PROGRAMMING FOR SURVIVAL: A MEETING SYSTEM THAT SURVIVES 8 YEARS LATER

Effective and useful interventions often deteriorate when researchers withdraw their direct supervision. We tested the survival of an intervention designed to produce effective weekly meetings in a student housing cooperative without direct researcher supervision. Chairperson performance, proposals completed per hour, and ratings of chairperson performance all increased when resident staff used a training manual, prompting checklist, and performance reviews. Eight years of follow-up revealed continuing high levels of meeting effectiveness. This study demonstrates a methodology for the direct observation and experimental analysis of intervention survival.     

Neuropsychological changes in children with cancer: The treatment of missing data in longitudinal studies

Researchers conducting longitudinal studies with children or adults are inevitably confronted with problems of attrition and missing data. Missing data in longitudinal studies is frequently handled by excluding from analyses those cases for whom data are incomplete. This approach to missing data is not optimal. On the one hand, if data are missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases ignores information collected on those cases that could be used to improve estimates of population parameters (e.g., means, variances, covariances, and growth rates) and improve the power of significance tests of statistical hypotheses. On the other hand, if data are not missing at random, then dropping incomplete cases leads to biased parameter estimates and hypothesis tests that may be internally and externally invalid. This study uses three years of follow-up data from a longitudinal investigation of neuropsychological outcomes of cancer in children to demonstrate the problems presented by missing data in repeated measures designs and some solutions. In evaluating potential biasing effects of attrition, the study extends previous research on neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric cancer by inclusion of patients whose disease had relapsed, and by comparison of surviving and nonsurviving patients. Although the data presented have specific relevance to the study of neuropsychological outcome in pediatric cancer, the problems of missing data and the solutions presented are relevant to a wide variety of diseases and conditions of interest to researchers in child and adult neuropsychology.     

Tests of sphericity of normal distributions and the analysis of repeated measures designs

The locally best invariant test statistic for testing sphericity of normal distributions is shown to be a simple function of the Box/Geisser-Greenhouse degrees of freedom correction factor in a repeated measures design. Because of this relationship it provides a more intuitively appealing test of the necessary and sufficient conditions for valid F-tests in repeated measures analysis of variance than the likelihood ratio test. The properties of the two tests are compared and tables of the critical values of the Box/Geisser-Greenhouse correction factor are given.     

Test theory without true scores?

This paper traces the course of the consequences of viewing test responses as simply providing dichotomous data concerning ordinal relations. It begins by proposing that the score matrix is best considered to be items-plus-persons by items-plus-persons, and recording the wrongs as well as the rights. This shows how an underlying order is defined, and was used to provide the basis for a tailored testing procedure. It also was used to define a number of measures of test consistency. Test items provide person dominance relations, and the relations provided by one item can be in one of three relations with a second one: redundant, contradictory, or unique. Summary statistics concerning the number of relations of each kind are easy to get and provide useful information about the test, information which is related to but different from the usual statistics. These concepts can be extended to form the basis of a test theory which is based on ordinal statistics and frequency counts and which invokes the concept of true scores only in a limited sense.1979 Psychometric Society presidential address.I want to recognize the contributions which others have made to whatever I have accomplished. First to mention here are my teachers: principally Harold Gulliksen, Ledyard Tucker, and the late Edith Jay. Second, I would like to recognize the importance of my graduate students. Tom Reynolds has been especially important in developing the ideas that I will talk about here today, but at various times, the others have made major contributions in this and other topics. I would like to express also a debt to my family, primarily my wife, Rosemary, who herself has a longterm interest in the psychometric area. Finally, I must acknowledge the financial support of the NIMH some time ago, the Office of Naval Research, until about a year ago, and of the James McKeen Cattell Fund this past year.     

An implicit technology of generalization

Traditionally, discrimination has been understood as an active process, and a technology of its procedures has been developed and practiced extensively. Generalization, by contrast, has been considered the natural result of failing to practice a discrimination technology adequately, and thus has remained a passive concept almost devoid of a technology. But, generalization is equally deserving of an active conceptualization and technology. This review summarizes the structure of the generalization literature and its implicit embryonic technology, categorizing studies designed to assess or program generalization according to nine general headings: Train and Hope; Sequential Modification; Introduce to Natural Maintaining Contingencies; Train Sufficient Exemplars; Train Loosely; Use Indiscriminable Contingencies; Program Common Stimuli; Mediate Generalization; and Train "To Generalize".     

