Career story: Climatological Statistician

Matthew Perry works for the Meterological Office. He tells Julian Champkin what he does and how he got there.     

Puzzles and further explorations in the interrelationships of successive births with husband’s income,spouses’ education and race

When fertility is examined in the detail of individual parity progressions and birth-order transitions, important interactions between the effects of income and education are seen. Among the findings are: the negative effect of education on fertility is stronger at all parities for less educated compared to more highly educated women. Additional income has a more positive effect for more highly educated than for less educated women. For women with 0-8 years of education the effect of more income is positive when the family has no children but negative thereafter, but for college-educated women the effect of more income is positive. And additional income has a less positive (more negative) effect on fertility among nonwhites than among whites.     

Predicting Support for Eliminating the Dividend Tax: The Role of Framing and Attributions for Wealth

The proposed elimination of the dividend tax was among the most debated aspects of the Bush administration's economic stimulus package. Both the fairness of the initiative and who would benefit from it were questioned. Drawing on the political rhetoric of these debates, 86 respondents completed materials assessing the effects of framing and attributions for wealth on support for eliminating the dividend tax. The participants were less supportive of eliminating the dividend tax when it was framed as benefiting the wealthy than when the initiative was framed as benefiting the general public. Attributing wealth to personal initiative and "warm" feelings toward the wealthy emerged as the most powerful predictors of supporting the tax's elimination. Implications for social policy and economic justice are discussed.     

Firms,Destinations, and Aggregate Fluctuations

This paper uses a data base covering the universe of French firms for the period 1990–2007 to provide a forensic account of the role of individual firms in generating aggregate fluctuations. We set up a simple multisector model of heterogeneous firms selling to multiple markets to motivate a theoretically founded decomposition of firms' annual sales growth rate into different components. We find that the firm‐specific component contributes substantially to aggregate sales volatility, mattering about as much as the components capturing shocks that are common across firms within a sector or country. We then decompose the firm‐specific component to provide evidence on two mechanisms that generate aggregate fluctuations from microeconomic shocks highlighted in the recent literature: (i) when the firm size distribution is fat‐tailed, idiosyncratic shocks to large firms directly contribute to aggregate fluctuations, and (ii) aggregate fluctuations can arise from idiosyncratic shocks due to input–output linkages across the economy. Firm linkages are approximately three times as important as the direct effect of firm shocks in driving aggregate fluctuations.     

Social risk assessment and social capital: A significant parameter for the formation of climate change policies

Public policy issues arising from climate change projections are becoming increasingly important in terms of the range and the scope of their effects. In order to effectively confront them it is important to address social, environmental and economic aspects as fully as possible in decision-making processes. In this context, social risk assessment techniques have begun to be applied to explore citizens’ risk perceptions of climate change projections. The present study aims to contribute to this area by examining the influence of four social capital parameters (social trust, institutional trust, social norms and social networks) on public risk perceptions of climate change. An empirical study was conducted for this purpose in Greece's fourth largest city, Heraklion. Results demonstrate that social capital is a significant explanatory parameter for citizens’ risk perceptions. Specifically, individuals with lower levels of social capital tend to perceive higher risks from climate change impacts. The most important parameter explaining this result is the low level of institutional trust, revealing that Heraklion's citizens do not believe that existing public institutions will be able to effectively manage projected climate change impacts.     

