密集追踪数据的中介效应分析

随着密集追踪数据在社科领域的广泛运用, 如何对密集追踪数据进行中介效应分析吸引了诸多研究者的注意。如果还是按通常追踪数据一样对待, 采用多水平模型和多水平结构方程模型进行中介效应分析, 则既忽略了变量之间的先后顺序, 也无法探究变量之间动态变化的关联。本文以1-1-1密集追踪中介模型为例, 详述了基于多水平自回归模型(MAM)及其变式(残差MAM)、动态结构方程模型(DSEM)及其变式(残差DSEM、交叉分类的DSEM)的密集追踪中介效应分析方法, 并总结出一个分析流程。用示例演示如何进行密集追踪数据的中介效应分析, 并给出了相应的Mplus和R程序。最后讨论了密集追踪数据的中介效应分析的拓展方向。     

The Quantified Relationship

The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article, we build upon this work to provide a detailed ethical analysis of the Quantified Relationship (QR). We identify eight core objections to the QR and subject them to critical scrutiny. We argue that although critics raise legitimate concerns, there are ways in which tracking technologies can be used to support and facilitate good relationships. We thus adopt a stance of cautious openness toward this technology and advocate the development of a research agenda for the positive use of QR technologies.     

From Zero to Sixty: Calibrating Real-Time Responses

Recent advances in data recording technology have given researchers new ways of collecting on-line and continuous data for analyzing input-output systems. For example, continuous response digital interfaces are increasingly used in psychophysics. The statistical problem related to these input-output systems reduces to linking time-varying covariates to a continuous response variate. Using real-time data obtained from an experiment in psychoacoustics, we showcase new statistical tools that incorporate dynamical elements of an input-output system. We employ functional data analysis (FDA) methods and a simple differential equation to analyze and model the continuous responses. Furthermore, we outline the issues involved in analyzing input-output systems when the exact form of the underlying mathematical model is not known. Finally, we develop a calibration method to facilitate inter-subject and intra-subject comparisons. This work was supported by grants from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to J. O. Ramsay and to D. J. Levitin, and by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to D. J. Levitin. We would like to thank Bennett Smith for designing and implementing the software used to conduct the pitch tracking experiment. Also, we wish to thank the research assistants in the Levitin Laboratory involved in the data collection: Catherine Chapados, Andrew Schaaf and Carla Himmelman. We would also like to acknowledge Giles Hooker’s work on implementing the generalized profiling software used within this paper.     

Disaggregating the Distal,Proximal, and Time-Varying Effects of Parent Alcoholism on Children’s Internalizing Symptoms

We tested whether children show greater internalizing symptoms when their parents are actively abusing alcohol. In an integrative data analysis, we combined observations over ages 2 through 17 from two longitudinal studies of children of alcoholic parents and matched controls recruited from the community. Using a mixed modeling approach, we tested whether children showed elevated mother- and child-reported internalizing symptoms (a) at the same time that parents showed alcohol-related consequences (time-varying effects), (b) if parents showed greater alcohol-related consequences during the study period (proximal effects), and (c) if parents had a lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism that predated the study period (distal effects). No support for time-varying effects was found; proximal effects of mothers' alcohol-related consequences on child-reported internalizing symptoms were found and distal effects of mother and father alcoholism predicted greater internalizing symptoms among children of alcoholic parents. Implications for the time-embedded relations between parent alcoholism and children's internalizing symptoms are discussed.     

Inducing a blockmodel structure of two-mode binary data using seriation procedures

We show that seriation of the rows and columns of a two-mode, binary matrix can be an effective method for producing a reordering of the matrix that reveals a blockmodel structure of the data. The objective criterion of the seriation process is based on Robinson patterning of matrix elements. The key advantages of the proposed method are: (a) it can be used in conjunction with existing two-mode blockmodeling algorithms by facilitating selection of the number of classes for the rows and columns of the matrix and the appropriate types of ideal blocks; (b) the model uses a well-grounded index based on Robinson structure, (c) guaranteed optimal solutions can be obtained for problems of practical size, and (d) the seriation method is frequently capable of producing a solution that has a substantive interpretation with respect to the orderings of the row objects and column items.     

Adjusting for information inflation due to local dependency in moderately large item clusters

When multiple items are clustered around a reading passage, the local independence assumption in item response theory is often violated. The amount of information contained in an item cluster is usually overestimated if violation of local independence is ignored and items are treated as locally independent when in fact they are not. In this article we provide a general method that adjusts for the inflation of information associated with a test containing item clusters. A computational scheme was presented for the evaluation of the factor of adjustment for clusters in the restrictive case of two items per cluster, and the general case of more than two items per cluster. The methodology was motivated by a study of the NAEP Reading Assessment. We present a simulated study along with an analysis of a NAEP data set.The research was supported under the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Grant No. R999G30002) as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. This work was started when the author was at the Division of Statistics and Psychometrics at the Educational Testing Service. The author thanks Juliet Shaffer, Bob Mislevy, Eric Bradlow, three reviewers and an associate editor for their helpful comments on the paper.     

Models for ordinal hierarchical classes analysis

This paper proposes an ordinal generalization of the hierarchical classes model originally proposed by De Boeck and Rosenberg (1998). Any hierarchical classes model implies a decomposition of a two-way two-mode binary arrayM into two component matrices, called bundle matrices, which represent the association relation and the set-theoretical relations among the elements of both modes inM. Whereas the original model restricts the bundle matrices to be binary, the ordinal hierarchical classes model assumes that the bundles are ordinal variables with a prespecified number of values. This generalization results in a classification model with classes ordered along ordinal dimensions. The ordinal hierarchical classes model is shown to subsume Coombs and Kao's (1955) model for nonmetric factor analysis. An algorithm is described to fit the model to a given data set and is subsequently evaluated in an extensive simulation study. An application of the model to student housing data is discussed.     

Social interest,extreme response style,and implications for adjustment

As part of a series of studies examining Adler's proposition that social interest, or interest and concern for others, is a major factor facilitating personal adjustment, the research investigated the relation between social interest and Extreme Response Style (ERS). ERS was chosen as an indirect measure of maladjustment since research has confirmed Adler's contention that it is especially prevalent among neurotic individuals. In three studies involving a total of 221 subjects, inverse relations were found between a measure of social interest and ERS scores derived from four questionnaires concerning attitudes toward self, others, and a wide variety of attitudinal issues. The data also indicated that the results were not due to either apathy or repression being associated with social interest. The results provided further evidence that positive relations between social interest and adjustment are not limited to self-reports of the latter.