A facet analysis of police officers' self‐reported use of suspect‐interviewing strategies and their Discomfort with Ambiguity

This study sought to establish: (i) whether tactics in police suspects interviews can be represented by two interacting facets (cognitive/emotional and coercive/facilitative) and (ii) whether a preference for coercive combinations are positively associated with Discomfort with Ambiguity (Kruglanski, 1989 ). Ninety‐nine police interviewers from the Crime Wing Headquarters of the Hong Kong Police completed a self‐report survey of preferred suspect interviewing tactics, as well as Chiu, Morris, Hong, and Menon (2000) version of the Need For Closure scale. Smallest Space Analysis (Guttman, 1968 ) revealed a duplex structure of cognitive and affective coercive/facilitative themes. Moreover, self‐report results indicated that high scorers on Discomfort with Ambiguity were more willing to use a wider variety of tactics (including more coercive cognitive and emotional tactics) than low scorers (who were more prudent in their constraint and willingness to stick with facilitative cognitive and emotional tactics). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing intergroup concordance in ranking experiments with two groups of judges

Across many areas of psychology, concordance is commonly used to measure the (intragroup) agreement in ranking a number of items by a group of judges. Sometimes, however, the judges come from multiple groups, and in those situations, the interest is to measure the concordance between groups, under the assumption that there is some within-group concordance. In this investigation, existing methods are compared under a variety of scenarios. Permutation theory is used to calculate the error rates and the power of the methods. Missing data situations are also studied. The results indicate that the performance of the methods depend on (a) the number of items to be ranked, (b) the level of within-group agreement, and (c) the level of between-group agreement. Overall, using the actual ranks of the items gives better results than using the pairwise comparison of rankings. Missing data lead to loss in statistical power, and in some cases, the loss is substantial. The degree of power loss depends on the missing mechanism and the method of imputing the missing data, among other factors.     

Standardization of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory: The prototype standardization method and its rationale

Methods and techniques for the standardization of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) are reviewed and discussed. Based on the idea of the UT transformation (Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 1992), a general method called prototype standardization is applied to the clinical scales as well as the personality scales of the CPAI. The rationale of the prototype standardization method is explained. Some variations of the basic methodology are suggested and applied to the CPAI. It is demonstrated that the prototype standardization of the CPAI yields desirable psychometric properties such as percentile comparability across scales and preservation of the correlation structures of the scales, even for the personality scales of the CPAI that do not have a homogeneous distributional shape. We conclude that prototype standardization is a useful method for standardizing all kinds of personality inventories consisting of a large number of scales.     

Justice for all? Progress in Research on Cultural Variation in the Psychology of Distributive and Procedural Justice

Nous passons en revue les apports des recherches concernant l'impact de la culture sur la perception de la justice. Nous pre´sentons les mode`les qui rendent compte de la faµon dont les gens appre´cient l'e´quite´ de l'attribution des allocations d'une part, l'e´quite´ des processus de de´cision d'autre part. Suite a` l'examen de recherches interculturelles, nous prenons en conside´ration des diffe´rences entre pays pour mettre a` l'e´preuve des hypothe`ses sur les liens entre des valeurs culturelles ge´ne´rales (ex.: individualisme‐collectivisme) et des crite`res particuliers (ex. les re`gles d'e´quite´). Nous ne manquons pas toutefois de souligner les e´cueils que rencontre cette strate´gie de recherche qui a entraîne´ une meilleure pre´cision des conceptions de l'influence culturelle (pre´cision dans les valeurs, les contextes sociaux qui renvoient a` des crite`res d'e´quite´ particuliers et les structures de savoirs qui pre´sident a` l'interpre´tation des conduites)     

Social preference,social prominence,and group membership in late elementary school: homophilic concentration and peer affiliation configurations

This study investigated the social preference and social prominence of 622 5th graders (290 boys, 332 girls) in relation to peer group membership. The sample was recruited from 11 elementary schools in a southeastern state. The ethnicity of participants was 55% European American, 41% African American, and 4% other. Peer groups were classified on each of three domains (academic, aggression, popular) by the proportion of group members who were high on the characteristic of interest. Participants’ peer affiliations were also classified with cluster analytic techniques that yielded distinct configurations of aggression, popularity, and academic competence. Social preference and social prominence were each related to popular peer group type for both boys and girls and differentially related to aggressive and academic group types. Social prominence, but not social preference, was related to peer group configurations for both girls and boys. Implications for the development of social contextual interventions to support students’ adjustment and academic engagement during late elementary school are discussed.     

Systemic Considerations: Factors Facilitating and Impeding the Development of Psychology in Developing Countries

Systemic factors that influence the development of psychology in developing countries are explored. Such factors include socio-political considerations, influences from other countries, public perceptions of psychology, relationships with other disciplines, training of psychologists, economic constraints, and research orientations. Because of the scarcity of resources and the widespread desire to modernize, the perceived applied value of psychology in developing countries has a major impact on its development. Student preference for choosing psychology as a major, the allocation of funding to psychology departments, and the status of psychology in relation to other disciplines partly depend on the applied value of the discipline. Thus, to facilitate its development, psychology must be seen as useful, and applied research should be emphasized. However, applied research should be backed up by the necessary basic research. Indigenization is also necessary so that psychological research is effective in addressing local problems.     

Bilingual comparison of Mandarin and English cognitive bias tasks

Most research into cognitive biases has used Western samples, despite potential East-West socio-cultural differences. One reason is the lack of appropriate measures for non-Westerners. This study is about cross-linguistic equivalence which needs to be established before assessing cross-cultural differences in future research. We developed parallel Mandarin and English measures of interpretation bias and attention bias using back-translation and decentering procedures. We assessed task equivalence by administering both sets of measures to 47 bilingual Mandarin-English speakers. Interpretation bias measurement was similar and reliable across language versions, confirming suitability of the Mandarin versions for future cross-cultural research. By contrast, scores on attention bias tasks did not intercorrelate reliably, suggesting that nonverbal stimuli such as pictures or facial expressions of emotion might present better prospects for cross-cultural comparison. The development of the first set of equivalent measures of interpretation bias in an Eastern language paves the way for future research investigating East-West differences in biased cognition.     

Editorial: Special Issue on Quality of Life among Children and Adolescents in Chinese Societies

Applied Research in Quality of Life -