Straightforward intermediate rank tensor product smoothing in mixed models

Tensor product smooths provide the natural way of representing smooth interaction terms in regression models because they are invariant to the units in which the covariates are measured, hence avoiding the need for arbitrary decisions about relative scaling of variables. They would also be the natural way to represent smooth interactions in mixed regression models, but for the fact that the tensor product constructions proposed to date are difficult or impossible to estimate using most standard mixed modelling software. This paper proposes a new approach to the construction of tensor product smooths, which allows the smooth to be written as the sum of some fixed effects and some sets of i.i.d. Gaussian random effects: no previously published construction achieves this. Because of the simplicity of this random effects structure, our construction is useable with almost any flexible mixed modelling software, allowing smooth interaction terms to be readily incorporated into any Generalized Linear Mixed Model. To achieve the computationally convenient separation of smoothing penalties, the construction differs from previous tensor product approaches in the penalties used to control smoothness, but the penalties have the advantage over several alternative approaches of being explicitly interpretable in terms of function shape. Like all tensor product smoothing methods, our approach builds up smooth functions of several variables from marginal smooths of lower dimension, but unlike much of the previous literature we treat the general case in which the marginal smooths can be any quadratically penalized basis expansion, and there can be any number of them. We also point out that the imposition of identifiability constraints on smoothers requires more care in the mixed model setting than it would in a simple additive model setting, and show how to deal with the issue. An interesting side effect of our construction is that an ANOVA-decomposition of the smooth can be read off from the estimates, although this is not our primary focus. We were motivated to undertake this work by applied problems in the analysis of abundance survey data, and two examples of this are presented.     

Ego strength and achievement motivation in pathological gamblers

This paper argues that there area priori reasons to extract measures of ego strength and achievement motivation from the psychometric data base routinely collected from inpatient pathological gambers in order to clarify the meaning of these constructs and to evaluate their roles in personality organization. A sample of 57 subjects engaged in an inpatient treatment program for pathological gamblers was studied using Barron's Ego Strength Scale (ES) from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and two measures of achievement motivation from the California Personality Inventory, Achievement via Conformance (Ac) and Achievement via Independence (Ai). Compared to the standardization group norms on these instruments, pathological gamblers are significantly deficient in both ego strength and one type of achievement motivation, Ac. Clinical impressions of gamblers in treatment suggest that narcissistic characteristics are a major problem in treatment and that future research should attempt further detailed studies of ego structure in order to refine treatment objectives.     

Spouse-aided Therapy and Psychiatric Nursing: A Preliminary Report

The training of psychiatric nurses as behavioural nurse therapists has been successfully established in the U.K. by Marks et al. However, their approach has a number of theoretical and practical limitations, such as a rigid adherence to an illness model of psychiatric disorder. This paper describes and evaluates an approach to the training of psychiatric nurses based on systems theory. Four nurses were trained in the use of Spouse-aided Therapy, a time-limited, goal-orientated outpatient approach to the treatment of married psychiatric patients with persisting psychological disorders. Patients' spouses are involved throughout therapy, with the aim of making full use of resources within marriage which may facilitate patients' recovery. Questionnaire and anecdotal data from 12 patients showed a mean fall of 30% in patients' symptoms and a mean fall of 20% in marital dissatisfaction after therapy. The pattern of results supported a systems theory interpretation of outcome.     

The Welfare Effect of an Additional Child Cannot be Stated Simply and Unequivocally

There is no single calculable welfare effect of an additional person. Rather, there are many different judgments, which may be negative or positive. The welfare effect depends upon the particular economic situation the child will be born into, which point in his life-cycle one refers to, whether he is expected to have a positive effect upon his particular sort of economy and society during and after his lifetime, and most of all, on the kind of welfare criterion used. Furthermore, no matter which welfare criterion is used, the welfare effect of an added individual summarized over time is especially sensitive to the particular assumptions made.     

Perceptions of environmental supports on the physical activity behaviors of university men and women: a preliminary investigation

OBJECTIVE: To examine perception differences between genders of university sidewalks and safety from crime on the physical activity (PA) behaviors of undergraduate students. PARTICIPANTS: Five hundred and sixty undergraduate students participated in this study. METHODS: The authors derived questions from the South Carolina Environmental Supports for Physical Activity Questionnaire (SCESPAQ) and National College Health Risk Behavior Survey (NCHRS) PA module. RESULTS: The authors found a significant mean difference between genders for the Moderate Intensity Item (eg, walking and biking) and the Flexibility Item, t(558)=3.602, p=.001, and t(558)=1.946, p=.050, respectively. Of participants surveyed, 30% of women perceived this campus to be extremely safe compared with 49% of men, t(558)=4.240, p=.001. Gender and the perceptions of sidewalk presence were significantly related (p<.05) to respondents' walking or bicycling patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Perceptions of sidewalks and safety from crime on this university campus were related to students' PA behaviors.