Is Autism a Preventable Disorder of Verbal Behavior? A Response to Five Commentaries

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - This paper presents a response to five commentaries on our article An Analysis of Autism as a Contingency-Shaped Disorder of Verbal Behavior (Drash &...     

Indicator development as a site of collective imagination? The case of European Commission policies on the circular economy

ABSTRACT

In recent years the concept of the circular economy gained prominence in EU policy-making. The circular economy promotes a future in which linear ‘make-use-dispose’ cultures are replaced by more circular models. In this paper, we use the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to ask how an imaginary of circularity has been assembled and stabilized, which imaginative resources were drawn on, and how goals, priorities, benefits and risks haven been merged with discourses of innovation, sustainability and growth. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with policy officers of the European Commission, we argue that the monitoring framework and indicator development function as a site collective imagination in which desirable ‘circular’ futures are co-produced. These futures are imagined to provide novel opportunities for the private sector and to generate jobs and economic growth while at the same time improving the natural environment as measured by selected environmental indicators.     

The nature of the connection between life course and satisfaction with community services

Research on satisfaction with community services has used both age and life cycle stage as predictors of satisfaction. As both age and life cycle stage are indicators of life course, their relative advantages in service satisfaction research need to be assessed. The authors correlated both age and life cycle stage with twenty service satisfaction items and with item non-response (a measure of the salience of a service). Results were: (1) associations with service satisfaction were linear, (2) some associations with salience were markedly curvilinear, and (3) as predictors of service satisfaction, age and life cycle performed similarly. The choice between age and life cycle as predictors of service satisfaction appears to involve conceptual as well as empirical issues.     

Eye-Tracking Data: New Insights on Response Order Effects and Other Cognitive Shortcuts in Survey Responding

Survey researchers since Cannell have worried that respondents may take various shortcuts to reduce the effort needed to complete a survey. The evidence for such shortcuts is often indirect. For instance, preferences for earlier versus later response options have been interpreted as evidence that respondents do not read beyond the first few options. This is really only a hypothesis, however, that is not supported by direct evidence regarding the allocation of respondent attention. In the current study, we used a new method to more directly observe what respondents do and do not look at by recording their eye movements while they answered questions in a Web survey. The eye-tracking data indicate that respondents do in fact spend more time looking at the first few options in a list of response options than those at the end of the list; this helps explain their tendency to select the options presented first regardless of their content. In addition, the eye-tracking data reveal that respondents are reluctant to invest effort in reading definitions of survey concepts that are only a mouse click away or paying attention to initially hidden response options. It is clear from the eye-tracking data that some respondents are more prone to these and other cognitive shortcuts than others, providing relatively direct evidence for what had been suspected based on more conventional measures.     

A general method of constructing E(s2)-optimal supersaturated designs

There has been much recent interest in supersaturated designs and their application in factor screening experiments. Supersaturated designs have mainly been constructed by using the E ( s ²)-optimality criterion originally proposed by Booth and Cox in 1962. However, until now E ( s ²)-optimal designs have only been established with certainty for n experimental runs when the number of factors m is a multiple of n-1 , and in adjacent cases where m = q ( n -1) + r (| r | 2, q an integer). A method of constructing E ( s ²)-optimal designs is presented which allows a reasonably complete solution to be found for various numbers of runs n including n ,=8 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 40, 48, 64.     

Statistical approaches for conducting network meta-analysis in drug development

We introduce health technology assessment and evidence synthesis briefly, and then concentrate on the statistical approaches used for conducting network meta-analysis (NMA) in the development and approval of new health technologies. NMA is an extension of standard meta-analysis where indirect as well as direct information is combined and can be seen as similar to the analysis of incomplete-block designs. We illustrate it with an example involving three treatments, using fixed-effects and random-effects models, and using frequentist and Bayesian approaches. As most statisticians in the pharmaceutical industry are familiar with SAS? software for analyzing clinical trials, we provide example code for each of the methods we illustrate. One issue that has been overlooked in the literature is the choice of constraints applied to random effects, and we show how this affects the estimates and standard errors and propose a symmetric set of constraints that is equivalent to most current practice. Finally, we discuss the role of statisticians in planning and carrying out NMAs and the strategy for dealing with important issues such as heterogeneity.