Factor analysis and Psychometrika: Major developments

Papers on factor analysis appearing inPsychometrika reflect the initial efforts of the Thurstonians to reformulate psychology as a quantitative science. The Thurstonians' emphasis on the development of factor analysis as an exploratory methodology was not new with them but was taken from British statisticians and psychologists who preceded them, whose literature the Thurstonians otherwise tended to ignore. The Thurstonians' rejection of general factors and focus on rotation to simple structure reflected an attempt to avoid statistical artifact and to identify factors with psychological substance. Much of the literature on factor analysis inPsychometrika concerned solving technical problems in the exploratory factor analysis method. Factor analysis took a major shift in direction in the 1970's with the development of confirmatory methodologies, many of which now receive greater attention than the method of exploratory factor analysis, most of the problems of which are now resolved.     

Scaling and Psychometrika: Spatial and alternative representations of similarity data

Progress over the past twenty-five years in the development and improvement of models for representation of similarity data is reviewed. The discussion includes comments on class, dimensional, ideal type, and dichotomous attribute representations of underlying similarity structures. Most of the theoretical research in the area appeared, and continues to appear, inPsychometrika.     

Models,computers and policies: Fifty years of Psychometrika

Mathematical models have been represented inPsychometrika first in biophysics, then in stochastic models of behavior, and later in computer simulations of behavior. Other specialized journals now attract many articles in these areas, butPsychometrika's policy of broad interest in all aspects of quantitative psychology remains sound. This paper reviewsPsychometrika's coverage of mathematical models and computation, and discusses some matters of editorial policy.     

Exploratory factor analysis: Current use,methodological developments and recommendations for good practice

Current Psychology - Psychological research often relies on Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). As the outcome of the analysis highly depends on the chosen settings, there is a strong need for...     

Language, thought and color: recent developments

The classic issue of color naming and color cognition has been re-examined in a recent series of articles. Here, we review these developments, and suggest that they move the field beyond a familiar rhetoric of 'nature versus nurture', or 'universals versus relativity', to new concepts and new questions.     

The Bayesian New Statistics: Hypothesis testing,estimation, meta-analysis,and power analysis from a Bayesian perspective

In the practice of data analysis, there is a conceptual distinction between hypothesis testing, on the one hand, and estimation with quantified uncertainty on the other. Among frequentists in psychology, a shift of emphasis from hypothesis testing to estimation has been dubbed “the New Statistics” (Cumming 2014). A second conceptual distinction is between frequentist methods and Bayesian methods. Our main goal in this article is to explain how Bayesian methods achieve the goals of the New Statistics better than frequentist methods. The article reviews frequentist and Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing and to estimation with confidence or credible intervals. The article also describes Bayesian approaches to meta-analysis, randomized controlled trials, and power analysis.     

Project IMPRESS,several perspectives: Interactive computing and data analysis

Project IMPRESS is an interactive social science data analysis system used extensively at Dartmouth College and throughout the DTSS network. The programming techniques used to make it an unobtrusive time-sharing job and the user interface design considerations used to make it a system easy for both students and experienced researchers to run are described and their pedagogical and research values discussed.     

Reliability analysis of observational data: Problems,solutions, and software implementation

In the reliability analysis literature, little attention has been given to the various possible ways of creating a basis for the comparison required to compute observer agreement. One needs this comparison to turn a sequential list of behavioral records into a confusion matrix. It is shown that the way to do this depends on the research question one needs to answer. Four methods for creating a basis for comparison for the computation of observer agreement in observational data are presented. Guidelines are given for computing observer agreement in a way that fits one’s goals. Finally, we discuss how these methods have been implemented in The Observer software. The Observer 4.1 supports all the methods that have been discussed. Most of these methods are not present in any other software package.     

题目位置效应的概念及检测

题目位置效应(Item Position Effect, IPE)是指在剔除随机误差的影响之后, 同一道题目在不同测验间因题目位置的变化而导致题目参数的变化。IPE的存在会严重威胁依赖于项目反应理论参数不变性特征的相关应用, 比如测验等值和计算机化自适应测验。目前关于这一领域的研究主要集中于对IPE的检测, 而对所检测到的效应进行进一步的解释, 则是今后的研究重点。另外, 在不同的研究情境下深入探讨IPE, 对于基础研究领域和实践领域都具有重要意义。     

An APL system for interactive data analysis: Histograms,correlation, and regression

This report describes an APL system for file-oriented univariate analysis, correlation, and regression analysis. The correlation and regression processes permit analyses of an unlimited number of cases, if the cases are arranged in tables small enough to be processed one at a time in a workspace. Support functions are also given for a menu-based processing system designed to support a broad range of analyses. The functions offer features such as subset selection, data transformation, and exclusion of invalid items.     

