Measuring grief: A short version of the perinatal grief scale

Despite a considerable number of studies, there are two major drawbacks in the literature on grief and bereavement. One is a lack of adequate and generally agreed upon measures for assessing grief. The second is a lack of ability to predict from existing measures the likelihood of what has been termed chronic or pathological grief reactions. This paper reports the results of the development of a bereavement measure for the study of perinatal loss which attempts to address these gaps. The measure is specific to a pregnancy-related loss, although it has the potential for adaptation to use for other types of loss. Analysis of responses from 138 women has resulted in the reduction of the original measure from 104 to a more manageable and almost equally comprehensive and reliable 33 items. In addition, a factor analysis has produced three factors, two of which indicate the possibility for longer-term and more severe grief reactions. Because of its sound psychometric qualities and interesting factor structure, the measure shows promise of being useful for both research and clinical purposes.This research was funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant R01 H18431-04, with additional assistance from the Center for Social Research at Lehigh University. Dr. Potvin is supported by the Quebec Health Research Fund.     

IMPLICATIONS OF BEHAVIORAL PHARMACOLOGY RESEARCH FOR APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSES: JEAB'S SPECIAL ISSUE CELEBRATING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF JOSEPH V. BRADY (MARCH 1994)

We review four articles from JEAB's March 1994 issue celebrating the contributions of Joseph V. Brady. These articles have implications for studying private events and for studying multiple operants. We suggest that regularly including self-reports about private events in behavioral pharmacological research has resulted in an accumulated knowledge that has facilitated examination of interesting relations among self-reports, environmental factors, and other observable behaviors. Methodological lessons that behavioral pharmacologists have learned regarding the study of multiple operants are also relayed. We provide examples of how these lessons could be useful to applied behavior analysts studying nonpharmacological issues.     

Norms for Parental Ratings on Conners' Abbreviated Parent-Teacher Questionnaire: Implications for the Design of Behavioral Rating Inventories and Analyses of Data Derived from Them

Despite the wide usage of Conners' 10-item Abbreviated Parent-Teacher Questionnaire (APTQ), normative data for parental ratings on the APTQ are rare. Moreover, its psychometric properties as a stand alone behavioral rating instrument have yet to be examined in detail. Using data from parental ratings for 6,841 children aged 5 to 14 years, this paper reports the psychometric properties of the APTQ and provides normative and prevalence estimates for four age cohorts (5 to 6, 7 to 8, 9 to 11, and 12 to 14 years) by gender. In presenting the findings, the paper highlights key methodological issues endemic to the design of behavioral rating inventories like the APTQ and the analysis of data derived from them. These issues are illustrated and discussed in terms of their implications for the measurement and determination of prevalence estimates of problem behaviors in child psychology and child psychiatry. The need to revise the design, content, and response formats of child behavior rating inventories is stressed.     

Additive structure in qualitative data: An alternating least squares method with optimal scaling features

A method is developed to investigate the additive structure of data that (a) may be measured at the nominal, ordinal or cardinal levels, (b) may be obtained from either a discrete or continuous source, (c) may have known degrees of imprecision, or (d) may be obtained in unbalanced designs. The method also permits experimental variables to be measured at the ordinal level. It is shown that the method is convergent, and includes several previously proposed methods as special cases. Both Monte Carlo and empirical evaluations indicate that the method is robust.This research was supported in part by grant MH-10006 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Psychometric Laboratory of the University of North Carolina. We wish to thank Thomas S. Wallsten for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Copies of the paper and of ADDALS, a program to perform the analyses discussed herein, may be obtained from the second author.     

Optimal appropriateness measurement

The test-taking behavior of some examinees may be so idiosyncratic that their test scores may not be comparable to the scores of more typical examinees. Appropriateness measurement attempts to use answer patterns to recognize atypical examinees. In this report appropriateness measurement procedures are viewed as statistical tests for choosing between a null hypothesis of normal test-taking behavior and an alternative hypothesis of atypical test-taking behavior. Most powerful tests for inappropriateness are described together with methods for computing their power. A recursion greatly simplifying the calculation of optimal test statistics is described and illustrated.The work reported in this article was supported by United States Office of Naval Research contracts N00014-79C-0752, NR 154-445 and N00014-83K-0397, NR 150-518, Michael V. Levine, Principal Investigator.     

The rank of reduced dispersion matrices

Psychometricians working in factor analysis and econometricians working in regression with measurement error in all variables are both interested in the rank of dispersion matrices under variation of the diagonal elements. Psychometricians concentrate on cases in which low rank can be attained, preferably rank one, the Spearman case. Econometricians cocentrate on cases in which the rank cannot be reduced below the number of variables minus one, the Frisch case. In this paper we give an extensive historial discussion of both fields, we prove the two key results in a more satisfactory and uniform way, we point out various small errors and misunderstandings, and we present a methodological comparison of factor analysis and regression on the basis of our results.Financial support by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Retrospective questions and correlations

In survey research it is not uncommon to ask questions of the following type: “How many times did you undertake actiona in reference periodT of length τ?.” The relationship is established between τ and the correlation of the number of reported actions with some background variable. To this end it is assumed that the process of actions satisfies a renewal model with individual heterogeneity. Also a model has to be formulated for possible recall effects. Applications are given in the field of medical consumption.     

Relationships between the Beck Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Psychiatric Rating Scale for Depression in depressed outpatients

The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Hamilton Psychiatric Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) were used with 300 outpatients diagnosed with DSM-III major depression disorders. A principal-components analysis was performed on the intercorrelations among the 21 BDI and 24 HRSD symptoms. Three orthogonal components were found and interpreted as reflecting differences in self-report and clinical rating methods for measuring the severity of depression. The importance of using both self-reports and clinical ratings for evaluating depression in psychiatric outpatients was discussed.     

On the use of bisection procedures in animal psychophysical scaling

The ability of bisection procedures to specify the form of the psychophysical scale depends upon the precision of the technique. It is demonstrated that the precision of bisection techniques is a function of the stimulus interval bisected. Consequently, the choice of stimuli in a bisection experiment may predispose the ability of the experiment to distinguish between alternative psychophysical scales. The testing of interval scale properties of derived scales and the assessment of context effects in bisection experiments was also discussed.This material has been reviewed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and there is no objection to its presentation and/or publication. The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the author and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting the view of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.