The family relations of female juvenile delinquents

This study evaluated the assumption that the family relations of female delinquents are more dysfunctional than those of male delinquents. In a 2 × 2 (gender by delinquency status) design, 32 intact families were matched on demographic variables, and the male and female delinquents were matched on arrest data. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents were administered a selfreport personality inventory and were observed during a family interaction task. Consistent with the extant literature, families of delinquents had low rates of facultative information exchange and delinquent adolescents were more dominant toward their mothers than were well-adjusted adolescents. It was also observed that fathers of delinquents were more dominant toward their wives than were fathers of well-adjusted adolescents. In regard to the primary purpose of the study, it was observed that mother-adolescent dyads and parents in families of female delinquents had higher rates of conflict than their counterparts in families of male delinquents. In addition, the fathers of female delinquents were more neurotic than the fathers of male delinquents. These findings provide some support for the view that the families of female deliquents are especially dysfunctional.This research was supported by funding to the Department of Psychology at Memphis State University granted through the Centers of Excellence Program of the State of Tennessee. We gwratefully appreciate the cooperation of Judge Kenneth Turner of Memphis Juvenile Court, and of George Relyea, who has provided statistical consultation over the years.     

Cost Effectiveness of Strategies for Recruiting Low-Income Families for Behavioral Parent Training

The goal of this study was to assess cost, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of recruitment strategies used to engage low-income families of young children with disruptive behavior disorder to participate in a Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) program. For this analysis, we used data on labor and non-labor resources associated with 13 recruitment strategies implemented in February 2014 through February 2016. We assessed the effectiveness of each strategy as the number of families that enrolled into the study. Cost-effectiveness of each recruitment strategy was expressed as cost per family enrolled; analysis was conducted in 2016. We calculated the cost of total recruitment effort for 13 strategies during the 2-year period to be $11,496 with an average cost of $885 per recruitment strategy or $255 per enrolled family. Across strategies, total costs ranged from $25 to $2540. “University mass e-mail” and “school flyers” resulted in the most phone screens (34 each); however, only 10% of these families enrolled in the study (three and four families, respectively). “Craigslist” was the most effective strategy with 30 families screened and 11 of them enrolling. Three strategies did not yield any participants. The four strategies with the lowest cost per family enrolled were “Facebook page,” “Craigslist,” “university mass e-mail,” and “organization/agency” (<$90). In conclusion, we found that some recruitment strategies were more successful at engaging low-income families to participate in a BPT program than others. Our results indicate that using a combination of recruitment strategies may be the optimal approach for recruiting low-income families.     

Identifying families at risk: exploring the potential of the McMaster Family Assessment Device

The Family Assessment Device (FAD) was given to a community sample of intact families with young children. Responses by mothers and fathers were analysed with a view to providing ways of indicating which families might benefit from preventive intervention.
Mother/father agreement was significant on five of the seven scales, with a failure to reach significance on Affective Involvement and General Functioning. The highest correlation between mothers and fathers was on the Roles scale (r = 0.53). However, mothers' means for Roles were significantly higher than fathers', indicating that mothers were less satisfied with family functioning in this area.
In addition to a family mean score greater than a cut-off value as an indicator of unhealthy functioning, present results suggest including those families whose respondents strongly disagree (indicated by scores lying on either side of the cut-off and a difference of more than two standard deviations). With this double criterion, Roles and Affective Involvement were the dimensions most frequently scored as unhealthy. Seventeen per cent of the families scored in the unhealthy range on four or more of the seven dimensions.
This paper considers how to decide where family intervention might be helpful and raises the question of whether screening families might be more widely undertaken, for example by health visitors, to identify those families who are at risk of family dysfunction.     

Recruitment modeling applied to longitudinal studies of group differences in intelligence

In longitudinal studies data is collected in a series of waves. Each wave after the first suffers from attrition. Therefore it can be difficult to discriminate between changes in sample parameters due to a longitudinal process (e.g. ageing) and changes due to attrition. The problem is particularly vexing if one of the purposes is to compare differences between two or more groups over time, because there may be differential attrition across groups. We refer to this as a recruitment problem, because the sample studied in any wave after the first can be thought of as having been recruited from a preceding wave. We present a mathematical model of the recruitment process. We then apply it to two large longitudinal studies, the British Cohort Survey 1970 and the National Child Development Study (1958), to demonstrate how we can identify effects expected from recruitment alone. As an illustration we show that differential recruitment would predict increasing differences between estimates of men's and women's intelligence as the studied sample ages.     

