ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTENT ANALYSIS OF COUPLE AND THERAPIST PERCEPTIONS IN A REFLECTING TEAM SETTING*

An ethnographic content analysis was used to examine couple and therapist perspectives about the use and value of reflecting team practice. Postsession ethnographic interviews form both couples and therapists were examined for the frequency of themes in seven categories that emerged form a previous ethnographic study of reflecting teams (Sells, Smith, Coe, Yoshioka, & Robbins, 1994). The study demonstrated that quantitative numerical data and qualitiative narrative data can examine the same phenomenon from multiple perspecrives and allow for greater accuracy and stability in study findings. Ethnographic content analysis is briefly cosntrasted with conventional modes of quantitative cosntent analysis to illustrate its usefulness and rationale for discovering emergent patterns, themes, emphases, and process using both inductive and deductive methods of inquiry.     

Class struggle in campaign finance? Political action committee contributions in the 1984 elections

Pluralist and class-based theories offer alternative hypotheses about the political behavior of organized interests in the United States. Using network methods and data on political action committees' (PAC) contributions to congressional candidates in the 1984 elections, we identify interest groups with politically similar behavior in an attempt to assess these perspectives concerning elites in the United States. The analysis includes corporate, labor, membership association, and nonconnected PACs. Counter to pluralist expectations, we find just two large groups—one primarily business oriented and the other primarily labor/public-interest oriented. Our findings thus support a class-based interpretation of the nature of organized interests. These findings are framed in terms of the meaning of unity and fragmentation.     

Infant Emotionality: Observational Methods and the Validity of Maternal Reports

This study was designed to improve the observational measurement of emotionality, and to test factors that influence the validity of maternal reports. More than 150 infants were visited at home with their mothers, two thirds of whom were depressed. These visits yielded 4 different observational measures of positive and negative emotionality at both 6 and 9 months. These were standard assessments (based on LabTab), naturalistic interactions, atypical reactions to the standard assessments, and the still‐face procedure. Atypical reactions were consistently related to traditional measures of emotionality. Responses to the still‐face procedure also generally cohered with the other measures. Aggregation improved agreement between mothers and observers. Depressed mothers' reports of negative emotionality were less accurate at 6 months than those of nondepressed mothers. Parenting experience appeared to be associated with greater maternal accuracy. Taken together the findings provide some support for both sides of the controversy surrounding the validity of maternal reports.     

Where Infants Look Determines How They See: Eye Movements and Object Perception Performance in 3‐Month‐Olds

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity perception in infants. The goal of this investigation was to examine the inputs to this process. We recorded eye movements in 3‐month‐old infants as they participated in a standard object unity task and found systematic differences in scanning patterns between those infants whose post‐habituation preferences were indicative of unity perception versus those infants who did not perceive unity. Perceivers, relative to nonperceivers, scanned more reliably in the vicinity of the visible rod parts and scanned more frequently across the range of rod motion. These results suggest that emerging object concepts are tied closely to available visual information in the environment, and the process of information pickup.     

Simulation assessments of statistical aspects of bioequivalence in the pharmaceutical industry

An Erratum has been published for this article in Pharmaceutical Statistics 2004; 3(3): 232 Since the early 1990s, average bioequivalence (ABE) has served as the international standard for demonstrating that two formulations of drug product will provide the same therapeutic benefit and safety profile. Population (PBE) and individual (IBE) bioequivalence have been the subject of intense international debate since methods for their assessment were proposed in the late 1980s. Guidance has been proposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the implementation of these techniques in the pioneer and generic pharmaceutical industries. Hitherto no consensus among regulators, academia and industry has been established on the use of the IBE and PBE metrics. The need for more stringent bioequivalence criteria has not been demonstrated, and it is known that the PBE and IBE criteria proposed by the FDA are actually less stringent under certain conditions. The statistical properties of method of moments and restricted maximum likelihood modelling in replicate designs will be summarized, and the application of these techniques in the assessment of ABE, IBE and PBE will be considered based on a database of 51 replicate design studies and using simulation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Web Survey Design: Paging versus Scrolling

A key choice in the design of Web surveys is whether to placethe survey questions in a multitude of short pages or in longscrollable pages. There are advantages and disadvantages ofeach approach, but little empirical evidence to guide the choice.In 2003 we conducted a survey of over 21,000 undergraduate students.Ten percent of the 10,000 respondents were directed to the scrollableversion of the survey, containing a single form for each ofthe major sections. The balance was assigned to the paging version,in which questions were presented to be visible without scrolling.The instrument contained a maximum of 268 possible questions,including topics that varied in sensitivity and desirability.The survey also permitted comparison of the effect of skip patternsby implementing skip instructions and hyperlinks in the scrollabledesign, and also recorded time at the end of each of the fivetopical sections. Differences between designs are evaluatedin terms of various forms of nonresponse, univariate and bivariatemeasurement properties, and proxies for respondent burden.