The truncation-by-death problem: what to do in an experimental evaluation when the outcome is not always defined

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome--relationship quality--is undefined when a couple splits up. This article shows how treatment-control differences in mean outcomes can be misleading when outcomes are not defined for everyone and discusses ways to identify the seriousness of the problem. Potential solutions to the problem are described, including approaches that rely on simple treatment-control differences-in-means as well as more complex modeling approaches.     

Evaluating the benefits and costs of regulatory reforms: what questions need to be asked?

In 1984, Portney argued that "[w]e should scrutinize proposed reforms of the rulemaking process every bit as carefully as the regulations that process produces." In the 23 years since then, the regulatory process on the federal level has been continuously reformed by statute, by executive order, and by directives from the OMB. Despite the extensive debate on the need for these reforms, there has been very little analysis of the reforms themselves. This paper updates Portney's work on analyzing cost-benefit analysis and expands it to evaluate reforms of the regulatory process. I use as my primary example the recent peer-review guidelines issued by OMB. I argue that we may have reached a point of diminishing returns in regulatory reforms, that the peer-review guidelines likely have costs that exceed their benefits, and that further regulatory reforms merit closer evaluation.     

Psychology's role in the conserving society

Because the earth's natural resources are finite and are growing increasingly more difficult to exploit, energy and resource conservation will soon become essential to our way of life. Psychologists and other social scientists can help in that transition, and recently they have begun to do relevant research in several areas: environmental pollution, recycling and solid wastes, reducing litter, and energy usage and conservation. Research approaches that have been used include studies of environmental and energy attitudes, behavioral research, social interaction studies, community conservation programs, and large-scale consumer research. More work is especially needed on the topics of transportation energy use, industrial and commercial energy conservation, and community action campaigns. Research efforts should increasingly utilize measures of actual behavior and actual energy usage, long-term longitudinal approaches, realistic field settings, and costeffective procedures. In addition to doing research, psychologists can contribute to the advent of the conserving society through program evaluation studies, proposals for innovation, dissemination of validated scientific knowledge, and offering policy advice.     

Thematic elements underlying the delivery of services in high-contact public service encounters

Earlier research alludes to the fact that enhanced information and systems (IS/IT) functionalities coupled with a lower degree of interaction with customers, the so-called zero- touch, real- time, self-service enhance services engagement. In this article, utilising a series of thematic elements drawn from two exploratory case studies, the authors suggest that the real enhancement of service delivery and increase in customer satisfaction, especially in frontline public service encounters, are not necessarily achieved through infusions of IS/IT, but from the adoption of a service philosophy which allows such organisations to de-emphasise IS/IT and instead focus on significant organisational factors in the area of enhanced human interaction.     

Penalized likelihood inference in extreme value analyses

Models for extreme values are usually based on detailed asymptotic argument, for which strong ergodic assumptions such as stationarity, or prescribed perturbations from stationarity, are required. In most applications of extreme value modelling such assumptions are not satisfied, but the type of departure from stationarity is either unknown or complex, making asymptotic calculations unfeasible. This has led to various approaches in which standard extreme value models are used as building blocks for conditional or local behaviour of processes, with more general statistical techniques being used at the modelling stage to handle the non-stationarity. This paper presents another approach in this direction based on penalized likelihood. There are some advantages to this particular approach: the method has a simple interpretation; computations for estimation are relatively straightforward using standard algorithms; and a simple reinterpretation of the model enables broader inferences, such as confidence intervals, to be obtained using MCMC methodology. Methodological details together with applications to both athletics and environmental data are given.     

Moments of suprema of random variables

The supremum of random variables representing a sequence of rewards is of interest in establishing the existence of optimal stopping rules. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for existence of moments of sup_n(X_n ? c_n) and sup_n(S_n ? c_n) where X₁, X₂, … are i.i.d. random variables, S_n = X₁ + … + X_n, and c_n = (nL(n))^1/r, 0 < r < 2, L = 1, L = log, and L = log log. Following Cohn (1974), “rates of convergence” results are used in the proof.     

A pattern-mixture odds ratio model for incomplete categorical data

Most models for incomplete data are formulated within the selection model framework. Pattern-mixture models are increasingly seen as a viable alternative, both from an interpretational as well as from a computational point of view (Little 1993, Hogan and Laird 1997, Ekholm and Skinner 1998). Whereas most applications are either for continuous normally distributed data or for simplified categorical settings such as contingency tables, we show how a multivariate odds ratio model (Molenberghs and Lesaffre 1994, 1998) can be used to fit pattern-mixture models to repeated binary outcomes with continuous covariates. Apart from point estimation, useful methods for interval estimation are presented and data from a clinical study are analyzed to illustrate the methods.     

Differentiating Processes of Control and Understanding in the Early Development of Emotion and Cognition

In this study, we examined the hypothesis that preschoolers' performance on emotion and cognitive tasks is organized into discrete processes of control and understanding within the domains of emotion and cognition. Additionally, we examined the relations among component processes using mother report, behavioral observation, and physiological measures of emotion control. Participants were 263 children (42 percent non‐White) and their mothers. Results indicated that the three approaches of measuring emotion control were unrelated. Regardless of the measurement method, a four‐factor solution differentiating emotion control and understanding and cognitive control and understanding fits the data better than did either of two two‐factor models, one based on domains of emotion and cognition across processes, and one based on processes of control and understanding across domains. Results of this research replicate those of Leerkes et al. in describing a differentiated underlying structure of emotion and cognition processes in early childhood while also extending these conclusions across samples and across measurement approaches for assessing emotion control.     

The social stratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English1

The sociolinguistic modelling of phonological variation and change is almost exclusively based on auditory and acoustic analyses of speech. One phenomenon which has proved elusive when considered in these ways is the variation in postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English. This study therefore shifts to speech production: we present a socioarticulatory study of variation of postvocalic /r/ in CVr (e.g. car) words, using a socially‐stratified ultrasound tongue imaging corpus of speech collected in eastern central Scotland in 2008. Our results show social stratification of /r/ at the articulatory level, with middle‐class speakers using bunched articulations, while working‐class speakers use greater proportions of tongue‐tip and tongue‐front raised variants. Unlike articulatory variation of /r/ in American English, the articulatory variants in our Scottish English corpus are both auditorily distinct from one another, and correlate with strong and weak ends of an auditory rhotic continuum, which also shows clear social stratification.