysis and principal component analysis were performed to examine whether items on the Activities-Specific Balance Confidence (ABC), assessing self-efficacy, and items on the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), assessing balance function, contribute jointly to a unidimensional construct in the elderly. A total of 35 elderly persons (4 men, 31 women) participated. In this study, each item of ABC (16 items) and BBS (14 items) was scored on a 5-point ordinal rating scale from 0 to 4. The initial Rasch and principal component analysis indicated that 3 of the ABC items and 2 of the BBS items were misfit for this study. These 5 items were excluded from further study. After combining ABC and BBS, Rasch and principal component analyses were examined and finally 23 items selected; 12 items from ABC, 11 items from BBS. The 23 combined ABC-BBC items were arranged in order of difficulty. The hardest item was 'walk outside on icy sidewalks' and the easiest item was 'pivot transfer'. Although structural calibration of each 5 rating scale categories was not ordered, the other three essential criteria of Linacre's optimal rating scale were satisfied. Overall, the ABC-BBS showed sound item psychometric properties. Each of the 5 rating scale categories appeared to distinctly identify subjects at different ability levels. The findings of this study support that the new ABC-BBS scale measure balance function and self-efficacy. It will be a clinically useful assessment of risk factors for falling in the elderly. However, the number of subjects was too small to generalize our results. Further study is needed to develop a new assessment considering more risk factors of falling in elderly.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.67-74
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• 2011

Collaborative recommendation is one of the most widely used methods of automated product recommendation in e-Commerce. For analyzing the customer's preference, traditional explicit ratings are less desirable than implicit ratings because it may impose an additional burden to the customers of e-commerce companies which deals with a number of products. Cardinal scales generally used for representing the preference intensity also ineffective owing to its increasing estimation errors. In this paper, we propose a new way of constructing the ordinal scale-based customer profile for collaborative recommendation. A Web usage mining technique and lexicographic consensus are employed. An experiment shows that the proposed method performs better than existing CF methodologies.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.207-213
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• 2018

This review article presents an assessment of trends in statistical methods and an evaluation of their appropriateness in articles published in the Archives of Plastic Surgery (APS) from 2012 to 2017. We reviewed 388 original articles published in APS between 2012 and 2017. We categorized the articles that used statistical methods according to the type of statistical method, the number of statistical methods, and the type of statistical software used. We checked whether there were errors in the description of statistical methods and results. A total of 230 articles (59.3%) published in APS between 2012 and 2017 used one or more statistical method. Within these articles, there were 261 applications of statistical methods with continuous or ordinal outcomes, and 139 applications of statistical methods with categorical outcome. The Pearson chi-square test (17.4%) and the Mann-Whitney U test (14.4%) were the most frequently used methods. Errors in describing statistical methods and results were found in 133 of the 230 articles (57.8%). Inadequate description of P-values was the most common error (39.1%). Among the 230 articles that used statistical methods, 71.7% provided details about the statistical software programs used for the analyses. SPSS was predominantly used in the articles that presented statistical analyses. We found that the use of statistical methods in APS has increased over the last 6 years. It seems that researchers have been paying more attention to the proper use of statistics in recent years. It is expected that these positive trends will continue in APS.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.131-142
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• 2001

Previous OD matrix estimation methods from link traffic counts have focused on the formulation of mathematical model and its solution algorithm. Thereby those methods have assumed that true or real OD is similar to the target OD and paid little attention to the properties of the change of OD structure. Although it is general situation that each OD pair increases or decreases due to significant land use and to large time variation between target OD with real OD, those methods have set unrealistic assumptions that target OD increases or decreases uniformly and that the OD structure does not change. Therefore those methods have showed poor performance of OD estimation in general situation. To cope with the problem. this paper suggests a new concept of OD matrix structure and shows the shortcomings of previous method′s dependancy on target OD matrix. We divide "OD trips" into "OD scale" and "OD structure". Where OD scale is a quantitative magnitude of OD trips and "OD structure" is ordinal OD scale. This paper use the same solution algorithm developed by Baek et al. (2000) for analysing the OD structure. Results of numerical examples show that the performance of the method is better than that of previous methods, while the previous methods have better performance in estimation only when OD trips increase or decrease. In addition to, if OD structure does not change, the results show that the error of estimation is low relatively regardless of the large difference of trips between target OD and real OD. This paper also shows that the model performance on OD structure and on OD trips is low as the number of origins that OD structure is changed increase. From the results we suggest that the change of OD structure can be more important information than the difference between target OD and real OD in OD estimation steps.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.63-80
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• 1997

This study attempts to establish the criteria of site selection for establishing solid waste disposal facility, to determine optimal solid waste disposal sites with the criteria, and to examine the suitability of the selected sites. The Multi-Criteria Evaluation(MCE) module in Idrisi is used to determine optimal sites for solid waste disposal. The MCE combines the information from several criteria in interval and/or ratio scale to form a single index of evaluation without leveling down the data scale into ordinal scale. The summary of this study is as follows: First, the considerable criteria are selected through reviewing the literature and the availability of data: namely, percent of slope, fault lines, bedrock characteristics, major residential areas, reservoirs of water supply, rivers, inundated area, roads, and tourist resorts. Second, the criteria maps of nine factors have been developed. Each factor map is standardized and multiplies by its weight, and then the results are summed. After all of the factors have been incorporated, the resulting suitability map is multiplied by each of the constraint in turn to "zero out" unsuitable area. The unsuitable areas are discovered in urban district and its adjacencies, and mountain region as well as river, roads, resort area and their adjacency districts. Third, the potential sites for establishing waste disposal facilities are twenty five districts in Youngyang-gun. Five districts are located in Subi-myun Sinam-ri, nine districts in Chunggi-myun Haehwa-ri and Moojin-ri, and eleven districts in Sukbo-myun Posan-ri. The first highest score of suitability for waste disposal sites is shown at number eleven district in Chunggi-myun Moojin-ri and the second highest one is discovered at number twenty one district in Sukbo-myun Posan-ri that is followed by number nine district in Chunggi-myun Haehwa-ri, number seventeen and twenty three in Sukbo-myun Posan-ri, and number two in Subi-myun Sinam-ri. The first lowest score is found in number six district in Chunggi-myun Haehwa-ri, and the second lowest one is number five district in Subi-myun Sinam-ri. Finally, the Geographic Information System (GIS) helps to select optimal sites with more objectively and to minimize conflict in the determination of waste disposal sites. It is important to present several potential sites with objective criteria for establishing waste disposal facilities and to discover characteristics of each potential site as a result of that final sites of waste disposal are determined through considering thought of residents. This study has a limitation of criteria as a result of the restriction of availability of data such as underground water, soil texture and mineralogy, and thought of residents. To improve selection of optimal sites for a waste disposal facility, more wide rage of spatial and non-spatial data base should be constructed.