The Art of Recruitment: The Foundation of Family and Linkage Studies of Psychiatric Illness

Family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness involve special benefits and challenges in the field of scientific investigation. The success of a family or linkage study is dependent on the recruitment process. The most informative and reliable method of data collection in this field of investigation is through direct interviews with as many family members as possible. Although there are circumstances when direct interviewing is not possible, there are other circumstances, such as refusal of relatives to participate, that deserve closer scrutiny. The complexities involved in the recruitment process while conducting medical investigations have been explored in the literature. However, special issues relevant to the recruitment process merit further exploration for working with families in the context of family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness. Careful understanding of this critical topic may minimize the incidence of family nonparticipation in such research endeavors. This article addresses these issues as they relate to recruiting individuals and their families in this field of investigation. These issues include the role of attitudes, values and beliefs, family interaction and the identification of influential members, informal communication networking, informed consent while promoting the research, and ethical concerns.     

Mindful Parenting and Care Involvement of Fathers of Children with Intellectual Disabilities

There are few data addressing psychological variables that may explain some variation in parenting by fathers of children with intellectual disabilities. In the present study, we hypothesized that fathers who were more mindful in their parenting role (specifically, fathers who reported more present-centered attention in their relationship with their child) would use less avoidance in relation to their child with intellectual disability and that this would be reflected in increased father involvement in childcare. In a questionnaire survey 105 fathers completed a mindful parenting measure and a measure of parental involvement. Regression analyses revealed that fathers who reported being more mindful as a parent also reported more involvement in child-related parenting tasks and roles related to child socialization. These data suggest that mindfulness in the parenting role may be an important predictor of parenting in families of children with intellectual disabilities. Therefore, interventions designed to increased mindfulness should improve parent–child relationships and ultimately child outcomes.     

„Intention to treat“ oder „treatment as received“ – Umgang mit Abbrechern in der Forschung zur Straftäterbehandlung

Lack of internal validity is a frequent problem in evaluation studies of offender treatment, as randomized controlled trials are difficult to implement and comparison groups in quasi-experimental studies are often not completely equivalent. Special matching procedures or statistical control of selection bias by using potentially interfering variables as covariates can provide a solution to some of these problems; however, a high dropout rate from offender treatment programs presents another problem, as the variables that cause attrition are often risk factors for reoffending. It is argued that a treatment-as-received (TR) approach which compares treatment completers with the comparison group may confound genuine treatment effects with selection effects. Particularly high recidivism rates in dropouts may be due to negative effects of attrition (e.g. stigmatization) but may more likely reflect a higher a priori risk for reoffending. Using data from some recent treatment studies, the authors show that alleged positive effects often disappear when a more adequate intention-to-treat (ITT) approach is used in which dropouts are retained in the treatment sample.     

Potential dropouts in a longitudinal study: Prevalence,stability, and associated characteristics

This study quantifies the prevalence and associated characteristics of subjects in a longitudinal study who are difficult to schedule and thus may become potential study dropouts. Although subject attrition over three years remained extremely low, many families were difficult to schedule for their assessments and this remained rather constant over time. Intercorrelations between the measures of scheduling difficulty were high, indicating good internal validity of the constructs. Stability of these measures from year to year was low, making it difficult to predict which families required more staff effort or were at risk for dropping out of the study in any one year. Race appeared to be associated with several measures of scheduling difficulty, while psychiatric characteristics of the sample were less so.     

Neuropsychological changes in children with cancer: The treatment of missing data in longitudinal studies

Researchers conducting longitudinal studies with children or adults are inevitably confronted with problems of attrition and missing data. Missing data in longitudinal studies is frequently handled by excluding from analyses those cases for whom data are incomplete. This approach to missing data is not optimal. On the one hand, if data are missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases ignores information collected on those cases that could be used to improve estimates of population parameters (e.g., means, variances, covariances, and growth rates) and improve the power of significance tests of statistical hypotheses. On the other hand, if data are not missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases leads to biased parameter estimates and hypothesis tests that may be internally and externally invalid. This study uses three years of follow-up data from a longitudinal investigation of neuropsychological outcomes of cancer in children to demonstrate the problems presented by missing data in repeated measures designs and some solutions. In evaluating potential biasing effects of attrition, the study extends previous research on neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric cancer by inclusion of patients whose disease had relapsed, and by comparison of surviving and nonsurviving patients. Although the data presented have specific relevance to the study of neuropsychological outcome in pediatric cancer, the problems of missing data and the solutions presented are relevant to a wide variety of diseases and conditions of interest to researchers in child and adult neuropsychology.     

