Personal Register Research Articles

Survey response rates in European comparative surveys: a 20-year decline irrespective of sampling frames or survey modes

AbstractThis paper assesses trends in three survey outcome rates within four prominent crossnationalcomparative surveys conducted in European countries in the 21st century: theEuropean Quality of Life Survey, the European Social Survey, the European ValuesStudy, and the International Social Survey Programme. These projects are recognisedfor their high-quality sampling and fieldwork procedures, extensive track records, andcommitment to rigorous methodological standards. The analysis is based on 753national surveys conducted on probability samples of the general population in 36European countries from 1999 to 2018. We investigated whether two essential surveycharacteristics, namely sampling frames and data collection modes, moderated thedecrease of survey outcome rates over time. To analyse these relationships, thesurvey year was included as the explanatory variable, and we applied multi-level linearregressions with surveys nested within countries. Additionally, the project name wasincorporated as a fixed factor, and the sampling frame and mode of data collectionwere control variables for the effect of time. Our study provides valuable insights intothe challenges of conducting high-quality Pan-European cross-national comparativesurveys over nearly two decades. We observed a consistent decline in survey outcomerates, irrespective of country or project. Neither the sampling frame nor the datacollection mode moderated this decline. Hence, even though personal register samplesand Face-to-Face interviews are often regarded as enhancements to overall surveyquality, their application does not effectively counter the factors causing a decline insurvey outcome rates.

Perceived healthiness of foods, food avoidance and diet-related anxiety in individuals with self-reported irritable bowel syndrome: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundIrritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common gastrointestinal disorder in which the intake of food is known to exacerbate symptoms. Experiencing food related symptoms can lead to avoidance of food, and cause anxiety related to food intake. We aimed to explore perceptions of the healthiness of food, food avoidance, and food-related worry and anxiety among individuals with and without IBS.MethodsThis study was based on a survey conducted in January-February 2017. In total, 2000 participants aged 20–65 were invited by postal letter randomly obtained through the Swedish state personal address register. The questionnaire included aspects of socioeconomic position, different disorders including IBS and food intolerances, food avoidance, and food-related worry or anxiety.ResultsIn total, 538 participants were included in this study, of whom 8.4% (n = 45) reported having IBS. There were few differences regarding the perceived healthiness of foods between individuals with and without IBS. Participants with IBS avoided gluten (OR 3.45, p = 0.002), lactose (OR 5.0, p < 0.001) and alcohol (OR 2.0, p = 0.042) more frequently than individuals without IBS, and avoidance was driven by abdominal pain. Participants with IBS also reported feeling more worried and having anxiety about diet than those without IBS (p = 0.032 and p = 0.002, respectively).ConclusionThis study indicates that individuals with IBS perceive most foods as equally healthy as individuals without IBS. Having IBS increases the odds of avoiding gluten, lactose, and alcohol. Worry and anxiety related to diet were more common among individuals with IBS, and these aspects need to be considered both in clinical practice and in future research.

Grandmaternal Subjectivity: A Conversation with Jessica Benjamin

In this conversational interview with Jessica Benjamin, who herself is a grandmother of feminist and relational psychoanalysis, we explore the scopic field of grandmaternal subjectivity. Starting with Benjamin’s recognition theory and thirdness, we consider how interrelated these positions are with maternal subjectivity, and then expand out to other layers of recognition by and of grandmothers, emphasizing where the grandmaternal can foster a sense of innate goodness in the mother through recognition. Benjamin is clear to not exclude fathers or grandfathers in her recognition of multiple subjectivities. She also considers the ways in which generational distance and age play a role in emotional regulation around young children, and broader social issues pertaining to recognition. We conclude with a consideration of lineage and relating through differentiation on both a personal and professional register.

Kveikjan að nýjum nöfnum

This article discusses new names that have been added to the personal names register since its first publication in 1991. Examples are given of new names inspired by nature, literature, movies and mythology.

