The Union Makes us Strong,but Does it Make Us Free? A Review of Mark Reiff’s In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization

Res Publica - Mark Reiff’s book In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization successfully delivers the promise contained in the title—the case for a version of...     

Assessing the Role of Spirituality in Coping Among African Americans Diagnosed with Cancer

Spirituality plays an important role in cancer coping among African Americans. The purpose of this study was to report on the initial psychometric properties of instruments specific to the cancer context, assessing the role of spirituality in coping. Items were developed based on a theoretical model of spirituality and qualitative patient interviews. The instruments reflected connections to self, others, God, and the world. One hundred African American cancer survivors completed the instruments by telephone. The instruments showed adequate internal reliability, mixed convergent validity, discriminant validity, and interpretable factor structures.     

Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.     

Assessing the Reliability of Situational Judgment Tests Used in High‐Stakes Situations

Assessing reliability of situational judgment tests (SJTs) in high‐stakes situations is problematic with reliability inappropriately measured by Cronbach's alpha when test items are heterogeneous. We computed the corrected, weighted mean alpha from 56 alpha coefficients, which produced a value of α = .46 and reviewed appropriate types of reliability to use with SJTs. In the current longitudinal study, SJT test–retest reliability was r = .82, compared with internal consistency, α = .46, and stratified alpha, α = .45 at Time 1 and α = .52 and stratified α = .51 at Time 2. We used a student sample (Time 1: n = 185; Time 2: n = 132) with items from a credentialing exam with ‘should do’ instructions. The SJT correlated significantly with cognitive ability, r = .30, and agreeableness, r = .24. In Study 2, we assessed test–retest reliability with Human Resource professionals (Time 1: n = 94; Time 2: n = 32) who had been recently credentialed and who participated in a pilot test of new SJT items with ‘most likely/least likely do’ response options. The SJT test–retest reliability was r = .66 compared with internal consistency, α = .43 and stratified α = .47 at Time 1 and α = .61 and stratified α = .67 at Time 2. We discuss the theoretical implications of the Study 1 results as well as the practical implications for use of SJTs in credentialing examinations.