Call for new measures suitable for intensive longitudinal studies: Ideas and suggestions

The intensive longitudinal studies (ILS) has recently gained prominence as one of the most developing and promising approaches in psychological research. It is suitable for studying intraindividual dynamics, since it collects many repeated measurements for multiple persons. However many existing psychometric scales that are suitable for cross-sectional studies cannot be used successfully in ILS. That is why it would be advisable to develop them. This article presents potential solutions and future directions that may be helpful in developing such tools. It focuses on and discusses three issues: (1) appropriate tool length, so that the person completing them multiple times does not feel too tired; (2) parallel forms of questionnaires to reduce the problem of remembering previous answers; (3) complementary types of measure, that would allow approaching certain characteristics in slightly different ways.     

Does partisan media make a pawn of mistrust? Institutional trust and preventive COVID-19 health behaviors in a polarized pandemic

In a rapidly developing crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, people are often faced with contradictory or changing information and must determine what sources to trust. Across five time points (N = 5902) we examine how trust in various sources predicts COVID-19 health behaviors. Trust in experts and national news predicted more engagement with most health behaviors from April 2020 to March 2022 and trust in Fox news, which often positioned itself as counter to the mainstream on COVID-19, predicted less engagement. However, we also examined a particular public health behavior (masking) before and after the CDC announcement recommending masks on 3 April 2020 (which reversed earlier expert advice discouraging masks for the general public). Prior to the announcement, trust in experts predicted less mask-wearing while trust in Fox News predicted more. These relationships disappeared in the next 4 days following the announcement and reversed in the 2 years that follow, and emerged for vaccination in the later time points. We also examine how the media trusted by Democrats and Republicans predicts trust in experts and in turn health behaviors. Broadly we consider how the increasingly fragmented epistemic environment has implications for polarization on matters of public health.     

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds 'listen through' ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deaccented. Target word recognition was disrupted only when lexically ambiguous adjectives were accented like nouns. Experiment 2 measured the extent of interference experienced by children when interpreting prenominal words as nouns. In Experiment 3, adults used prosodic cues to identify the form class of adjective/noun homophones in string-identical sentences before the ambiguous words were fully spoken. Results show that children and adults use prosody in conjunction with lexical and distributional cues to ‘listen through’ prenominal adjectives, avoiding costly misinterpretation.     

Postural control in children with and without neurofibromatosis type 1

Previous research has evaluated the motor proficiency of children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and found delays on the balance subtest. However the balance subtest was found to have low sensitivity for identifying balance impairments. This study examines the differences in postural control between children with NF1 and peers with typical development using a force plate. A single limb stance test on a force plate was completed for all participants. The force plate variables, center of pressure maximum distance in the anterior/posterior direction (COPmax A/P) and center of pressure velocity (COPvel A/P) were compared between groups. The NF1 group’s performance was significantly poorer than the control group in both COPmax A/P (p = .01) and COPvel A/P (p = .01). When separated into specific age ranges, only the children in the NF1 group between 5 and 12 years of age demonstrated statistically significant differences in the COP variables. The COP variables for the 13- to 18-year-old group were not significantly different. These results indicate that young children with NF1 have poor postural control. However, postural control appears to improve with maturation.     

The Questionnaire Big Six in 26 Nations: Developing Cross‐Culturally Applicable Big Six,Big Five and Big Two Inventories

The Big Five is a useful model of attributes now commonly used in cross‐cultural research, but without the support of strong measurement invariance (MI) evidence. The Big Six has been proposed as a cross‐culturally informed update, and the broader Big Two (Social Self‐Regulation and Dynamism) draws on even more cross‐cultural evidence. However, neither has been rigorously tested for cross‐cultural MI. Here a Big Six inventory (36QB6) and measures of the Big Five and Big Two derived from it were tested and refined for cross‐cultural usability in samples from 26 nations, divided into three subsets. Confirmatory factor analysis of the models in the first subset of nations demonstrated fit as strong in translation as typical personality measures achieve in their nation of origin (although poor per standard benchmarks). Items that performed inconsistently across cultures were removed, and alternates considered in a second subset of nations. Fit and invariance were improved for refined 30‐item QB6, 25‐item Big Five and 14‐item Big Two measures in the third subset of nations. For all models, decrease in comparative fit index between MI levels was larger than .01, indicating lack of support for higher levels. Configural and factorial invariance were relatively stronger, compared to scalar and full. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology