Girls Study Girls Inc.: Engaging Girls in Evaluation Through Participatory Action Research

Between 2004 and 2007, Girls Incorporated^® conducted research about the experience of five affiliates from different parts of the United States as they engaged with girls in Girls Study Girls Inc., a participatory evaluation project that explored the meaning and impact of Girls Inc. environments and uncovered ways such environments can be improved. We describe the context and motivation for using participatory action research [PAR] in Girls Inc. environments and discuss the relevance and importance of PAR for organizations that empower girls and young women. We explain the process of training and engaging Girls Inc. members in research, discuss the effectiveness of Girls Study Girls Inc. as an evaluation strategy, and conclude this article with lessons learned and recommendations for using PAR in evaluating youth development programs.     

An imprecise goal programming approach for modeling design team's preferences in quality function deployment planning process

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an approach that facilitates designing product by analyzing and projecting the Customer's Needs (CNs) in the Engineering Characteristics (ECs) of a product. The aim of QFD planning process is to determine the target levels for ECs of a product that achieve high level of overall customers' satisfaction. However, integrating design team's preferences in this preliminary stage of product design could make the design more realistic and could also avoid unfeasibility in posterior phases of the product development processes. Moreover, this process is performed within an imprecise environment, and more than one factor must be taken into account in determining targets levels of ECs; especially, the limited resources and increased market competition. This paper presents an imprecise goal programming approach to determine the best aspiration levels of ECs in QFD planning process. Based on benchmarking data of ECs, the concept of satisfaction functions will be utilized to integrate explicitly the design team's preferences and incorporate the competitive analysis of target market into the modelling and solution processes. In addition, the relationships linking CNs and ECs and the ECs to each other are integrated by functional relationships. The proposed approach will be illustrated through an example of product development of an emulsification dynamite packing machine. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

青少年神经质人格、互联网服务偏好与网络成瘾的关系

采用问卷法,以339名中学生为被试,通过无拘束结构方程模型分析方法探讨了神经质人格特征与互联网服务偏好的交互作用对网络成瘾的影响。研究发现在对网络成瘾的影响上,神经质人格与互联网社交、娱乐和信息使用偏好存在显著的交互作用,但与互联网交易服务不存在显著的交互作用：（1）从平均影响来看,互联网社交、娱乐和交易使用偏好以及神经质人格对网络成瘾有显著的正向影响,而互联网信息使用偏好对网络成瘾没有显著影响;（2）在神经质高分组中,互联网社交、娱乐和信息服务偏好与PIU的正向关系都是最强的;在神经质低分组中,互联网社交服务偏好与PIU的正向关系最弱,而互联网娱乐和信息服务偏好与PIU甚至呈现出微弱的反向关系;（3）即便是高神经质人格类型的青少年,对信息服务的偏好也不容易使其卷入PIU;而对于低神经质人格类型的青少年来说,即便是偏好社交和娱乐服务,也不容易卷入PIU     

Effects of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexics

The present study investigated the impact of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexic children. In two experiments, eye movements were recorded while dyslexic children, reading-age, and chronological-age controls, performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task on words and strings of hashes presented either with default inter-character spacing or with extra spacing between the characters. The results of Experiment 1 showed that (1) only proficient readers had already developed highly automatized procedures for programming both left- and rightward saccades, depending on the discreteness of the stimuli and (2) children of all groups were disrupted (i.e., had trouble to land close to the beginning of the stimuli) by extra spacing between the characters of the stimuli, and particularly for stimuli presented in the left visual field. Experiment 2 was designed to disentangle the role of inter-character spacing and spatial width. Stimuli were made the same physical length in the default and extra-spacing conditions by having more characters in the default spacing condition. Our results showed that inter-letter spacing still influenced saccade programming when controlling for spatial width, thus confirming the detrimental effect of extra spacing for saccade programming. We conclude that the beneficial effect of increased inter-letter spacing on reading can be better explained in terms of decreased visual crowding than improved saccade targeting.     

不只是“谈话疗法”：精神分析治疗中的非言语维度

精神分析治疗在很长一段时间里被视为“谈话疗法”,其治愈机制是将潜意识的内容意识化,语言解释在其中发挥关键作用。自20世纪末开始,越来越多分析师强调非言语交流在治疗中的作用。非言语交流不仅能够为咨访双方提供更丰富的交流形式,还能通过互动中的“相遇时刻”,实现对患者过去经验的重组,改变其有缺陷的内隐关系知晓。非言语交流和语言交流能够在治疗中发挥互补作用,未来的精神分析心理学要继续加强对非言语领域的研究。     

Interactive silences within spontaneous early infant–father ‘dialogues’

