Quality of Life Measurement in the Field of Intellectual Disabilities: Eight Principles for Assessing Quality of Life-Related Personal Outcomes

As the concept of quality of life (QOL) has evolved from a theoretical concept to both a measurable construct and an action-oriented change agent in the field of intellectual disabilities, there has emerged a corresponding need to develop, implement, and use a systematic approach to the assessment of domain-referenced quality of life outcomes. The purpose of this article is to suggest eight principles based on published literature and the authors’ experiences that should underlie the assessment of QOL-related personal outcomes in the field of intellectual disabilities. Data from the development of the personal outcomes scale are used to exemplify each principle. The article’s premise is that model development and test construction should work in tandem, and that a ‘quality of life assessment instrument’ should be based on an empirically derived QOL conceptual and measurement framework/model.     

Assessing the predictive value of a binary surrogate for a binary true endpoint based on the minimum probability of a prediction error

The individual causal association (ICA) has recently been introduced as a metric of surrogacy in a causal‐inference framework. The ICA is defined on the unit interval and quantifies the association between the individual causal effect on the surrogate (ΔS) and true (ΔT) endpoint. In addition, the ICA offers a general assessment of the surrogate predictive value, taking value 1 when there is a deterministic relationship between ΔT and ΔS, and value 0 when both causal effects are independent. However, when one moves away from the previous two extreme scenarios, the interpretation of the ICA becomes challenging. In the present work, a new metric of surrogacy, the minimum probability of a prediction error (PPE), is introduced when both endpoints are binary, ie, the probability of erroneously predicting the value of ΔT using ΔS. Although the PPE has a more straightforward interpretation than the ICA, its magnitude is bounded above by a quantity that depends on the true endpoint. For this reason, the reduction in prediction error (RPE) attributed to the surrogate is defined. The RPE always lies in the unit interval, taking value 1 if prediction is perfect and 0 if ΔS conveys no information on ΔT. The methodology is illustrated using data from two clinical trials and a user‐friendly R package Surrogate is provided to carry out the validation exercise.     

Limits to Concurrency*

In the global race to bring new products to market, many firms have adopted concurrent engineering as a technique to shrink development lead time. Due to the many concurrent engineering success stories in the business and engineering literature, a common misconception has grown that more concurrency is always better. The major contribution of this paper is a rigorous demonstration that limits to concurrency exist even in the simplified situation in which concurrency is modeled as the number of design modules to be executed in parallel. As complexities such as communication linkages between modules are layered onto our basic model, we show that the expected project completion time is minimized at a finite number of modules, a number that decreases with increasing problem complexity. In general, the more complex the project, the stricter the limits to concurrency. This strongly suggests that project managers should be cognizant of the potentially adverse effects of pushing concurrency too far.     

Is the Pendulum Swinging Back? Patterns of Skill Change in the Machine-Tool Industry

In this paper, we focus on the results of the Belgian Trend Study. The intention of this study was to examine the prevalence of new production concepts within the widest possible range of Belgian companies in the automobile, machine tool, chemical and clothing industries. The Trend-study aimed to answer the following questions: is the Taylorist division of labour a thing of the past ? What are the alternatives? Are shifts in the division of labour accompanied by another type of personnel policy, and do traditional industrial relations have to make way for this new approach? The methodological concept used had to guarantee that the findings at the level of each industry could be generalized. In this paper, we examine the penetration of new production concepts in the main processing fields of the machine tool industry.     

Fast two-stage estimator for clustered count data with overdispersion

Clustered count data are commonly analysed by the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). Here, the correlation due to clustering and some overdispersion is captured by the inclusion of cluster-specific normally distributed random effects. Often, the model does not capture the variability completely. Therefore, the GLMM can be extended by including a set of gamma random effects. Routinely, the GLMM is fitted by maximizing the marginal likelihood. However, this process is computationally intensive. Although feasible with medium to large data, it can be too time-consuming or computationally intractable with very large data. Therefore, a fast two-stage estimator for correlated, overdispersed count data is proposed. It is rooted in the split-sample methodology. Based on a simulation study, it shows good statistical properties. Furthermore, it is computationally much faster than the full maximum likelihood estimator. The approach is illustrated using a large dataset belonging to a network of Belgian general practices.     