Mannanafnaskrá - tilurð og þróun

The article sheds light on the origin and development of the Icelandic register of personal names. There were various matters of opinion during the creation of this register, e.g. regarding the interpretation of the provision in the name law from 1991 that given names should be Icelandic. Procedural rules have been established to ensure that the law‘s implementation would be clear. In 1996, a new naming law was passed, and it was no longer required that a given personal name should be Icelandic. That change had a great impact on Icelandic register of personal names, and based on it, many names of foreign origin have been added to the register. A number of nicknames that were not allowed as personal names according to the old law, as well as many old names that were not included in the register in 1991 because how uncommon they were have also been added. With the entry into force of the law on gender autonomy in 2019, the provision that a girl should be given a female name and a boy should be given a male name was abolished, and as a result various gender-neutral names have been added to the personal names register.

The Letters of Sushila Gandhi: From Press Worker to Managing Trustee of Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, 1927 to 1977

An epistolarium of over 80 letters written by a first-generation Gujarati migrant woman to South Africa provides the basis for the construction of her biography. The personal register of the letters written to family and friends allows her to shape this biography and for her voice to be heard though filtered through the process of translation and selection. The letters are read for expressions of labour performativity, the meaning of work and its challenges, her political astuteness and for the intersections with her other roles such as that of wife and mother for there was a seamlessness across these. Her growth as a letter writer over five decades is mirrored by her maturation in all spheres of her life. Through her transnational life, there is the opportunity to consider what role movement to Africa had in this development. The space of Phoenix Settlement, a farm started by Mohandas Gandhi, plays a central role in her transformation, growth and relations with men.

The West Jutland Tele-Electrocardiogram Registry (WEJU-tECG): content, data quality, and research potential.

To present the content, data quality, and research potential of the West Jutland Tele-Electrocardiogram Registry (WEJU-tECG). Danish patients reporting symptoms indicating heart disease in the prehospital setting are subjected to a 12-lead tele-electrocardiogram (ECG) in the ambulance, which is digitally sent to a local tele-centre. WEJU-tECG is a newly established Danish registry containing information from the individual tele-ECGs received at the Regional Hospital West Jutland tele-centre. WEJU-tECG holds extracted information from all tele-ECGs with a valid Civil Personal Register number between 2011 and 2020. WEJU-tECG contains information on patient characteristics, tele-ECG data (including a computerised tele-ECG interpretation), vital signs, and time information. A unique Civil Personal Register number allows individual-level linkage between WEJU-tECG and other Danish registries and enables complete follow-up. WEJU-tECG contains 43,696 tele-ECGs from 29,489 different patient contacts among 20,280 different patients. WEJU-tECG contains 5566 patients with ST-segment deviations. The median age is 67 years and 45% are women. Completeness is highest for time information (100% for all variables), tele-ECG data (99% for heart rate, the specific intervals and axes, and QRS duration, and 86% for J-point deviation), and patient characteristics (100% for all variables). Completeness is lowest for vital signs (13% for systolic, diastolic, and mean arterial blood pressure, and 12% for blood oxygen saturation). The computerised tele-ECG interpretation had a negative predictive value of 80% for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and 94% for non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and a positive predictive value of 45% for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and 32% for non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction. WEJU-tECG is a novel population-based tele-ECG registry with high research potential.

The Personal and Demonstrative Pronoun “nie” in Hebei Dialect

Nie 乜, the merging syllable of renjia 人家, is a pronoun in northwestern dialect and an obviative or middle demonstrative pronoun in some dialects of Shandong province. In Wuji County of Hebei province, which is located between northwestern China and Shandong province, nie is both personal and neutral demonstrative pronoun. This regional distribution reflects not only the conceptual cognitive mapping of personal register and demonstrative register of Chinese dialects, but also the evolution of nie from personal pronoun to demonstrative pronoun. The evolution results from the generalization of nie from referent to object. And the mapping of the two conceptual registers makes the demonstrative pronoun system develop into “proximate, middle and obviative” in some dialects. Thus nie evolved into an obviative or middle demonstrative pronoun.

