Predicting Nonresponse Bias from Teacher Ratings of Mental Health Problems in Primary School Children

The impact of nonresponse on estimates of mental health problems was examined in a prospective teacher screen in a community survey of 9,155 7–9 year olds. For 6,611 of the children, parents consented to participation in the actual study (Responders), while for 2,544 children parental consent was not obtained (Nonresponders). The teacher screen involved assessment of a broad set of symptoms of mental health problems and functional impairment. Calculations of non-response coefficients, a function of effect sizes and non-response proportion, revealed only ignorable nonresponse bias for both mean scores and correlations. However, the results from binary logistic regressions revealed that children ascribed signs of mental health problems by their teachers were less likely to participate. This was most frequent among children with only moderate symptoms. However, it also involved children with high symptom scores related to inattention, hyperactivity, emotions and peer relationship problems. These findings suggest that measures based on effect size can underestimate the magnitude of non-response bias and that a logistic regression approach may be more appropriate for studies geared at estimating prevalence of mental health problems in children. The study was financially supported by the Norwegian Research Council, The Norwegian Directorate for Health and Social Affairs, Western Norwegian Regional Health Authority, the L. Meltzer legacy for the University of Bergen, and the City of Bergen.     

Connections between experience, beliefs, scientific knowledge, and self-evaluated expertise among investigators of child sexual abuse in Finland

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether clinicians investigating child sexual abuse (CSA) rely more on scientific knowledge or on clinical experience when evaluating their own expertise. Another goal was to check what kind of pre-trial beliefs the clinicians had. The connections between these different factors were investigated. A questionnaire covering items concerning demographic data, experience, knowledge about CSA, self-evaluated expertise and beliefs about CSA was given to 126 social workers, 60 child psychiatrists and 134 psychologists. The results showed that the clinicians relied more on their clinical experience than on scientific knowledge when evaluating their expertise as investigators of CSA. Furthermore, social workers possessed stronger attitudes in favor of children than the other groups, while child psychiatrists had more negative attitudes towards the criminal justice system. Male participants had less strong beliefs than did the female participants. The findings indicate that the education of CSA investigators should focus more on theoretical knowledge and decision-making processes as well as the role of pre-trial beliefs.     

THE RELEVANCE OF EMERGENCE THEORY IN THE SCIENCE–RELIGION DIALOGUE

In this article, I call into question the relevance of emergence theories as presently used by thinkers in the science–religion discussion. Specifically, I discuss theories of emergence that have been used by both religious naturalists and proponents of panentheism. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) If we take the background theory to be metaphysical realism, then there seems to be no positive connection between the reality of emergent properties and the validity of providing reality with a religious interpretation, though one could perhaps construe an argument for the positive ontological status of emergence as a negative case for a religious worldview. (2) To be considered more plausible, religious naturalism should interpret religious discourse from the perspective of pragmatic realism. (3) Panentheistic models of divine causality are unable to avoid ontological dualism. (4) It is not obvious that emergent phenomena and/or properties are nonreducible in the ontological sense of the terms; indeed, the tension between weak and strong emergence makes it difficult for the emergentist to make ontological judgments. My general conclusion is that the concept of emergence has little metaphysical significance in the dialogue between science and theology.     

A Religiously Partisan Science? Islamic and Christian Perspectives

Both within Christianity and Islam we can find influential scholars who maintain that science is not religiously neutral because it contains a naturalist bias. They argue that Christians or Muslims should respond by developing their own kind of science, an “Islamic science,” a “sacred science,” a “theistic science” or a “faith-informed science.” In this article the recent writings of two advocates of such a view, standing in two different religious traditions, namely Mehdi Golshani (Islam) and Alvin Plantinga (Christianity) are compared, analyzed, and evaluated. A distinction between different ways in which religion might enter into the fabric of science is introduced and it is argued that the most crucial issues surround the question of whether or not religion ought to play a part in the validation of theories.     

Three kinds of reliabilism

Abstract

The distinction between acting and suffering underlies any theory of agency. Among contemporary writers, Fred Dretske is one of the few who has attempted to explicate this distinction without restricting the notion of action to intentional action alone. Aristotle also developed a global account of agency, one which is deeper and more detailed than Dretske's, and it is to Aristotle's account (with some modifications) that the bulk of this paper is devoted. Dretske's sketchier theory faces at least two ground-level problems. It is shown in the course of the paper how these can be handled by the Aristotelian account, in a way which is friendly to Dretske's approach.     

The memorability of names and the divergent effects of prior experience

Pre-experimental familiarity can have paradoxical effects on episodic memory. Knowledge of the stimulus domain usually enhances memory, but word frequency—a presumed correlate of prior experience—is negatively related to recognition accuracy. The present study examined episodic recognition of names and its relation to two measures of pre-experimental knowledge, name frequency, and fame. Frequency was operationalised as the number of hits in a national telephone directory, and fame as hits on national mass media websites. Recognition accuracy was increased by fame, but diminished by frequency. Four experiments confirmed the findings, using yes/no recognition, ROC curves, and remember-know paradigms. Hit rates were consistently more strongly influenced by fame than by frequency, whereas the reverse was true for false alarm rates. These dissociations suggest that two different forms of semantic memory, specific and nonspecific knowledge, interact with episodic memory in separate ways.