Development of a rating form to evaluate grant applications to the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health

Reliance on subjective grant proposal review methods leads private philanthropies to underfund mental health programs, even when foundations have mental health focuses. This article describes a private mental health foundation's efforts to increase the objectivity of its proposal review process by developing a reliable, valid proposal rating form. Staff from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, an administrative unit of The University of Texas at Austin, developed the items for the grant proposal rating form (GPRF). Four interns, who had educational backgrounds equivalent to the foundation's grant-making staff, used the GPRF to independently rate 20 grant proposals previously reviewed by the foundation. Internal consistency and interrater reliability were very good. It had good face and construct validity and moderate criterion validity. The GPRF's psychometric properties are sufficient to recommend its use in the foundation's review process and suggest private philanthropies' grant proposal review processes can be made more objective and reliable without compromising validity.     

The effect of schooling on income in Japan

This paper uses cross-sectional data from the 1955, 1965, and 1975 Social Stratification and Mobility Surveys to investigate the effect of schooling on personal income in the Japanese male labor force. For each survey, log-income regressions are estimated which include (in addition to controls for years of work experience) two variables to indicate educational attainment: (1) years of schooling completed, and (2) percentile ranking in the distribution of years of schooling for one's age-cohort. The effect of the first educational variable may be interpreted as the human capital effect of schooling. The effect of the second educational variable may be interpreted as the screening or credentialing effect of schooling. The results indicate that controlling for the credentialing effect of schooling significantly reduces the net effect of schooling as human capital. Regression decomposition is then used to ascertain the components of the growth in mean log-income between 1955 and 1975. The contribution of years of schooling to the increase in mean log-income across these decades is significantly reduced after controlling for the credentialing effect.     

Balanced Confidence Regions Based on Tukey's Depth and the Bootstrap

We propose and study the bootstrap confidence regions for multivariate parameters based on Tukey's depth. The bootstrap is based on the normalized or Studentized statistic formed from an independent and identically distributed random sample obtained from some unknown distribution in R ^q . The bootstrap points are deleted on the basis of Tukey's depth until the desired confidence level is reached. The proposed confidence regions are shown to be second order balanced in the context discussed by Beran. We also study the asymptotic consistency of Tukey's depth-based bootstrap confidence regions. The applicability of the method proposed is demonstrated in a simulation study.     

Reality check: is your behavior aligned with organizational goals?

Strong, well thought out organizational behaviors help instill confidence in patients and allow physicians to take a leadership role in health care.