The family culture of negotiation—a result of changing parent‐child relationships

Case studies of parent‐child relations in three different European regions—West Germany, East Germany and the Netherlands—offer material for the comparative analysis of the ongoing intra‐familial process of modernization and civilization in post‐war West European societies. The data are drawn from extended narrative interviews with twelve‐year‐olds and from parallel but separate semi‐structured ‘mirrored’ interviews with the same children and their parents. The results of the analysis show that family relations in general, and parent‐child relations in particular, are increasingly marked by a familial ‘culture of negotiation’. This suggests that the balance of intergenerational power relations is currently in the process of change. To a greater or lesser extent, contemporary family relations are characterized by situationally grounded processes of negotiation between parents and children.     

Truncated sequential change-point detection based on renewal counting processes II

The standard approach in change-point theory is to base the statistical analysis on a sample of fixed size. Alternatively, one observes some random phenomenon sequentially and takes action as soon as one observes some statistically significant deviation from the “normal” behaviour. The present paper is a continuation of Gut and Steinebach [2002. Truncated sequential change-point detection based on renewal counting processes. Scand. J. Statist. 29, 693–719] the main point being that here we look in more detail into the behaviour of the relevant stopping times, in particular the time it takes from the actual change-point until the change is detected, more precisely, we prove asymptotics for stopping times under alternatives.     

A method for consideration of conditional dependencies in the Fellegi and Sunter model of record linkage

An objective of Record Linkage is to link two data files by identifying common elements. A popular model for doing the separation is the probabilistic one from Fellegi and Sunter. To estimate the parameters needed for the model usually a mixture model is constructed and the EM algorithm is applied. For simplification, the assumption of conditional independence is often made. This assumption says that if several attributes of elements in the data are compared, then the results of the comparisons regarding the several attributes are independent within the mixture classes. A mixture model constructed with this assumption has been often used. Within this article a straightforward extension of the model is introduced which allows for conditional dependencies but is heavily dependent on the choice of the starting value. Therefore also an estimation procedure for the EM algorithm starting value is proposed. The two models are compared empirically in a simulation study based on telephone book entries. Particularly the effect of different starting values and conditional dependencies on the matching results is investigated.     

Unbiased estimation in type II censored samples from a one-truncation parameter density

We consider uniform minimum variance unbiased estimation of a U-estimable function when the sample is (singly) Type II censored and comes from a one-truncation parameter density f(x;θ) = h(x) q(θ). An explicit expression for the estimator is derived. Shortest length confidence interval for q(θ) is obtained.     

Stochastic dominance for ranking ventures: Comments and extensions

This paper suggests some extensions to Tilley and Eilon's paper on ranking ventures. Tilley and Eilon consider concave utility functions consisting of two linear segments and this allows all rectangular distributions to be ordered. Such utility functions have a wide scope and allow other distributions to be ordered.