Generalized confidence interval estimation for the mean of delta-lognormal distribution: an application to New Zealand trawl survey data

Highly skewed and non-negative data can often be modeled by the delta-lognormal distribution in fisheries research. However, the coverage probabilities of extant interval estimation procedures are less satisfactory in small sample sizes and highly skewed data. We propose a heuristic method of estimating confidence intervals for the mean of the delta-lognormal distribution. This heuristic method is an estimation based on asymptotic generalized pivotal quantity to construct generalized confidence interval for the mean of the delta-lognormal distribution. Simulation results show that the proposed interval estimation procedure yields satisfactory coverage probabilities, expected interval lengths and reasonable relative biases. Finally, the proposed method is employed in red cod densities data for a demonstration.     

Measuring the Unmeasurable—A Study of Domestic Violence Risk Prediction and Management

ABSTRACT

The prevention of domestic violence (DV) have aroused serious concerns in Taiwan because of the disparity between the increasing amount of reported DV cases that doubled over the past decade and the scarcity of social workers. However, most common collaborations for DV prevention, between academic researchers and advocacy groups or governments outsourcing, often fail to produce effective prevention strategies. Hence, Data for Social Good Initiative (D4SG) worked with Taipei City Government to improve the efficiency of DV prevention and risk management on two levels—project collaboration level and data level. On the project collaboration level, we adopted a platform strategy and utilize public-private partnership (PPP) to connect and empower change agents across data silos from pilot runs to actual project execution. On the data level, we helped social workers differentiate the risk level of new cases by building a repeat victimization risk prediction model using random forest method with the 2015 data from Taipei City government’s DV database. The accuracy and F1-measure of our model were 96.3% and 62.8%. This projects’ PPP approach and quantification method successfully improved DV prevention process. These methodologies have also been applied to other work fields including firework prediction, emergency healthcare management as a paradigm.     

Health,Quality of Homecare Services and Quality of Life: A Case of Frail Older Immigrant Adults

The theory about missing links of economic growth often lags behind the empirical estimations of such links. A consensus has emerged that ethnic fractionalization has a negative impact on growth, also when controlled for income inequality. Often, although implicitly, the assumed channel is social cohesion. We analyse the effect of fractionalization on social cohesion with a different inequality measure, namely a social measure of inequality: the Inclusion of Minorities Index. Our results indicate that it is social exclusion, which reduces social cohesion, rather than diversity as such. We conclude that future studies of social cohesion and its relation to growth may benefit from using measures of social exclusion next to ethnic diversity.     

Domain Importance in Subjective Well-Being Measures

This article explores the underlying dimensions of consumer well-being from 2013 adults representing the major cities in two emerging countries, China and India; and three developed countries, Japan Korea, and Singapore. The analyses reveal that well-being dimension importance varies across respondents. For example, Market Mavens valued acquisition, image, and consumption dimensions while Social Shoppers value the personal interactions associated with consumer well-being. These groups exist in all five countries, suggesting that macro measures of consumer well-being may mask meaningful differences. Our results suggest that consumer well-being measures need to be modified to account for individual differences.     

Importance Weighting in Client Satisfaction Measures: Lessons from the Life Satisfaction Literature

The linearisation approach to approximating variance of complex non-linear statistics is a well-established procedure. The basis of this approach is to reduce non-linear statistics to a linear form, justified on the basis of asymptotic properties of large populations and samples. For diverse cross-sectional measures of inequality such linearised forms are available, though the derivations involved can be complex. Replication methods based on repeated resampling of the parent sample provide an alternative approach to variance estimation of complex statistics from complex samples. These procedures can be computationally demanding but tend to be straightforward technically. Perhaps the simplest and the best established among these is the Jackknife Repeated Replication (JRR) method. Recently the JRR method has been shown to produce comparable variance for cross-sectional poverty measures (Verma and Betti in J Appl Stat 38(8):1549–1576, 2011); and it has also been extended to estimate the variance of longitudinal poverty measures for which Taylor approximation is not currently available, or at least cannot be easily derived. This paper extends the JRR methodology further to the estimation of variance of differences and averages of inequality measures. It illustrates the application of JRR methodology using data from four waves of the EU-SILC for Spain. For cross-sectional measures design effect can be decomposed into the effect of clustering and stratification, and that of weighting under both methodologies. For differences and averages of these poverty measures JRR method is applied to compute variance and three separate components of the design effect—effect of clustering and stratification, effect of weighting, and an additional effect due to correlation of different cross-sections from panel data—combining these the overall design effect can be estimated.     