Methodological Problems in Operant Learning Research with Human Infants

A great number of the recent studies on infant operant learning use the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm with 2- and 3-month-old infants. This paradigm has proved to be adequate for the study of learning and the transfer of learning. However, difficulties linked to the high attrition rates of subjects, and the variability in performance are frequently observed in studies using other paradigms or in studies with older infants (4–5-month-olds). The problems noted in a group of studies seem to be related to important methodological issues such as the brevity of the learning sessions, the choice of dependent measures, and the management of variability in performance. The use of single-subject designs and the use of variables encountered in infants' daily learning experiences may be the solution to some of the problems.     

Fathers’ Paternity Leave-Taking and Children’s Perceptions of Father-Child Relationships in the United States

Paternity leave-taking is believed to benefit children by encouraging father-child bonding after a birth and enabling commitments to fathers’ engagement. Yet, no known U.S. studies have directly focused on the associations between paternity leave-taking and children’s reports of father-child relationships. Understanding the potential consequences of paternity leave-taking in the United States is particularly important given the lack of a national paid parental leave policy. The present study uses five waves of data on 1319 families, largely socioeconomically disadvantaged, from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to analyze the associations between paternity leave-taking and 9-year-old children’s reports of their father-child relationships. We also assess the extent to which these associations are mediated by fathers’ engagement, co-parenting quality, parental relationship satisfaction, and fathers’ identities. Results indicate that leave-taking, and particularly 2 weeks or more of leave, is positively associated with children’s perceptions of fathers’ involvement, father-child closeness, and father-child communication. The associations are explained, at least in part, by fathers’ engagement, parental relationship satisfaction, and father identities. Overall, results highlight the linked lives of fathers and their children, and they suggest that increased attention on improving opportunities for parental leave in the United States may help to strengthen families by nurturing higher quality father-child relationships.

     

Simulation of complex survival distributions

This paper describes a method for generating sample survival distributions from a hypothetical population, as would be required for running Monte Carlo simulations. The method is based on the concept of a quincunx. Cases are entered into a life table and allowed to drop out or die during each interval with probabilities that mirror the hypothetical population. By repeating this process many times and tracking the results, the researcher is able to study the sampling distribution of effect size indices and test statistics, and can generate empirical estimates of power and precision for planned studies. Unlike other methods that are commonly used for this purpose, the model proposed here allows the researcher to define a population in which the hazard rates and/or attrition rates vary substantially from one time point to the next, as may be the case in clinical trials or studies of processing times. The method requires less than 100 lines of code and runs some 10,000 simulations per hour on a microcomputer.     

Intelligence and selective attrition in a nationally representative and longitudinal sample of Americans

Selective attrition is a potentially serious problem that can bias the findings that are generated from longitudinal samples. Although the extent to which IQ might be involved in selective attrition has been studied, the results from these studies have been decidedly mixed. The current study adds to the literature examining the link between IQ and selective attrition by examining four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Analysis of these data revealed that IQ is related to attrition, with lower IQ respondents more likely to drop out of the study when compared against higher IQ respondents. The evidence suggests that dropouts score about 4.5 IQ points lower than subjects who did not drop out. Limitations of the study are noted and directions for future research are discussed.     

Personality research on the Internet: A comparison of Web-based and traditional instruments in take-home and in-class settings

Students, faculty, and researchers have become increasingly comfortable with the Internet, and many of them are interestedin using the Web to collectdata. Few published studies have investigated the differences between Web-based data and data collected with more traditional methods. In order to investigate these potential differences, two important factors were crossed in this study: whether the data were collected on line or not and whether the data were collected in a group setting at a fixed time or individually at a time of the respondent’s choosing. The Visions of Morality scale (Shelton & McAdams, 1990) was used, and the participants were assigned to one of four conditions: in-class Web survey, in-class paper-and-pencil survey; take-home Web survey, and take-home paper-and-pencil survey. No significant differences in scores were found for any condition; however, response rates were affected by the type of survey administered, with the take-home Web-based instrument having the lowest response rate. Therefore, researchers need to be aware that different modes of administration may affect subject attrition and may, therefore, confound investigations of other independent variables.     

Acculturation, parent-adolescent conflict, and adolescent adjustment in Mexican American families

We tested an acculturation model in a community sample of Mexican American families (146 mothers, 137 fathers, and 146 adolescents) that proposed that differences between parents and adolescents in acculturation would be associated with parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent adjustment problems. Contrary to hypotheses, we found that families who exhibited an acculturation gap were not more likely to report parent-adolescent conflict or adolescent adjustment problems. In fact, familial conflict and adolescent sexual experience were associated with high levels of acculturation among adolescents and their parents. Pending replication, these findings suggest that both parent and children acculturation may independently predict familial processes and youth outcomes, irrespective of an acculturation gap. Future research should consider other factors aside from acculturation differences that might account for parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent adjustment in Mexican American families.     

Multilevel analysis of matching behavior

Multilevel modeling has been considered a promising statistical tool in the field of the experimental analysis of behavior and may serve as a convenient statistical analysis for matching behavior because it structures data in groups (or levels) to account simultaneously for the within‐subject and between‐subject variances. Heretofore, researchers have sometimes pooled data erroneously from different subjects in a single analysis by using average ratios, average response and reinforcer rates, aggregation of subjects, etc. Unfortunately, this leads to loss of information and biased estimations, which can severely undermine generalization of the results. Instead, a multilevel approach is advocated to combine several subjects' matching behavior. A reanalysis of previous data on matching behavior is provided to illustrate the method and point out its advantages. It illustrates that multilevel regression leads to better estimations, is more convenient, and offers more behavioral information. We hope this paper will encourage the use of multilevel modeling in the statistical practices of behavior analysts.     

The father's role in the socialization of his infant

Although research on fathers and infants increased dramatically during the past decade, it did so largely in a theoretical vacuum. Theories of development emphasize mother-infant relationships, with little attention, if any, given to father-infant relationships. As a result, studies of father-infant interactions tend to replicate procedures that have been used in mother-infant research. While useful, mimicking mother-infant research paradigms may blind investigators to salient aspects of development that are unique to and critical for father-infant relationships. In traditional families, study of mother-father-infant triadic interactions may reveal more useful information about the father's role in infant socialization, than the study of father-infant dyadic interactions. However, the study of triadic interactions may yield little useful information about father-infant interaction in the single parent family. Until a number of methodological issues are resolved, the literature on the father's role in the socialization of his infant must be interpreted cautiously.     

Strategies to Engage Underrepresented Parents in Child Intervention Services: A Review of Effectiveness and Co-occurring Use

The purpose of this review was to estimate the impact of parent engagement strategies tested with underrepresented families of young children with social, emotional, or behavioral disorders, and describe the combinations in which these strategies are commonly used together. We conducted a systematic review using the PracticeWise Engagement Coding System to identify which strategies had the strongest empirical support for engaging underrepresented (i.e., minority race or ethnicity, or low income) families receiving psychosocial services for their children. Social network analyses were used to identify the frequency of strategy use and how strategies were combined to engage underrepresented families. Linear regression was used to estimate the impact of each strategy on parent engagement, using attrition as a proxy for non-engagement. Thirty-five studies met inclusion criteria. Parent attrition was predicted by larger sample sizes, lower maternal education, interventions that were more community or home-based, less therapist monitoring, positive reinforcement from therapists, and more pairing families with peers. Social network analyses suggested that more effective strategies were more frequently implemented alone and less effective strategies were commonly combined with each other. Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners require guidance in selecting engagement strategies to reduce attrition of underrepresented families in treatment. Although we identified promising strategies for improving parent engagement in treatment for underrepresented children with social, emotional, or behavioral disorders, the frequent combining of engagement strategies in research means that there is little data on the independent effects of interventions to increase parent engagement for this population.     

A Hierarchical Modeling Approach to Data Analysis and Study Design in a Multi-site Experimental fMRI Study

We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model for analyzing multi-site experimental fMRI studies. Our method takes the hierarchical structure of the data (subjects are nested within sites, and there are multiple observations per subject) into account and allows for modeling between-site variation. Using posterior predictive model checking and model selection based on the deviance information criterion (DIC), we show that our model provides a good fit to the observed data by sharing information across the sites. We also propose a simple approach for evaluating the efficacy of the multi-site experiment by comparing the results to those that would be expected in hypothetical single-site experiments with the same sample size.