Hierarchical classes: Model and data analysis

A discrete, categorical model and a corresponding data-analysis method are presented for two-way two-mode (objects × attributes) data arrays with 0, 1 entries. The model contains the following two basic components: a set-theoretical formulation of the relations among objects and attributes; a Boolean decomposition of the matrix. The set-theoretical formulation defines a subset of the possible decompositions as consistent with it. A general method for graphically representing the set-theoretical decomposition is described. The data-analysis algorithm, dubbed HICLAS, aims at recovering the underlying structure in a data matrix by minimizing the discrepancies between the data and the recovered structure. HICLAS is evaluated with a simulation study and two empirical applications.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Belgian NSF (NFWO) to Paul De Boeck and in part by NSF Grant BNS-83-01027 to Seymour Rosenberg. We thank Iven Van Mechelen for clarifying several aspects of the Boolean algebraic formulation of the model and Phipps Arabie for his comments on an earlier draft.     

Participants and researchers searching for meaning: Conceptual developments for interpretative phenomenological analysis

ABSTRACT

In this article I offer a theoretical account of interpretative phenomenological analysis’s (IPA’s) position in relation to meaning-making by participant and researcher. In doing this, I draw on a range of theoretical writing on meaning. I then apply these ideas to a series of empirical studies on pain which I have been involved in. The intention, therefore, is for the article to contribute a theoretically informed and empirically grounded extension to the literature on IPA.     

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the Netherlands: concepts,developments, and backdrops

In recent years, the Netherlands has been frequently confronted with public incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. After defining the complex concepts of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, presenting the theoretical approach to these phenomena, and sketching the societal context in which they are embedded, this article describes the development of the numbers of reported expressions of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the Netherlands since the turn of the century. It notes that the general level of annual numbers of recorded incidents of the phenomena has increased since 2000 and, at the same time, there are significant fluctuations in the numbers of notified incidents per year. These fluctuations correlate to outbursts of violence in the Middle East and to acts of violence committed in the name of Islam in the West, while the general higher level of incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia relates to numerous and various threats experienced in the context of the Dutch multi-ethnic society, changes in national identity, and trends in globalisation.     

The experimental analysis of human sexual arousal: Some recent developments

Experimental analyses of human sexual arousal have been decidedly sparse. Recent developments in the analysis of derived relational responding, however, have opened the way for a modern behavior-analytic treatment of complex or "novel" human behavior, including specific instances of human sexual arousal. The current article examines some of these developments and their relevance to the analysis of emotional behavior, with a focus on sexual arousal. Recent research that has examined the acquisition of sexual stimulus functions within a relational frame paradigm is then outlined. Finally, a series of relational frame interpretations of a variety of human sexual arousal phenomena is offered.     

Air pollution, weather, and violent crimes: concomitant time-series analysis of archival data

Archival data covering a 2-year period were obtained from three sources in order to assess relations among ozone levels, nine measures of meteorological conditions, day of the week, holidays, seasonal trends, family disturbances, and assaults against persons. Confirming results obtained in laboratory studies, more family disturbances were recorded when ozone levels were high than when they were low. Two-stage regression analyses indicated that disturbances and assaults against persons were also positively correlated with daily temperatures and negatively correlated with wind speed and levels of humidity. Further, distributed lag (Box-Jenkins) analyses indicated that high temperatures and low winds preceded violent episodes, which occurred more often on dry than humid days. In addition to hypothesized relations, it was also found that assaults follow complaints about family disturbances, which suggests that the latter could be used to predict and lessen physical violence. It was concluded that atmospheric conditions and violent episodes are not only correlated but also appear to be linked in a causal fashion. This conclusion, however, was qualified by a discussion of the limitations of archival data and concomitant time-series analysis.     

Frog skin,time series,and other kinds of data: Nonisomorphic representation and analysis

Representational art is spatially congruent, or isomorphic, with objects in the world. In other words, they are the same in some important way. But not all representation is isomorphic. Data graphs are a type of nonisomorphic representation. A major goal of data graphs is to facilitate the rapid comprehension of differences or relations. This is done by providing a kind of analogy between something that can be “seen” (the relative heights of points) and some relevant information. This article discusses some rules about data graphing, then some new visualization tools are briefly critiqued.     

Combinatorial data analysis: Association and partial association

A combinatorial data analysis strategy is reviewed that is designed to compare two arbitrary measures of proximity defined between the objects from some set. Based on a particular cross-product definition of correspondence between these two numerically specified notions of proximity (typically represented in the form of matrices), extensions are then pursued to indices of partial association that relate the observed pattern of correspondence between the first two proximity measures to a third. The attendant issues of index normalization and significance testing are discussed; the latter is approached through a simple randomization model implemented either through a Monte Carlo procedure or distributional approximations based on the first three moments. Applications of the original comparison strategy and its extensions to partial association may be developed for a variety of methodological and substantive tasks. Besides rank correlation, we emphasize the topics of spatial autocorrelation for one variable and spatial association between two and mention the connection to the usual randomization approach for one-way analysis-of-variance.