A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Max-stable processes for modeling extremes observed in space and time

Max-stable processes have proved to be useful for the statistical modeling of spatial extremes. For statistical inference it is often assumed that there is no temporal dependence; i.e., that the observations at spatial locations are independent in time. In a first approach we construct max-stable space–time processes as limits of rescaled pointwise maxima of independent Gaussian processes, where the space–time covariance functions satisfy weak regularity conditions. This leads to so-called Brown–Resnick processes. In a second approach, we extend Smith’s storm profile model to a space–time setting. We provide explicit expressions for the bivariate distribution functions, which are equal under appropriate choice of the parameters. We also show how the space–time covariance function of the underlying Gaussian process can be interpreted in terms of the tail dependence function in the limiting max-stable space–time process.     

Impact of Economic Conditions and Crises on Mortality and its Predictability

To investigate how economic conditions and crises affect mortality and its predictability in industrialized countries, we review the related literature, and we forecast mortality developments in Spain, Hungary, and Russia—three countries which have recently undergone major transformation processes following the introduction of radical economic and political reforms. The results of our retrospective mortality forecasts from 1991 to 2009 suggest that our model can capture major changes in long-term mortality trends, and that the forecast errors it generates are usually smaller than those of other well-accepted models, like the Lee-Carter model and its coherent variant. This is because our approach is capable of modeling (1) dynamic shifts in survival improvements from younger to older ages over time, as well as (2) substantial changes in long-term trends by optionally complementing the extrapolated mortality trends in a country of interest with those of selected reference countries. However, the forecasting performance of our model is limited (like that of every model): e.g., if mortality becomes extremely volatile—as was the case in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—generating a precise forecast will depend more on luck than on methodology and expert judgment. In general, we conclude that, on their own, recent economic changes appear to have minor effects on life expectancy in industrialized countries, but that the effects of these changes are greater if they occur in conjunction with other major social and political changes.     

Competing Sovereignties,Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment

Abstract

This article explores how ‘competing sovereignties’ are shaping the political construction of food sovereignty—broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. This study was motivated by a lack of clarity on the ‘sovereignty’ of food sovereignty, as noted by numerous scholars—sovereignty for whom, and how? As there is a growing consensus that there are in fact ‘multiple sovereignties’ of food sovereignty that cut across jurisdictions and scales, there is the question of how these sovereignties are competing with each other in the attempted construction of food sovereignty. This question is becoming ever more relevant as food sovereignty is increasingly adopted into state policy at various levels, calling for state and societal actors to redefine their terms of engagement. This article explores questions of ‘competing sovereignties’ by developing an analytical framework, using the lenses of scale, geography, and institutions, and applying it to Venezuela, where for the past 15 years a food sovereignty experiment has been underway in the context of a dynamic shift in state–society relations.     

A Bootstrap Approach for Testing Marginal Independence Between Two Categorical Variables When Subjects Have Repeated Responses

To assess independence in two-way contingency tables, the Pearson chi-square test or Fisher’s exact test are typically used. These tests assume that each subject contributes at most one count to only one table cell (e.g., sex versus blood type). In other situations, each subject may have more than one count contributing to the table and these counts may occur in different cells of the table. One may wish to test independence, adjusting for the within-subject correlation. We provide a simple nonparametric bootstrap approach and assess its performance through simulation studies. The method is illustrated on subjects with multiple mental health presentations to Emergency Departments.     

Emotional functioning, attachment style, and attributions as predictors of child abuse potential in domestic violence victims

To explore cognitive and emotional factors that may exacerbate child-abuse potential among domestic violence victims, 80 participants reported on their depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and anger as well as their attachment style and attributional style. Increased emotional difficulties as well as insecure attachment styles were significantly positively correlated with child abuse potential, although depression and anxiety were the strongest predictors. Externalizing blame for the spousal abuse was not associated with abuse risk. Women residing in shelters demonstrated significantly greater abuse risk than those in transitional housing programs, suggesting that greater temporal proximity to the spousal abuse may in part account for the increased abuse potential. Depression and hopelessness, however, appeared particularly relevant to increased abuse risk in domestic violence victims in the transitional housing system. Implications of these findings for working with battered women in terms of their emotional functioning and attachment style are discussed.     

Logistic Regression Models with Unspecified Low Dose–Response Relationships and Experimental Designs for Hormesis Studies

Hormesis refers to a nonmonotonic (biphasic) dose–response relationship in toxicology, environmental science, and related fields. In the presence of hormesis, a low dose of a toxic agent may have a lower risk than the risk at the control dose, and the risk may increase at high doses. When the sample size is small due to practical, logistic, and ethical considerations, a parametric model may provide an efficient approach to hypothesis testing at the cost of adopting a strong assumption, which is not guaranteed to be true. In this article, we first consider alternative parameterizations based on the traditional three‐parameter logistic regression. The new parameterizations attempt to provide robustness to model misspecification by allowing an unspecified dose–response relationship between the control dose and the first nonzero experimental dose. We then consider experimental designs including the uniform design (the same sample size per dose group) and the $c$‐optimal design (minimizing the standard error of an estimator for a parameter of interest). Our simulation studies showed that (1) the $c$‐optimal design under the traditional three‐parameter logistic regression does not help reducing an inflated Type I error rate due to model misspecification, (2) it is helpful under the new parameterization with three parameters (Type I error rate is close to a fixed significance level), and (3) the new parameterization with four parameters and the $c$‐optimal design does not reduce statistical power much while preserving the Type I error rate at a fixed significance level.     

Constructing the New Economy: A Discursive Perspective

The rise and fall of the 'New Economy' at the turn of the millennium, most visibly evidenced by the stellar rise and subsequent collapse of the Nasdaq composite index of technology stocks, represents one of the most significant business phenomena in recent times. This paper examines the 'New Economy' phenomenon as a culturally embedded discourse through an analysis of 133 print advertisements collected from the UK edition of the Financial Times between February and December 2000. It investigates the social construction of the concept 'New Economy' in a rapidly changing business environment. The contribution of the paper lies in the empirical study of discursive phenomena in late capitalist societies. From a discursive perspective, the 'New Economy' can be seen as a signifier that points to itself, whose form is its very content. The paper suggests the 'New Economy' must be understood in terms of its ability to accommodate multiple meanings, and it is this very ability which is profoundly ideological, in that it allows essentially socio-historical obsessions and anxieties (e.g. about novelty and change) to appear as seemingly 'natural' or logical behaviour.