In defence of the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT)—a reply.

A paper by I. Zuber and B. Ekehammar in this Journal (38, 1997) is reviewed. The paper advocates that the non-veridical contents in the series of reports in the DMT should preferably be referred, not to psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, but to factors of stimulus order. The methods and the arguments of this investigation are critically examined.     

‘So you did what you wanted then’: Discourse analysis,personal agency,and psychotherapy

This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.     

SOCIAL VALIDATION: THE EVOLUTION OF STANDARDS OF COMPETENCY FOR TARGET BEHAVIORS

The use of social validation procedures has become widespread in recent years. Although most researchers have used social validation procedures to select target behaviors and to evaluate whether the changes produced by a treatment program should be considered socially useful, little attention has been focused upon using the social validation process to determine the optimal levels for target behaviors. This paper suggests several ways in which social validation procedures can be employed in order to select when and how much to change target behaviors.     

PROVIDING A LESS RESTRICTIVE ENVIRONMENT FOR PROFOUNDLY RETARDED PERSONS BY TEACHING INDEPENDENT WALKING SKILLS

A basic right of all handicapped persons is to live in the least restrictive environment possible. In this investigation, procedures were evaluated for teaching four institutionalized males with profound retardation necessary skills to increase their individual freedom of movement. Following baseline, a travel training program with a backward chaining format was implemented to teach each person to walk independently from his living area to school. Travel training included instructions, practice, praise, feedback, verbal reprimands, prompts, and edible reinforcers. Each resident began walking the entire distance to school independently during training and also began walking back to the living area, although the latter set of skills was not specifically trained. Following termination of the formal investigation, follow-up measures of 1 to 8 weeks showed the residents continued going to school independently. A survey of residential facilities in 43 states provided social validation for the seriousness of the problems associated with transporting seriously retarded persons to school. Also, time efficiency measures indicated that training independent travel resulted in reductions of staff time required in school transportation. Results were discussed in light of the potential contributions of behavior analysis in providing less restrictive environments for seriously handicapped persons.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REINFORCEMENT AND PRACTICE FOR ENHANCING THE CREATIVE WRITING OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN1

Reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to the written work of 16 fifth graders on three operationally defined components of creative writing, fluency, flexibility, and originality.4 These three components were assessed via five response measures. Fluency was defined as the number of different ideas each student listed in an idea list prepared prior to writing an essay. Flexibility was measured in two ways, idea list flexibility and story flexibility. Idea list flexibility was defined as the number of different kinds of ideas which appeared in each day's list whereas story flexibility was defined as the number of different approaches to the topic that the child used in the story itself. Originality was also measured in two ways, idea list originality and story originality. Idea list originality was defined by the statistical infrequency of ideas in the children's lists of ideas. Story originality was determined by blind, subjective ratings of stories conducted by independent raters. All of the measures of creative responding were demonstrated to be under experimental control. The procedures also raised students' scores on Torrance's Tests of Thinking Creatively With Words on three variables, fluency, flexibility, and originality. Adoption for classroom use seems straightforward.     

Fisher transformations for correlations corrected for selection and missing data

The validity of a test is often estimated in a nonrandom sample of selected individuals. To accurately estimate the relation between the predictor and the criterion we correct this correlation for range restriction. Unfortunately, this corrected correlation cannot be transformed using Fisher'sZ transformation, and asymptotic tests of hypotheses based on small or moderate samples are not accurate. We developed a Fisherr toZ transformation for the corrected correlation for each of two conditions: (a) the criterion data were missing due to selection on the predictor (the missing data were MAR); and (b) the criterion was missing at random, not due to selection (the missing data were MCAR). The twoZ transformations were evaluated in a computer simulation. The transformations were accurate, and tests of hypotheses and confidence intervals based on the transformations were superior to those that were not based on the transformations.     

Methodological issues in judgment and decision-making research: Concurrent verbal protocol validity and simultaneous traces of process

This paper examines two dimensions of concurrent verbal protocol validity. First, whether verbalization affects process and outcome (reactivity) was examined by comparing concurrent verbal protocol traces with those from a computer search process tracing method, the latter being a complete trace of information acquisition from experimental materials. Earlier findings that verbalization affects time were confirmed. However, verbalization did not affect amount and pattern of acquisition or accuracy of judgments. Second, whether concurrent verbal protocols are complete was examined by comparing concurrent verbal protocol and computer traces that were simultaneously obtained in a treatment in which subjects verbalized as they acquired information from the computer. The verbal traces less completely captured information acquisition behavior than computer search. This suggests that, although concurrent verbal protocols provide greater insight into decision behavior than computer search, the latter is a more reliable information-acquisition trace. Thus, if information acquisition is of primary interest and if computer search activities can be naturally integrated into performing the primary task, computer search is preferred to concurrent verbal protocols. However, if information use or retrieval from long-term memory is of primary interest, concurrent verbal protocols are preferred to computer search. Finally, this paper examined whether the simultaneous use of concurrent verbal protocols and computer search provides traces of information acquisition and use that are as complete as when each method is independently applied. Although computer search tended to limit subjects verbalizations of evaluative operators, this effect may be eliminated by practice on the computer prior to collecting data.     

EM and beyond

The basic theme of the EM algorithm, to repeatedly use complete-data methods to solve incomplete data problems, is also a theme of several more recent statistical techniques. These techniques—multiple imputation, data augmentation, stochastic relaxation, and sampling importance resampling—combine simulation techniques with complete-data methods to attack problems that are difficult or impossible for EM.A preliminary version of this article was the Keynote Address at the 1987 European Meeting of the Psychometric Society June 24–26, 1987 in Enschede, The Netherlands. The author wishes to thank the editor and reviewers for helpful comments.     

Clinicians and supervisors' experiences with developing practices of open dialogue in network meetings in public mental health services

Open Dialogue is a dialogical approach focusing on the perspectives of patients and their social networks on treatment and recovery processes. As part of a larger research project, this prospective cohort study explores what promotes and hinders the development of Open Dialogue in network meetings (ODNM) based on the experiences of thirty-seven clinicians and seven supervisors. Multistage focus group interviews were used to collect data and were analysed thematically. We generated two main themes: (1) togetherness and isolation and (2) challenging and evolving. The findings show that ODNM can be developed in public mental healthcare, but this leads to both challenges and opportunities at the organisational level, such as conflicting perspectives, the difficulty of maintaining interest in ODNM, the need for committed and involved leaders, and the growing change in the traditional view of treatment, which has made clinicians collaborate more with patients and their relatives.     

认知诊断模型Q矩阵修正：完整信息矩阵的作用

Q矩阵是CDM的核心元素之一,反映了测验的内部结构和内容设计,通常由领域专家根据经验进行主观界定,因此需要对可能存在的错误进行修正。本研究提出了一种新的Q矩阵修正方法——基于完整经验交叉相乘信息矩阵的Wald-XPD方法。采用Monte Carlo模拟检验了新方法的表现,并与同类方法进行了比较。研究表明：新开发的Wald-XPD方法在Q矩阵恢复率、保留正确标定属性的比例以及修正错误标定属性的比例这3个主要指标上均有较好的表现,且整体上优于其他方法,尤其是在修正错误标定的属性方面。通过实证数据展示了Wald-XPD方法在Q矩阵修正中的良好表现。总之,本研究为Q矩阵修正提供了有效的方法。