The present longitudinal and naturalistic study aims to investigate infants' and fathers' facial expressions of emotions during pauses preceding and following spontaneous early infant–father conversation. Studying emotional expressions in the course of pauses in early infant–father interaction is important because it may extend our knowledge on how, without being able to speak, infants begin communication and develop a capacity to share understanding of what they and Significant Others (such as fathers) mean by what they do. Eleven infant–father dyads from Crete, Greece, were observed during their natural interactions at home from the second to the sixth month of life. The microanalysis of fathers' and infants' facial expressions of emotions provided evidence that: (a) in the course of pauses preceding and following early infant–father conversation, either the infant is interested in the father while the latter expresses pleasure to the infant, or the infant expresses external interest while the father is interested in the infant, (b) infants seem to attune their descending and stable emotional intensity to the same direction as their father's emotional intensity, (c) infants and fathers remain consistent in their emotional expression in the beginning and at the end of the pause, and (d) infant and paternal pleasure and interest did not change significantly across the nine age points of this study. Exploratory analysis of the relationship of paternal and infant emotional expressions across infants' birth order provided evidence of certain differences and similarities. It is proposed that pausal interruptions preceding and following free early infant–father ‘dialogues’ constitute interactive silences, since in their course there is evidence of inter‐subjective emotional coordination and intra‐subjective regulation of emotion. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heuristic Implementation of Dynamic Programming for Matrix Permutation Problems in Combinatorial Data Analysis

Dynamic programming methods for matrix permutation problems in combinatorial data analysis can produce globally-optimal solutions for matrices up to size 30×30, but are computationally infeasible for larger matrices because of enormous computer memory requirements. Branch-and-bound methods also guarantee globally-optimal solutions, but computation time considerations generally limit their applicability to matrix sizes no greater than 35×35. Accordingly, a variety of heuristic methods have been proposed for larger matrices, including iterative quadratic assignment, tabu search, simulated annealing, and variable neighborhood search. Although these heuristics can produce exceptional results, they are prone to converge to local optima where the permutation is difficult to dislodge via traditional neighborhood moves (e.g., pairwise interchanges, object-block relocations, object-block reversals, etc.). We show that a heuristic implementation of dynamic programming yields an efficient procedure for escaping local optima. Specifically, we propose applying dynamic programming to reasonably-sized subsequences of consecutive objects in the locally-optimal permutation, identified by simulated annealing, to further improve the value of the objective function. Experimental results are provided for three classic matrix permutation problems in the combinatorial data analysis literature: (a) maximizing a dominance index for an asymmetric proximity matrix; (b) least-squares unidimensional scaling of a symmetric dissimilarity matrix; and (c) approximating an anti-Robinson structure for a symmetric dissimilarity matrix. We are extremely grateful to the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and corrections.     

Identifying a Reordering of Rows and Columns for Multiple Proximity Matrices Using Multiobjective Programming

This paper is concerned with a problem where K (n×n) proximity matrices are available for a set of n objects. The goal is to identify a single permutation of the n objects that provides an adequate structural fit, as measured by an appropriate index, for each of the K matrices. A multiobjective programming approach for this problem, which seeks to optimize a weighted function of the K indices, is proposed, and illustrative examples are provided using a set of proximity matrices from the psychological literature. These examples show that, by solving the multiobjective programming model under different weighting schemes, the quantitative analyst can uncover information about the relationships among the matrices and often identify one or more permutations that provide good to excellent index values for all matrices.     

Statistical inference of minimum rank factor analysis

For any given number of factors, Minimum Rank Factor Analysis yields optimal communalities for an observed covariance matrix in the sense that the unexplained common variance with that number of factors is minimized, subject to the constraint that both the diagonal matrix of unique variances and the observed covariance matrix minus that diagonal matrix are positive semidefinite. As a result, it becomes possible to distinguish the explained common variance from the total common variance. The percentage of explained common variance is similar in meaning to the percentage of explained observed variance in Principal Component Analysis, but typically the former is much closer to 100 than the latter. So far, no statistical theory of MRFA has been developed. The present paper is a first start. It yields closed-form expressions for the asymptotic bias of the explained common variance, or, more precisely, of the unexplained common variance, under the assumption of multivariate normality. Also, the asymptotic variance of this bias is derived, and also the asymptotic covariance matrix of the unique variances that define a MRFA solution. The presented asymptotic statistical inference is based on a recently developed perturbation theory of semidefinite programming. A numerical example is also offered to demonstrate the accuracy of the expressions.This work was supported, in part, by grant DMS-0073770 from the National Science Foundation.     

高低自我监控者在不同互动情境中的被洞悉错觉

用Snyder的自我监控量表,从大学生中筛选出典型高低自我监控者。要求他们不动声色地喝下1杯醋和4杯水,而后,让观众根据他们的表现去辨别饮料的味道,并让被试预测可能猜中的人数。在实验1中,被试和观众以录像为媒介间接的互相推测;在实验2中,被试和观众现场直接的互相推测。两个实验都包括高低自我监控者各21名。实验结果表明,自我监控水平对被洞悉错觉有明显的影响,在直接和间接两种互动情境中,低自我监控者的被洞悉错觉都比高自我监控者强烈。互动情境对高自我监控者有明显的影响,在间接的互动中,高自我监控者出现了明显的被洞悉错觉;而在直接的互动情境中,低自我监控者的被洞悉错觉依然非常明显,高自我监控者则趋于消失