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Economic evaluations often utilise individual-patient data (IPD) to calculate probabilities of events based on observed proportions. However, this approach is limited when interest is in the likelihood of extreme biomarker values that vary by observable characteristics such as blood glucose in gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Here, instead of directly calculating probabilities using the IPD, we utilised flexible parametric models that estimate the full conditional distribution, capturing the non-normal characteristics of biomarkers and enabling the derivation of tail probabilities for specific populations. In the case study, we used data from the Born in Bradford study (N = 10,353) to model two non-normally distributed GDM biomarkers (2-hours post-load and fasting glucose). First, we applied fully parametric maximum likelihood to estimate alternative flexible models and information criteria for model selection. We then integrated the chosen distributions in a probabilistic decision model that estimates the cost-effective diagnostic thresholds and the expected costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) of the alternative strategies (‘Testing and Treating’, ‘Treat all’, ‘Do Nothing’). The model adopts the ‘payer’ perspective and expresses results in net monetary benefits (NMB). The log-logistic and Singh-Maddala distributions offered the optimal fit for the 2-hours post-load and fasting glucose biomarkers, respectively. At £13,000 per QALY, maximum NMB with ‘Test and Treat’ (−£330) was achieved for a diagnostic threshold of fasting glucose >6.6 mmol/L, 2-hours post-load glucose >9 mmol/L, identifying 2.9% of women as GDM positive. The case study demonstrated that fully parametric approaches can be implemented in healthcare modelling when interest lies in extreme biomarker values.

This chapter reviews the sociology of sport as a subdiscipline in the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The review is based on analyses of central documents, scholarly contributions, as well as interviews with some key scholars in the field. The review describes both similarities and differences across the three countries. The sociology of sport as a subdiscipline and research field is a relatively new area. Among the decisive factors that prompted the field to grow were the expansion of higher education and the institutionalization of sport studies as an academic field during the 1970s. Each country today has approximately 15–20 scholars who identify themselves as sport sociologists. None of the Scandinavian countries have special research programs for research funding in the social sciences of sport, and the main funding derives mostly from the research resources linked to the scholars’ professorships/scholarships and external funding. The research trajectories of the field are mostly concentrated around areas like youth sport, participation studies, sport politics, and team sports. Besides scholars involved in gender studies and body culture, most of the key contributors also belong to these areas. Scholars make use of multifaceted theoretical and methodological approaches. One of the main future challenges of the research field is to maintain and strengthen its critical traditions against the strong influence from neoliberal sport management discourses.

Debates over ritual slaughter, sacred food, fasts, and forbidden foods, perpetuated by religion and tradition, are nothing new. Dietary obligations and prohibitions, in all their diversity, have always been the object of comment, critique, or even concern from one human group towards another. The consumption of meat (or its prohibition) has always been about more than its nutritional function. Reducing religious dietary obligations to hygienic or gustatory practices would be an unrealistic attempt to erase the diversity of the procedures which people undertake to give meaning to life, death, and the world, and to locate themselves in relation to “others”. These rites, ­legitimated by myths, inevitably provoke phenomena of influence, reciprocated within and outside groups. The selection of food – of meat in particular – plays a primordial role as a social marker, the rules of which contribute to the organisation of groups by tracing ­differences between individuals, between men and women, and between communities. Formerly attached to a totemic group and its territory, then to a religion and its society, dietary practices are globalising and encountering one-another. Questions are now raised about the management, in shared spaces, of a diversity of dietary prohibitions and obligations. These questions are at the core of this chapter, notably, what place should be reserved for dietary particularities in collective catering in human organisations? And what limits should be given to the expectations of each regarding dietary purity or fasting?

Navigating the social fields of identity on the playground, in the classroom and in the community is a complex and intricate set of networks, each of which may simultaneously support or restrict certain individuals. For students in an American English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) reception class, and an ESOL pull-out program, these navigations are perhaps the most important and far reaching negotiations they enter into. Content-based study, knowledge of English, and cultural competency (all of these very important skills and understandings) pale in comparison to the social identity survival games played out by students and staff in the school yard. Over the course of 15 months in an American elementary school, the conflicts between non-discriminatory policy and discriminatory practice were examined.

Hunger strikes have a long history in efforts to achieve social change but scholars have made few comparative, empirical, or theoretical contributions to understanding their dynamics and connections in the social movement and nonviolent action literature. We examine hunger strikes from 1906 to 2004 with a comparative perspective, elaborating on its use as a tactic of nonviolent change. Using data assembled from the New York Times, Keesing's Worldwide Online, and The Economist we analyze how, when, where, and why hunger strikes occur, and by whom they have been utilized to seek change. In general, findings reveal that hunger strikes over the last century have been widespread phenomena that are typically small, brief, and relatively successful tactics against the state. Several themes emerge regarding hunger strikes including their appeal to the powerless and emergence when few political opportunities exist, their significance for third-party mobilization, and the role of emotions in the protest dynamics. Taken together, the power struggle involving the hunger strike is an important example and extension of “political jiu-jitsu” as presented by Sharp (1973).

Misunderstanding and harmful stereotyping have become commonplace amongst people in the United States and the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region since 2001, if not earlier. If universities are the locus of transformative education, work remains towards remedying these issues.One non-profit organisation, “Natafaham (pseudonym, Arabic for « we understand each other”), works to undo this negativity student by student. It brings participants from the MENA and Europe/North America into dialogue via Zoom each week. The inter-cultural dialogue availed to participants is empowering to actors, including the dialogue facilitator. This narrative is an autoethnographic exploration of my experience as an intercultural dialogue facilitator. Yet reviewing contemporaneous notes and reflections revealed structural aspects of this programme that empower voices from the MENA region, while facilitating learning amongst participants on both sides of the Atlantic. Such aspects include the format and the location of the programme, its focus on individuals rather than institutions or groups, its mixed top-down and bottom-up approach, and the opportunities it avails for ascension to positions of authority. This narrative analyses these aspects through several lenses and academic traditions, including those of global citizenship, critical internationalisation, (reciprocal) global service learning, and socio-cultural frameworks of second language acquisition. The chapter urges that these aspects are recognised as key catalysts of (more) equal relationships between youth in the MENA region and the United States, which merit widespread replication. It concludes by envisioning a still more equal relationship predicated upon more equitable language usage.

This chapter explores institution as a religious phenomenon. Institutional logics are organized around relatively stable congeries of objects, subjects, and practices. Institutional substances, the most general object of an institutional field, are immanent in the practices that organize an institutional field, values never exhausted by those practices, and practices premised on a practical belief in that substance. Like religion, an institution's practices are ontologically rational, that is, tied to a substance indexed by the conjunction of a practice and a name. Institutional substances are not loosely coupled, ceremonial, legitimating exteriors, but unquestioned, constitutive interiors, the sacred core of each field, unobservable, but socially real.