Learning to make sense: interdisciplinary perspectives on sensory education and embodied enculturation

ABSTRACT

In this introductory essay we examine through a ‘temporally inflected lens’ some of the complex entanglements of learning, senses, and sense making; body-sensory experience and practice; and culture and society. We thereby aim to bring into dialogue inter-/multisensorial approaches to education as a project and praxis and processes of ‘enculturation’, which have always, in one way or the other, involved ‘embodied’ learning (and imaginaries thereof), rather than mere ‘mental processing’. We first situate the ‘turn’ to the senses, across a range of disciplinary fields, brought on by a growing interest in ‘modes of meaning-making’, including the visual, aural, audio-visual, material, bodily, and spatial. Secondly, we investigate the explanatory potential of enculturation and embodiment as seemingly entangled notions. From this, we derive the concept of ‘embodied enculturation’ for the study of situated, historical entanglements of sensory learning and education. We link this proposed research paradigm to incisive scholarship on ‘cultural learning’ through sensorial lenses, after which we tease out six key questions or concerns emerging from a review of relevant, recent research. These key concerns help to contextualize state-of-the-art ‘sensuous education scholarship’ introduced in the final section of the article and elaborated further in the ensuing contributions to this special issue.     

Turning a Blind Eye? Punishment of Friends and Unfamiliar Peers After Observed Exclusion in Adolescence

In order to decrease the occurrence of social exclusion in adolescence, we need to better understand how adolescents perceive and behave toward peers involved in exclusion. We examined the role of friendships in treatment of perpetrators and victims of social exclusion. Eighty‐nine participants (aged 9–16) observed exclusion of an unfamiliar peer (victim) by their best friend and another unfamiliar peer. Subsequently, participants could give up valuable coins to altruistically punish or help peers. Results showed that participants altruistically compensated victims and punished unfamiliar excluders, but refrained from punishing their friends. Our findings show that friendship with excluders modulates altruistic punishment of peers and provide mechanistic insight into how friendships may influence treatment of peers involved in social exclusion during adolescence.     

联盟组合多样性及其与绩效维度的关系

基于480家机构的以自我为中心的网络数据,分析了联盟组合多样性和财务绩效、激进式创新绩效、渐进式创新绩效等三个重要绩效维度之间的关系.其中,联盟组合多样性与财务绩效负相关;而联盟组合多样性与激进式创新绩效呈现倒U形关系;联盟组合多样性与渐进式创新绩效呈现递减收益正相关.结果表明,管理者应该意识到联盟组合多样性的可能的消极影响,并且意识到不同水平的联盟组合多样性是最有益的.     

Data Envelopment Analysis for Composite Indicators: A Multiple Layer Model

The development of a composite indicator (CI) over a set of individual indicators is worthwhile in case the methodological aggregation process is sound and the results are clear. It can then be used as a powerful tool for performance evaluation, benchmarking, and decision making. In this respect, data envelopment analysis (DEA), as a self appraisal technique, has recently received considerable attention in the construction of CIs for policy analysis and public communication. However, due to the ever increasing complexity of numerous performance evaluation problems, more and more potential indicators might be developed to represent an evaluation activity in a more comprehensive way. These indicators might also belong to different categories and further be linked to one another constituting a multilayer hierarchical structure. Simply treating all the indicators to be in the same layer as is the case in the basic DEA model thereby ignores the information on their hierarchical structure, and further leads up to weak discriminating power and unrealistic weight allocations. To overcome this limitation, a multiple layer DEA-based CI model is developed in this study to embody a hierarchical structure of indicators in the DEA framework, and both its primal and dual form are realized. The proposed model is illustrated by constructing a composite road safety performance index for a set of European countries.     

The effect of personalization on response rates and data quality in web surveys

Personalizing correspondence has often shown to significantly increase survey response rates in mail surveys. This study experimentally tests whether personalization of email invitations acts correspondingly to web survey response rates. Also, it is investigated whether personalization influences data quality. The results of the study, using a large student sample, show that personalization significantly increases the web survey response rate by 8.6 percentage points. The data quality does not appear to be affected in any major way by personalizing the email invitations. However, the analyses do show that respondents of the personalization condition tend to respond with more social desirability bias to sensitive questions. Therefore, it is concluded that personalization has positive effects on the survey response rate, but one should carefully consider whether or not to personalize when a survey on sensitive topics is conducted.