Importance Weighting in the Domain-of-Life Approach to Subjective Well-Being: the Consideration of Age

The domain-of-life approach to subjective well-being (SWB) has been popular for decades. Recognizing the possibility that individuals may not perceive all life domains equally important, many researchers advocate for importance weighting, which is to incorporate the relative importance of life domains (i.e., domain importance) into the scoring of SWB at the individual level. However, the need for and the adequacy of importance weighting remain topics of debate. What has been missing in the debate is the consideration of influences of potential confounding factors. Given that age is significantly associated with domain satisfaction, domain importance, and SWB, assessing importance weighting should not ignore the potential confounding effect of age. Analyzing data from an online survey, we found that adjusting for the confounding effect of age produced negligible changes in the results of assessing the role that domain importance played in the relationship between domain satisfaction and SWB. Our findings support the observations from the literature that the results of assessing importance weighting depended on the SWB variable selected. However, given our non-probability study sample, future studies should continue to consider age as a confounder in assessing importance weighting in the domain-of-life approach to SWB.

     

The Health Professional Ethics Rubric: Practical Assessment in Ethics Education for Health Professional Schools

A barrier to the development and refinement of ethics education in and across health professional schools is that there is not an agreed upon instrument or method for assessment in ethics education. The most widely used ethics education assessment instrument is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) I & II. This instrument is not specific to the health professions. But it has been modified for use in, and influenced the development of other instruments in, the health professions. The DIT contains certain philosophical assumptions (??Kohlbergian?? or ??neo-Kohlbergian??) that have been criticized in recent years. It is also expensive for large institutions to use. The purpose of this article is to offer a rubric??which the authors have named the Health Professional Ethics Rubric??for the assessment of several learning outcomes related to ethics education in health science centers. This rubric is not open to the same philosophical critiques as the DIT and other such instruments. This rubric is also practical to use. This article includes the rubric being advocated, which was developed by faculty and administrators at a large academic health science center as a part of a campus-wide ethics education initiative. The process of developing the rubric is described, as well as certain limitations and plans for revision.     

A factor-adjusted multiple testing procedure for ERP data analysis

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are now widely collected in psychological research to determine the time courses of mental events. When event-related potentials from treatment conditions are compared, often there is no a priori information on when or how long the differences should occur. Testing simultaneously for differences over the entire set of time points creates a serious multiple comparison problem in which the probability of false positive errors must be controlled, while maintaining reasonable power for correct detection. In this work, we extend the factor-adjusted multiple testing procedure developed by Friguet, Kloareg, and Causeur (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 1406-1415, 2009) to manage the multiplicity problem in ERP data analysis and compare its performance with that of the Benjamini and Hochberg (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B, 57, 289-300, 1995) false discovery rate procedure, using simulations. The proposed procedure outperformed the latter in detecting more truly significant time points, in addition to reducing the variability of the false discovery rate, suggesting that corrections for mass multiple testings of ERPs can be much improved by modeling the strong local temporal dependencies.