Outpatient standards of care and the suicidal patient.

This article is a review of the legal and clinical literature on standards of care for nonhospitalized adult suicidal patients. The authors discuss effective assessment, management and treatment procedures that balance the need for high-quality care by a reasonable and prudent practitioner with the requirements of court-determined and statutory standards. Through a review of malpractice claims data and through an examination of the clinical literature we detail the essential guidelines for sound assessment, intervention, and management procedures. The authors specifically discuss common failure situations in outpatient care (e.g., problems in pharmacotherapy, the decision to hospitalize, inappropriate and dual relationships, the assessment of imminence and lethality, and so on). Details regarding practical considerations in developing an outpatient standard of care are provided, as are suggestions that such a standard of care must include an ongoing assessment of the therapeutic alliance.     

What can we learn from Plausible Values?

In this paper, we show that the marginal distribution of plausible values is a consistent estimator of the true latent variable distribution, and, furthermore, that convergence is monotone in an embedding in which the number of items tends to infinity. We use this result to clarify some of the misconceptions that exist about plausible values, and also show how they can be used in the analyses of educational surveys.     

Generation speed in Raven''s progressive matrices test

In this paper, we investigate the role of response fluency on a well-known intelligence test, Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) test. Finding rules that govern the items is critical in solving this test. Finding these rules is conceptualized as sampling rules from a (statistical) rule distribution until the correct one is attained. Response fluency is then seen as generation speed, or the speed at which a person generates (samples) rules from this distribution. We develop a test that isolates this speed of sampling variable, and a method to check whether this variable was adequately isolated. The score on this test is then compared with performance on the APM test. It is found that the speed at which people sample from such distributions is an important variable in solving APM items.     

Effects of social and intellectual instruction on achievement motivation as a function of role orientation

University women preselected for traditionality of role orientation were administered a task described as a test either of intelligence or social skills. Results generally supported the hypothesis that instructions interact with a women's role orientation in determining both her achievement motivation, as measured projectively, and her performance. Differences in motivation and performance were interpreted in terms of women's definitions of appropriate achievement situations. Nontraditional women displayed achievement motivation on a projective measure under standard intellectual arousal conditions. Traditionally role-oriented women displayed greater achievement motivation under affiliative arousal conditions. The importance of measuring achievement in traditionally feminine areas, in addition to more traditionally masculine intellectual achievement, was stressed.Portions of this research were included in a thesis submitted by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the M.A. degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.     

On the sampling interpretation of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests in the context of conditional maximum likelihood estimation

In the context ofconditional maximum likelihood (CML) estimation, confidence intervals can be interpreted in three different ways, depending on the sampling distribution under which these confidence intervals contain the true parameter value with a certain probability. These sampling distributions are (a) the distribution of the data given theincidental parameters, (b) the marginal distribution of the data (i.e., with the incidental parameters integrated out), and (c) the conditional distribution of the data given the sufficient statistics for the incidental parameters. Results on the asymptotic distribution of CML estimates under sampling scheme (c) can be used to construct asymptotic confidence intervals using only the CML estimates. This is not possible for the results on the asymptotic distribution under sampling schemes (a) and (b). However, it is shown that theconditional asymptotic confidence intervals are also valid under the other two sampling schemes. I am indebted to Theo Eggen, Norman Verhelst and one of Psychometrika's reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Additive and multiplicative models for gamma distributed random variables,and their application as psychometric models for response times

A class of models for gamma distributed random variables is presented. These models are shown to be more flexible than the classical linear models with respect to the structure that can be imposed on the expected value. In particular, both additive, multiplicative, and combined additive-multiplicative models can be formulated. As a special case, a class of psychometric models for reaction times is presented, together with their psychological interpretation. By means of a comparison with existing models, this class of models is shown to offer some possibilities that are not available in existing methods. Parameter estimation by means of maximum likelihood (ML) is shown to have some attractive properties, since the models belong to the exponential family. Then, the results of a simulation study of the bias in the ML estimates are presented. Finally, the application of these models is illustrated by an analysis of the data from a mental rotation experiment. This analysis is preceded by an evaluation of the appropriateness of the gamma distribution for these data.     

The adolescent suicide problem

ABSTRACT: The suicide rate of young people in the United States rose 237 percent between 1960 and 1980. This paper addresses three related issues. First, is this change an epidemic or an artifact? Second, what is there about adolescence as a life-stage in modern society that makes it stressful, even suicide producing? Finally, what are the distinctive traits of the lifestyles or careers of a random sample of young Chicago suicides?