Toward a History of Psychological Expertise

In honor of the 60th anniversary of SPSSI's founding, this issue examines the ascendence of psychological expertise in American society. After World War II, psychology grew as the public accepted the illuminating power and social benefits of psychologists' expert knowledge. In that period, four problems confronted psychological experts as their numbers and influence grew. First, they needed ideas and methods that were new and superior to common sense. Second, experts needed to appear both relevant and objective. Third, psychologists needed to forge alliances with those who held social power in the settings in which they wished to operate. Finally, experts needed to balance the roles of social critic and social engineer.     

The Criterial Crisis of the Academic World*

The author analyzes the crisis in standards in the academic world where symptoms of academic fraud and diminished quality are linked to increasing competitive pressure, demographic forces, and defects in the social system of professional control, examples of a criterial system with mechanical assessment technology that generates paradoxical outcomes. The paper addresses such issues as redundancy of publications and defects in the peer review system, drawing examples from the fields of medicine, science and sociology, It is argued that a decline in academic standards is facilitated by the confusion involved in differentiating criteria from standards. Further analysis of criterial systems is suggested, along with the need for an explicit examination of academic values and quality.     

This is not a race, this is a farce: Formula One and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway tire crisis

Formula One is the most technologically advanced and financially lucrative form of motorsport in the world with global audiences in the billions over the course of a season. A highly unusual and potentially deadly set of events took place during the Friday practice for the sixth annual United States Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Controversy and blame soon followed. Using Benoit's public relations and image restoration strategy framework, this paper examines the different strategies employed during the crisis by the Formula One teams, Michelin, the Federation Internationale De L’Automobile, Formula One Management, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. An examination of the crisis situation at the United States Grand Prix allows this study to expand Benoit's initial framework into sport as well as examining the implications for public relations and image repair strategies.     

Perceived Equity in the Gendered Division of Household Labor

Despite huge imbalances in the division of housework between women and men, previous studies have found perceptions of equity on the part of women to be much more frequent than feelings of injustice. Taking a comparative perspective on the basis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2002 data (N = 8,556), we find that, on the individual level, the explanatory frameworks that have been found to influence the actual inequality of household division of labor (time availability, resource dependence, and gender ideology) contribute to the explanation of perceptions of equity, in that they interact with the inequality of the household division of labor. On the country level, the gender‐wage ratio and the average level of inequality are important predictors.     

Forecasting mortality rates via density ratio modeling

The authors propose a semiparametric approach to modeling and forecasting age‐specific mortality in the United States. Their method is based on an extension of a class of semiparametric models to time series. It combines information from several time series and estimates the predictive distribution conditional on past data. The conditional expectation, which is the most commonly used predictor in practice, is the first moment of this distribution. The authors compare their method to that of Lee and Carter.     

Red unions and bourgeois democracy: A quantitative-historical analysis of worker militancy and socialist electoral power

This paper investigates how workers’ “economic struggle” determines the “democratic class struggle,” and extends socialist electoral constituency. This paper argues that political outcomes, namely, electoral behavior, may not be understood independently of the labor process, especially its most militant manifestation, strikes. Rather than follow the customary conceptual dichotomy between the sphere of production and the political sphere, it is suggested that both strike activity and electoral participation are compatible political strategies that, under specific historical circumstances, may jointly determine the fate of the Socialist party. The leading question is how did the wave of strikes in post World War I Italy affect the electoral power of the Italian Socialist party, in comparison with another mass party, the Popular Catholic Party. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) is employed to analyze census, strike, and electoral data. It is found that strike activity and electoral democracy increased the electoral power of the Socialist party, whereas they had little effect on the power of the Catholic party. It is suggested that this was due to the Catholic non-revolutionary program which was ambivalent about the political role of strikes. It is concluded that the socialists’ political success was determined by their dual political strategy in both spheres, electoral participation, and organizing strikes.     

The importance of preservation of the ethical principle of equipoise in the design of clinical trials: relative impact of the methodological quality domains on the treatment effect in randomized controlled trials

Previous research has identified methodological problems in the design and conduct of randomized trials that could, if left unaddressed, lead to biased results. In this report we discuss one such problem, inadequate control intervention, and argue that it can be by far the most important design characteristic of randomized trials in overestimating the effect of new treatments. Current guidelines for the design and reporting of randomized trials, such as the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement, do not address the choice of the comparator intervention. We argue that an adequate control intervention can be selected if people designing a trial explicitly take into consideration the ethical principle of equipoise, also known as "the uncertainty principle."