AKEN Infrastructure: an example Personal and DNA-profile Register

AKEN Infrastructure: an example Personal and DNA-profile Register

Linguistic rhetoric of Soviet discourse: official vs personal register (J. Stalin – A. Dovzhenko)

Within the conception of the Sochi Linguistic &amp; Rhetorical School the paper discusses the diglossia of the Soviet discourse employed in the former USSR, distinguishes official and personal registers as well as shows their difference drawing on Joseph Stalin’s speech of 31 January 1944 to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks concerning Alexander Dovzhenko’s screenplay “Ukraine in Flames” and in the writer’s diaries. The comparison reveals a few specific linguistic rhetorical features of cognitive communicative type ontologically characteristic of the Soviet linguistic personality’s communicative cognitive activity in a totalitarian state. The cognitive features of Stalin’s individual discourse representing the official register and his system of argumentation rest on the significative component of linguistic units, arguments from literature to illustrate the postulates and dogmas of Marxist-Leninist doctrine forming the foundation of the Soviet discourse. It is also found that the official register represented by Stalin’s speech is characterized by the following features: 1) repetition; 2) sarcastic remarks; 3) dramatic mutually exclusive contrast of mental spaces (“our own, true in the last resort” and destructed, represented by the opponent’s discourse); 4) rigidly adversarial characteristic of the alternative linguistic rhetorical worldview; 5) appeal to the Soviet collective linguistic personality’s opinion; 6) ideological translation from one subdiscourse into the other, from personal register into the official one; 7) biased retelling of the discourse regarded as anti-Soviet; 8) appeal to the facts lacking in the discourse under criticism; 9) “ideological editing” taking on the form of peremptory lecturing with consequences threatening the liberty of the person under criticism. The personal register of the Soviet Ukrainian writer Dovzhenko is characterized by a broad interpretation of reality devoid of the “Marxist-Leninist blinds” and a more objective interpretation of the world due to a bigger ratio of denotative references (“evidential arguments” like “I say” and “I heard” etc) and communicative cognitive activity relative to two axiological hierarchies: national and Christian, i.e. the dominance of human values over class morality. It is proved that Dovzhenko’s screenplay was criticized within Stalin’s official register for its deviation from the cognitive schemas and the model of the Soviet discourse, for the focus on Ukraine and its citizens rather than on class struggle.

Trinocular views of register

Abstract Michael Halliday’s argument for the value of ‘trinocular vision’ in linguistic research has particular relevance to the observation, exploration and description of register. Taking each semiotic dimension relevant to the characterisation of register by turn, I begin by discussing Halliday’s proposition. I then proceed, using the metaphor of cartography, to examine register variation via the intersection of three semiotic dimensions: stratification, instantiation and metafunction. I discuss how such examinations enable us to create description maps of register variation. From this basis, I discuss a long-term programme of systematically producing descriptive maps of registers, which I and colleagues have begun. Finally, I suggest that by using such maps we can better understand such important phenomena as aggregates of registers and personal register repertoires.

Searching technology for questionable records when creating the Unified registry of ukrainian individuals identification

One of the most effective solutions for protecting personal data when building a Unified Identity Registry is to share end-to-end identifier and hash codes generated from combinations of personal data using one-sided hash functions. This is due to the fact that the stage of creating a unified personal identification register does not involve the use of open personal data and therefore no personal data is allowed on the server and only unique identifiers and hash codes are allowed. In accordance with the principles of creating the above registry, five required and fifteen optional types of personal data stored in the registry were analyzed and used to generate hash codes, as well as possible combinations of personal data fields (ten different combinations of personal data were used in the work) data) built on the types specified. The technology of end-to-end identification has been developed, which has the ability to track errors in the fields with personal data when entering new data and when searching the registry. For the evaluation of the proposed technology, 100,000 simulated individuals were selected with random errors in the appropriate fields that store personal data. These errors are randomly placed in the fields of the created registry database that store personal information of the required and optional types. The efficiency of the proposed technology has also been verified by registering new persons in the registry. The proposed technology has a high tolerance for errors and can correctly identify and associate an individual, even with errors in multiple fields of personal data. Correct personal data, especially in the fields of the database with mandatory personal data, is crucial to avoid erroneous entries in the created registry. In the context of one-sided hash transformation, a doubtful record with personal data can be identified by applying hash operators based on hash codes calculated according to certain combinations of personal data.

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Placing Writing Tasks in Local and Global Contexts: The Case of Argumentative Writing

Background: Current research in composition and writing studies is concerned with issues of writing program evaluation and how writing tasks and their sequences scaffold students toward learning outcomes. These issues are beginning to be addressed by writing analytics research, which can be useful for identifying recurring types of language in writing assignments and how those can inform task design and student outcomes. To address these issues, this study provides a three-step method of sequencing, comparison, and diagnosis to understand how specific writing tasks fit into a classroom sequence as well as compare to larger genres of writing outside of the immediate writing classroom environment. By doing so, we provide writing program administrators with tools for describing what skills students demonstrate in a sequence of writing tasks and diagnosing how these skills match with writing students will do in later contexts. Literature Review: Student writing that responds to classroom assignments can be understood as genres, insofar as they are constructed responses that exist in similar rhetorical situations and perform similar social actions. Previous work in corpus analysis has looked at these genres, which helps us as writing instructors understand what kind of constructed responses are required of students and to make those expectations explicit. Aull (2017) examined a corpus of first-year undergraduate writing assignments in two courses to create “sociocognitive profiles” of these assignments. We analyze student writing that responds to similar writing tasks, but use a different corpus method that allows us to understand the tasks in both local and global contexts. By doing so, we gain confidence and depth in our understanding of these tasks, analyze how they sequence together, and are able to compare argumentative writing across institutions and contexts. Research Questions: Two questions guided our study: What is the trajectory of skills targeted by the sequence of tasks in the two first-year writing courses, as evidenced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers in successive assignments? Focusing on the final argument assignments, how similar are they to argumentative writing in other contexts, in terms of rhetorical profiles? Methodology: We first conducted a local analysis, in which we used a dictionary-based corpus method to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by writers in the first-year writing courses to understand how they built on each other to form a sequence. Having understood what skills students are demonstrating in a course, we then conducted a global analysis which calculated a “distance” between the first-year argument writing and a corpus of argument writing drawn from other contexts. Recognizing that there was a non-trivial distance, we then identified and evaluated the sources of the distance so that the writing tasks could be assessed or modified. Results: The local analysis revealed eight key rhetorical strategies that student writing exhibits between the two first-year writing courses. With this understanding, we then placed the argument writing in global contexts to find that the assignments in both courses differ somewhat from argument writing in other contexts. Upon analyzing this difference, we found that the first-year writing primarily differs in its usage of academic language, the personal register, assertive language, and reasoning. We suggest that these differences stem primarily from the rhetorical situation and learning objectives associated with first-year writing, as well as the sequencing of the courses. Discussion: The three-step method presented provides a means for writing program administrators to describe and analyze writing that students produce in their writing programs. We intend these steps to be understood as an iterative process, whereby writing programs can use these results to evaluate what rhetorical skills their students are exhibiting and to benchmark those against the program’s goals and/or other similar writing programs. Conclusions: By presenting these analyses together, we ultimately provide a cohesive method by which to analyze a writing program and benchmark students’ use of rhetorical strategies in relation to other argumentative contexts. We believe this method to be useful not only to individual writing programs, but to assessment literature broadly. In future research, we anticipate learning how this process will practically feed back into pedagogy, as well as understanding what placing writing tasks into a global context can tell us about genre theory.

Diabetes among migrants in Denmark: Incidence, mortality, and prevalence based on a longitudinal register study of the entire Danish population

ObjectiveStudies of diabetes in migrant populations have shown a higher prevalence compared to their respective countries of origin and to people natively born in the host country, but there is little population-based data on diabetes incidence and mortality in migrant populations. The aim of the current study was (1) to describe the incidence rates and prevalence of diabetes among first generation migrants in Denmark compared to the Danish background population, and (2) to compare standardised mortality rates (SMRs) for individuals with and without diabetes according to country of origin. Research design and methodsInformation was obtained from linkage of the National Diabetes Register with mortality statistics and information from the Central Personal Register on country of origin. Age- and sex-specific estimates of prevalence, incidence rates, mortality rates and SMRs relative to the part of the population without diabetes were calculated based on follow up of the entire Danish population. ResultsCompared with native born Danes, the incidence of diabetes was about 2.5 times higher among migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and these migrant groups also showed significantly higher prevalence. The standardised mortality rates (SMR) were higher particularly above 50years of age among most migrant groups compared with native born Danes, and with a higher annual increase. ConclusionsThe highest diabetes incidence rates and prevalence estimates were observed among migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and the annual increase in SMRs was higher in these groups compared to native born Danes.

From Sight through to In-Sight: Time, Narrative and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford by Omar Sabbagh (review)

Reviewed by: From Sight through to In-Sight: Time, Narrative and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford by Omar Sabbagh Andrew Glazzard Omar Sabbagh, From Sight through to In-Sight: Time, Narrative and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. xlv + 232 pp. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford collaborated on novels, short stories, and magazine editing for an immensely productive decade, and their mutual influence remained strong even after their friendship cooled in 1909. It is all the more surprising, then, that we do not have many parallel or comparative studies of these two major figures. We should therefore welcome Omar Sabbagh’s monograph, which sets out to examine how a selection of Conrad’s and Ford’s narratives narrate and thematize time, how they represent the self, and how they bring these two concerns together by examining time as subjective experience. These would seem to be valuable questions to examine: while the techniques of impressionism have been productively investigated by critics such as John G. Peters (on Conrad) and Max Saunders (on Ford), this study seems to be approaching new territory — the temporal dimension of early twentieth-century literary impressionism. However, several problems with the approach soon become apparent. A 35-page prologue offers an anticipation of some of the material to come in “a personal register.” One of three epigraphs to this prologue is a quotation from Forster’s Howards End (1910): “Only connect.” Aside from assigning this as a rogue epigraph to Forster’s novel — one of the many typographical slips and minor errors that suggest insufficient attention at the proof-reading and copy-editing stages — this instruction is one that we might wish Sabbagh had followed himself. The prologue’s meditations range from St. Paul to G. K. Chesterton via J. S. Mill, George Eliot, and Rosa Luxemburg; the relevance of this material to the questions under examination is hard to discern. And Shandyesque discursiveness is a persistent feature of the book’s style, causing difficulties of comprehension not just with respect to its arguments but even at sentence level. Parenthetical insertions of only tangential relevance are so frequent that the reader not only struggles to follow, but also quickly begins to wonder how much the author is in control of his material. [End Page 182] This problem of parenthetical complication is part of a more fundamental problem of clarity. Even when it does not wander, Sabbagh’s prose is often obscure to the point of impenetrability. At times this is no doubt because he is seeking to communicate subtle and complex ideas. For example, writing conceptually about time — a focus particularly of his examination of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–1928) — is never likely to be straightforward, but it is possible to be clearer than this: “just as the analeptical presentations of the past present the past, and vividly so, so the qualitatively different moments from the latest point in time, the latest present, make of the latter, continuously, a past, from the perspective of the cusp of the future, or future anteriority that is evinced or suggested by this continuous shifting back and forth” (195). Another problem becomes visible when a page-long quotation from Heart of Darkness (1899), in which Marlow expresses his realization that the dying Kurtz is suffering from a kind of moral insanity, appears in the prologue (again, barely linked to what comes before or after). Sabbagh mentions his intention to “look at the constellation of moments of climax and disintegration in detail” in this passage — and yet he moves on with barely a comment. Later in the study he promises us close readings, and those that we get are, on the whole, perceptive and rewarding, but they are few and far between. Analysis too often remains cursory. What, then, is this study actually saying? Because of these (in my view rather fundamental) flaws, this is not an easy question to answer. What Sabbagh says he will address is “why and how Ford and Conrad chose to shape and form their narratives the way they did.” This seems clearly enough to be signalling a narratological approach, but Sabbagh then adds an extra issue: he will examine “how...

Was the increase in culture-confirmed Campylobacter infections in Denmark during the 1990s a surveillance artefact?

