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Speaking Community (speaking + community)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences50%

Selected Abstracts

Translation and validation of a Chinese language version of the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PAEDIATRIC DENTISTRY, Issue 6 2009
GILLIAN H. M. LEE
Objective., This study aimed to adapt the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) for pre-school children in a Chinese speaking community and to investigate its psychometric properties (validity and reliability). Methods., A Chinese language version of the ECOHIS was derived through a forward,backward translation and tested for face and content validity among a focus group. A convenient sample of pre-school children (n = 111) was recruited (including a sub-sample with early childhood caries and caries-free children). Parents of the children self-completed the derived Chinese-ECOHIS measure. Validity of the measure was assessed by investigating the relationship between dental caries status and Chinese-ECOHIS scores (construct and criterion validity). A sub-sample of the parents repeated the ratings of the measure to enable reliability assessments. Both internal and test,retest reliability were determined. Results., A Chinese version of ECOHIS was derived with minor modification to the original version. Chinese-ECOHIS scores were associated with children's caries experience (dmft) (r = 0.66, P < 0.05) supporting convergent validity. In addition, variations in ECOHIS scores were apparent with respect to caries and caries-free groups (P < 0.001), supporting the ability to distinguish between patient groups. Cronbach's alpha values (internal reliability) for total ECOHIS score were 0.91 and intraclass correlation coefficient value (test,retest reliability) was 0.64. Conclusions., A Chinese version of the ECOHIS was developed and demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability. These findings can enable assessments of pre-school child oral health-related quality of life in Chinese speaking communities. [source]

Precise entities but irredeemably vague concepts?

DIALECTICA, Issue 3 2002
Enrique Romerales
Various arguments have recently been put forward to support the existence of vague or fuzzy objects. Nevertheless, the only possibly compelling argument would support, not the existence of vague objects, but indeterminately existing objects. I argue for the non-existence of any vague entities,either particulars or properties - in the mind-independent world. Even so, many philosophers have claimed that to reduce vagueness to semantics is of no avail, since linguistic vagueness betrays semantic incoherence and this is no less a problem than is ontological incoherence. After spelling out why there are fewer essentially vague concepts than usually thought. I claim that only the linguistic competence of the whole speaking community for each word can draw the sharp boundaries for its concept, even if these are unknowable in practice and still leave a precise range of indetermination. This could explain both the existence of boundaries and our non-removable ignorance of them, fulfilling the intuitions of the epistemic theory of vagueness with the supervaluationist's indeterminacy. [source]

Translation and validation of a Chinese language version of the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PAEDIATRIC DENTISTRY, Issue 6 2009
GILLIAN H. M. LEE
Objective., This study aimed to adapt the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) for pre-school children in a Chinese speaking community and to investigate its psychometric properties (validity and reliability). Methods., A Chinese language version of the ECOHIS was derived through a forward,backward translation and tested for face and content validity among a focus group. A convenient sample of pre-school children (n = 111) was recruited (including a sub-sample with early childhood caries and caries-free children). Parents of the children self-completed the derived Chinese-ECOHIS measure. Validity of the measure was assessed by investigating the relationship between dental caries status and Chinese-ECOHIS scores (construct and criterion validity). A sub-sample of the parents repeated the ratings of the measure to enable reliability assessments. Both internal and test,retest reliability were determined. Results., A Chinese version of ECOHIS was derived with minor modification to the original version. Chinese-ECOHIS scores were associated with children's caries experience (dmft) (r = 0.66, P < 0.05) supporting convergent validity. In addition, variations in ECOHIS scores were apparent with respect to caries and caries-free groups (P < 0.001), supporting the ability to distinguish between patient groups. Cronbach's alpha values (internal reliability) for total ECOHIS score were 0.91 and intraclass correlation coefficient value (test,retest reliability) was 0.64. Conclusions., A Chinese version of the ECOHIS was developed and demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability. These findings can enable assessments of pre-school child oral health-related quality of life in Chinese speaking communities. [source]

Salamanca and the city: culture credits, nature credits, and the modern moral economy of indigenous Bolivia

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2006
Kathleen B. Lowrey
This article draws on fieldwork carried out in a Guaraní-speaking community in the Bolivian Chaco , Isoso , between 1997 and 2000. At the time, some Isoseño people were employed in urban-headquartered projects that revolved around Isoso's environment, culture, or identity and that were funded multilaterally by grants, loans, or other foreign aid. The article describes a set of fantastic discourses circulating in rural Isoso that seem to compare a magical place called Salamanca to the city where some Isoseño people now work. The article argues that these Salamanca discourses are an Isoseño-specific way of talking about a general set of unprecedented processes. It takes up the fact that undertakings of the kind in which the Isoseño are involved create new calibrations among radically different systems for moral/qualitative and material/ quantitative evaluation which can most ,economically' be expressed in terms of credit and debt. Finally, it considers why it is that for all their strange magic, Isoseño ,Salamanca and the city' discourses put an extremely recognizable suite of moral considerations at their centre. [source]