Choosing the best method for local validity estimation: relative accuracy of meta-analysis versus a local study versus Bayes-analysis

This study assessed the relative accuracy of 3 techniques--local validity studies, meta-analysis, and Bayesian analysis--for estimating test validity, incremental validity, and adverse impact in the local selection context. Bayes-analysis involves combining a local study with nonlocal (meta-analytic) validity data. Using tests of cognitive ability and personality (conscientiousness) as predictors, an empirically driven selection scenario illustrates conditions in which each of the 3 estimation techniques performs best. General recommendations are offered for how to estimate local parameters, based on true population variability and the number of studies in the meta-analytic prior. Benefits of empirical Bayesian analysis for personnel selection are demonstrated, and equations are derived to help guide the choice of a local validity technique (i.e., meta-analysis vs. local study vs. Bayes-analysis).     

Peer group membership and a sense of belonging: their relationship to adolescent behavior problems

This study explored three aspects of peer group membership in adolescence: peer group affiliation, the importance of group membership, and a sense of peer group belonging. Each is considered in relationship to adolescents' behavior problems as measured by the Achenbach Youth Self-Report. Participants included an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of 733 adolescents ranging in age from 11 to 18 years. Girls reported more internalizing problems and boys reported more externalizing problems. Girls also reported a higher sense of peer group belonging than boys. When controlling for adolescent age, gender, ethnicity, parent's educational level, and family structure, a sense of peer group belonging was negatively related to internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Adolescents who viewed peer group membership as very important to them and had a positive sense of peer group belonging had significantly fewer behavior problems than those who viewed peer group membership as very important but did not have a positive sense of peer group belonging.     

Balancing Justice and Mercy

The concept of forgiveness is analyzed as a moral gesture toward the offender designed to help restore that individual's moral standing. Jewish sources on the conditions under which forgiveness is obligatory are explored and two contrasting positions are presented: one in which the obligation to forgive is conditional on the repentance of the offender and another in which people are required to forgive unconditionally. These two positions are shown to represent different ways of framing the offending behavior that rest, in turn, on different ways of balancing the need for justice and for mercy respectively. In the final analysis, Judaism's two contrasting attitudes toward forgiveness are rooted in different theological assumptions and different ways of construing the very goals of the moral life. The author points out the merits and shortcomings of both positions and concludes with the suggestion that the two complement each other in important ways.     

A Realist Sexual Ethics

A very liberal sexual ethics now holds sway in Western culture, such that mutual consent alone is widely seen as morally legitimizing almost any sexual activity between adults. It is further commonly assumed by both philosophers and nonphilosophers that arguing for some alternative to liberal sexual ethics requires appeal to ethical commands specific to some religious tradition or other. The purpose of this paper is to challenge that assumption by suggesting some purely naturalistic and independently‐plausible premises that can be used to argue for a much more conservative system of sexual ethics than is widely accepted today.     

Versuche über das Gamma-Phänomen

Ohne Zusammenfassung Mit 5 Textabbildungen.     

Pregnancy, thirdness, and the aesthetics of catastrophe in Heinrich von Kleist

In documenting his own personal crisis of faith in Enlightenment rationalism through letters and essays, Kleist exposes the epistemological fissures in its edifice. This paper explores in psychoanalytic terms the dilemmas associated with knowing and not knowing, and the relationship between self and other, revealed by these texts. Kleist's literary work goes beyond expressing this crisis of knowledge to enact a kind of solution to it, not resolving the contradictions that are central in his world but presenting them aesthetically, intact and precariously balanced. More specifically, a pregnancy conceived without the knowledge of the mother-to-be--in his novella "The Marquise of O" (1807a)--suggests a modification of the psychoanalytic third to include within it the catastrophe that it also mitigates.