In 1991, 1999 and 2006, randomly selected individuals from the Danish Central Personal Register provided a serum sample. From individuals aged 30 years and above, 500 samples from each year were analysed for Campylobacter IgG, IgA and IgM antibodies using a direct ELISA method. We applied a seroincidence calculator available from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to perform a mathematical back-calculation to estimate the annual Campylobacter seroincidence in the Danish population. The estimated Campylobacter seroincidence did not differ significantly between the 1991, 1999 and 2006 studies although the reported number of culture-confirmed cases of Campylobacter infection increased 2.5 fold from 1993 to 1999 among individuals aged 30 years and above. This suggests that Campylobacter was widely present in the Danish population before the increase in poultry-associated clinical Campylobacter infections observed from 1993 to 2001 among individuals of this age groups.

How Danes evaluate moral claims related to abortion: a questionnaire survey

ObjectiveTo investigate how Danish citizens evaluate four moral claims related to abortion issues, regarding the moral status of the fetus, autonomy, harm and possible negative consequences of allowing abortion and...

Die Ordnung der Sammlung: Papst Nikolaus III. und Berard von Neapel

The arrangement of the collection: Pope Nicolas III and Berard of Naples The manuscript ASV Reg. Vat. 29 A allows to reconstruct the development of the earliest known transmission of the letter collection of Berard of Naples, a papal notary active chiefly in the second half of the 13th century. Already at the time of Pope Nicolas III’s pontificate (1277- 1280), a host of letters compiled chronologically in the notary’s personal register were re-arranged to form a collection organised by topic. However, contrary to assumptions made previously, this was not done under the guidance of Berard of Naples, rather it was the pope himself who ordered his chancery personnel to rearrange the letters. The action seems to be part of Nicolas’ general efforts toward setting up regulations, which, among others, also led to the issue of his rules for the chancery.

Les contrats commerciaux OHADA dans une perspective congolaise. Vers un droit général commun des obligations contractuelles?

Abstract: The economists agree that actually the African economies did take off. A further growth, however, needs investments. Attracting these investments is precisely one of the purposes of the African Union with her 54 Member States and of - in a geographically more limited area - the OHADA, the organization for the harmonization of business law in mainly French-speaking Africa. The originality of the OHADA consists in the adoption of uniform Acts, which apply in all 17 Member States. It is only fair to say that through these uniform statutes the influence of France and that of the French juridical culture are perpetuated in Africa. In this paper, the OHADA legislation is described, more specifically from the perspective of one of the Member States, namely the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Belgian colony. An overview of the uniform Acts relating to the following commercial contracts is given: sale, arbitration agreement, carriage of goods by land, lease for professional purposes, lease of the management of a business, agency and brokerage, pledge, surety, and other guarantees. The uniform Acts modernize the outdated law of the Member States. Some of the introduced innovations are the Trade and Personal Property Credit Register and the Trustee for the guarantees. The French law as it stands in our days (including e.g. the trust-like device of the "fiducie") serves as a model, but so does the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and the UNIDROIT Principles. The latter is not faithfully followed, though. For instance, the remedy of the anticipatory breach (provided for in the CISG) did disappear out of the revised uniform Act relating to the general commercial law. The unilateral avoidance for breach of contract (provided for in the UNIDROIT Principles), on the other hand, is only by exception allowed and the exceptional circumstances are not defined. The creditor must normally thus apply to the court for an order resolving the contract. The non-commercial special contracts continue to be regulated by the national law of each Member State. This can produce odd effects, so is the ownership of the goods sold transferred to the buyer at the very moment of the agreement of the contracting parties according to the Congolese Civil Code, while the ownership of the goods sold in Congo by commercial contract takes place at the moment of the delivery since the joining of the OHADA. In the present state of affairs, the general law of contracts (as opposed to the OHADA special rules for the different nominate contracts) remains also part of the national law of the Member States. Obviously, this has to change by all means, if one wants the harmonization of the commercial contracts. This article deals therefore also with a text that should become the cornerstone of the OHADA legislation, i.e., the preliminary draft on general contract law. It follows as close as possible the UNIDROIT Principles and there are good reasons for this, as explained by the draughts man professor M. Fontaine. Unfortunately, this draft is momentarily blocked off backstage by some lawyers steeped in the myth of the French legal culture. It may indeed seem hard to imagine, for instance, that the causa disappears! But then also does the consideration in the UNIDROIT Principles.