Twicing Kernels and a Small Bias Property of Semiparametric Estimators

The purpose of this note is to show how semiparametric estimators with a small bias property can be constructed. The small bias property (SBP) of a semiparametric estimator is that its bias converges to zero faster than the pointwise and integrated bias of the nonparametric estimator on which it is based. We show that semiparametric estimators based on twicing kernels have the SBP. We also show that semiparametric estimators where nonparametric kernel estimation does not affect the asymptotic variance have the SBP. In addition we discuss an interpretation of series and sieve estimators as idempotent transformations of the empirical distribution that helps explain the known result that they lead to the SBP. In Monte Carlo experiments we find that estimators with the SBP have mean‐square error that is smaller and less sensitive to bandwidth than those that do not have the SBP.     

A Client Satisfaction Measure of Homecare Services for Older Adults

Client satisfaction can be used as an indicator for service quality. Without concrete feedback from clients, however, the usefulness of client satisfaction data for service improvement can be limited. This study described the development of a client satisfaction measure that can be used to provide concrete feedback for service providers. Based on a conceptual framework proposed in the literature, the Client Satisfaction: Home Care (CSAT-HC) uses a client-centered perspective to measure client satisfaction for homecare services for older adults. A survey of 200 older adults receiving homecare services provided by a social service agency in a large U.S. Midwest city was conducted to assess the psychometric properties of CSAT-HC. Results based on the 156 completed surveys show that CSAT-HC has good validity (correlation r = .62 with a popular client satisfaction measure) and test-retest reliability (r = .75). These results indicate that CSAT-HC is a valid and reliable client satisfaction measure; and therefore, providers of homecare services for older adults can use CSAT-HC to obtain client feedback for quality assurance or program evaluation purpose. Future research may use CSAT-HC to explore the potential influences of quality of homecare services on the well-being of older adult clients.     

External technology acquisition and product innovativeness: The moderating roles of R&D investment and configurational context

An increasing number of studies in technology/innovation management contribute to the understanding of the relationship between external technology acquisition and product innovation performance. On the other hand, the meta-analytic reviews of new product development literature indicate a positive impact of product innovativeness on product innovation performance. However, existing research has not examined the link between external technology acquisition and product innovativeness. This study, therefore, aims to fill this gap of knowledge by investigating the external technology acquisition—product innovativeness relationship and examining the moderating roles of R&D investment and configurational context on this link. Based on a panel sample of 105 high-technology firms over a six-year period, a least squared dummy variable s model reveals interesting results. First, external technology acquisition has a positive impact on product innovativeness. Second, R&D investment increases the effect of external technology acquisition on product innovativeness. Lastly, firm size exhibits a negative effect on the contribution of external technology acquisition to product innovativeness. However, firm age positively impacts the relationship between external technology acquisition and product innovativeness. In addition, this study reveals a positive effect of product innovativeness on firm growth.     

The role of parenting and personal characteristics on deviant peer association among European American and Latino adolescents

This study examined both mothers’ and fathers’ parenting (positive and negative) and adolescents’ personal characteristics (religiosity, social initiative, aggression, depression) in relation to perceived deviant peer association for European American and Latino adolescents. Using structural equation modeling, adolescents’ reports of positive or negative mothering and fathering were found to be related to adolescents’ personal characteristics, and these characteristics were, in turn, related to perceived deviant peer association. Ethnic differences in means were found in both parenting and outcome variables, with European American adolescents reporting higher levels of positive parenting and social initiative, and lower levels of perceived deviant peer association than Latino adolescents. Despite these mean differences, no ethnic differences were found in the overall measurement or structural model, suggesting that this process functions similarly for these two ethnic groups.     

Importance Counts: The Role of Relative Importance of Service Elements in Client Satisfaction Measures

ABSTRACT

It is not uncommon for social work service providers, researchers, and evaluators to develop measures to obtain client satisfaction data relevant to their particular service settings. These measures are often constructed through a set of (usually Likert-type) satisfaction rating response items for each of the service elements relevant to their settings. Scores from these multiple items are then either summed or averaged to produce global satisfaction scores. By summing or averaging satisfaction scores across all items, one implicitly assumes that all survey items that represent various service elements carry equal weight. This assumption of equal weight is somewhat counterintuitive because individual clients may perceive certain survey items or service elements to be more important, or carry more weight, than others. Analyzing data from interviews with 112 clients of an elderly case management service agency in a large city in the Midwest region of the United States, this study examined this equal weight assumption in an elderly case management service setting. Results indicated that not all service elements were considered equally important, which called into question the common practice of summing or averaging satisfaction scores of various service elements to represent global client satisfaction.