Preservice Teachers and Religion: Serious Gaps in Religious Knowledge and the First Amendment

Recognizing the influence of religion on people's worldview and daily lives, we wondered if elementary and secondary social studies preservice teachers knew enough about religions not only to be culturally responsive in a classroom but also whether they knew enough to teach about these religions within the appropriate curriculum. We used questions from previously tested surveys to ascertain the students’ knowledge about world religions, the First Amendment's religion clauses, and the application of religion in schools. Our findings suggest that preservice teachers’ knowledge about all religions, including their own, and about the First Amendment's intent, is lacking.     

Establishing the Validity of the Affirmative Training Inventory: Assessing the Relationship between Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Affirmative Training and Students’ Clinical Competence

This study established the validity and factor structure of the Affirmative Training Inventory (ATI; T. S. Carlson, C. R. McGeorge & M. Rock, unpublished) as a measure of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) affirmative clinical training. Additionally, this study examined the latent associations among the subscales of the ATI and the Sexual Orientation Counselor Competency Scale ( Bidell, 2005 ) utilizing a sample of 248 master’s and doctoral couple and family therapy students. The findings from this study provide empirical support for the relationship between specific classroom‐related content associated with LGB affirmative therapy and students’ perceptions of their own ability to work competently with LGB clients. This study also found a positive association between the degree to which couple and family therapy programs adopt a LGB‐affirmative stance and students’ beliefs, knowledge, and skills associated with competent therapy with LGB clients.     

Leisure activity and adjustment in retirement

A sample of retired persons in a southern metropolitan area responded to a questionnaire designed to investigate the interrelationship between level of leisure activity and adjustment in retirement Adjustment was measured by two indices, life satisfaction and alienation. The survey's results show that persons who have more leisure activities are more satisfied with their lives and are less alienated than those who have few leisure activities.     

Leadership development as identity formation: middle managers’ leadership learning from MBA study

This article challenges often unquestioned understandings within human resource development (HRD) of leadership as comprising knowledge and skills and leadership development as involving the transfer of such knowledge and skills from formal interventions to workplace performance. Using the notions of leadership as identity and learning as a process of identity formation, the article reports qualitative research showing how a case-study group of middle managers in a sector of the economy undergoing unprecedented turbulence, UK local government, developed a sense of themselves as leaders and how a key HRD intervention, a corporate MBA, facilitated such identity development. In particular, the article uses situated learning theory to examine how informal communities of practice associated with Master of Business Administration (MBA) study provided a forum for identity building of equal developmental value to the formal MBA curriculum. The implications for future HRD research are established and suggestions made for the re-design of HRD interventions to best enable identity-work.     

Managing Supply Chain Execution: Monitoring Timeliness and Correctness via Individualized Trace Data

Improvements in information technologies provide new opportunities to control and improve business processes based on real‐time performance data. A class of data we call individualized trace data (ITD) identifies the real‐time status of individual entities as they move through execution processes, such as an individual product passing through a supply chain or a uniquely identified mortgage application going through an approval process. We develop a mathematical framework which we call the State‐Identity‐Time (SIT) Framework to represent and manipulate ITD at multiple levels of aggregation for different managerial purposes. Using this framework, we design a pair of generic quality measures—timeliness and correctness—for the progress of entities through a supply chain. The timeliness and correctness metrics provide behavioral visibility that can help managers to grasp the dynamics of supply chain behavior that is distinct from asset visibility such as inventory. We develop special quality control methods using this framework to address the issue of overreaction that is common among managers faced with a large volume of fast‐changing data. The SIT structure and its associated methods inform managers on if, when, and where to react. We illustrate our approach using simulations based on real RFID data from a Walmart RFID pilot project.     

Robust estimation of the ratio of scale parameters for positive random variables

An estimator of the ratio of scale parameters of the distributions of two positive random variables is developed for the case where the only difference between the distributions is a difference in scale. Simulation studies demonstrate that the estimator performs much better, in terms of mean squared error, than the most popular one among those estimators currently available.     

Fitting a Semi-Parametric Mixture Model for Competing Risks in Survival Data

A model for survival analysis is studied that is relevant for samples which are subject to multiple types of failure. In comparison with a more standard approach, through the appropriate use of hazard functions and transition probabilities, the model allows for a more accurate study of cause-specific failure with regard to both the timing and type of failure. A semiparametric specification of a mixture model is employed that is able to adjust for concomitant variables and allows for the assessment of their effects on the probabilities of eventual causes of failure through a generalized logistic model, and their effects on the corresponding conditional hazard functions by employing the Cox proportional hazards model. A carefully formulated estimation procedure is presented that uses an EM algorithm based on a profile likelihood construction. The methods discussed, which could also be used for reliability analysis, are applied to a prostate cancer data set.     

Alternating event processes during lifetimes: population dynamics and statistical inference

In the literature studying recurrent event data, a large amount of work has been focused on univariate recurrent event processes where the occurrence of each event is treated as a single point in time. There are many applications, however, in which univariate recurrent events are insufficient to characterize the feature of the process because patients experience nontrivial durations associated with each event. This results in an alternating event process where the disease status of a patient alternates between exacerbations and remissions. In this paper, we consider the dynamics of a chronic disease and its associated exacerbation-remission process over two time scales: calendar time and time-since-onset. In particular, over calendar time, we explore population dynamics and the relationship between incidence, prevalence and duration for such alternating event processes. We provide nonparametric estimation techniques for characteristic quantities of the process. In some settings, exacerbation processes are observed from an onset time until death; to account for the relationship between the survival and alternating event processes, nonparametric approaches are developed for estimating exacerbation process over lifetime. By understanding the population dynamics and within-process structure, the paper provide a new and general way to study alternating event processes.     

COMBINING HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS USING MASS IMPUTATION TO ESTIMATE POPULATION TOTALS

Pressure is often placed on statistical analysts to improve the accuracy of their population estimates. In response to this pressure, analysts have long exploited the potential to combine surveys in various ways. This paper develops a framework for combining surveys when data items from one of the surveys is mass imputed. The estimates from the surveys are combined using a composite estimator (CE). The CE accounts for the variability due to the imputation model and the surveys’ sampling schemes. Diagnostics for the validity of the imputation model are also discussed. We describe an application of combining the Australian Labour Force Survey and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey to estimate employment characteristics about the Indigenous population. The findings suggest that combining these surveys is beneficial.