Using Surveys in Public Participation Processes for Risk Decision Making: The Case of the 2003 British GM Nation? Public Debate

This article takes as its case study the “GM Nation?” public debate, a major participation process on the commercialization of agricultural biotechnology, which occurred in Britain during the summer of 2003. We investigate possible self‐selection biases in over 36,000 open questionnaire responses on the risks and benefits of genetically modified crops and food obtained during GM Nation? A comparison sample of equivalent responses from a statistically representative sample (n= 1,363) of the British general public obtained shortly after the conclusion of the debate is reported. This comparison shows that the GM Nation? open responses were indeed not fully representative of British “public opinion” regarding agricultural biotechnology. Rather, such opinion is not a unitary whole, but fragmented, with considerable ambivalence coexisting alongside outright opposition to GM agriculture. The methodological implications for multistage participation processes are discussed: in particular, the need to anticipate outcomes of complex design decisions, and to include representative public surveys as standard where measures of broader public attitudes to risk are an important objective.     

Third Way Social Governance: Where is the State?

The ‘Third Way’ politics of Blair's New Labour government of the United Kingdom has popularised a number of policy reforms centred on a supposedly new discourse of ‘devolution’, ‘inclusion’, ‘partnerships’ and ‘community’. These notions reflect a re‐emergence of the ideas and values of civil society, participation and localism. Key drivers of this discourse are: new conceptions of citizenship; a retreat from the social state to a politics of community; and a questioning of both ‘big‐state’ interventionist and competitive market approaches to public policy. These trends have resonance in the Australian context. The welfare reform agenda of the Australian Commonwealth government together with community building and engagement initiatives of State governments have been sites for these policy directions. Much of the debate surrounding these policies excludes or minimises the fundamental role of an active state by focusing on an uncritical conception of community. Drawing on the notion of network governance, an alternative framework for re‐conceptualising state‐community relations and delivering improved community outcomes is posited. The paper concludes by suggesting possible social governance methodologies for actioning this framework.     

统计数据的使用与误用

不要依赖统计分析,除非你了解其中的陷阱缺陷比率正在下降吗?顾客满意度在提高吗?你查看数字,却并不确定是否该相信它们。你并不担心存在欺骗或操控,而是不知道在多大程度上信任统计数据。谨慎从事,是有道理的。哈佛商业院     

The minimum regularized covariance determinant estimator

Statistics and Computing - The minimum covariance determinant (MCD) approach estimates the location and scatter matrix using the subset of given size with lowest sample covariance determinant. Its...     

Youth Justice

This paper illustrates how mindfulness and reflection exercises can be integrated into the teaching and learning of active listening skills, an integral component of relationship skills training. This pedagogy was first trialled on a small cohort of 15 students and the improved version was applied with a second cohort of 53 students. Through the mindfulness and reflection exercises which were built in throughout the module, students identified the three most prominent ‘bad habits’ that hindered active listening as ‘mind wandering’, ‘multi-tasking’ while listening and ‘thinking ahead’. The mindfulness and reflection exercises appeared to bring the usually-unnoticed ‘bad habits’ into awareness so that a conscious effort could be channelled into preventing them from interfering with relationship building. This expanded awareness facilitated the strengthening of ability to observe oneself in interactions. This paper proposes a combination of exercises that expand students' awareness of their own habitual listening styles, together with skills training through conventional methods of role play, video-taping and skills drilling, in order to strengthen motivation to change and bring about deeper learning.     

What do we mean by evaluation?

The popularity of evaluation research has increased markedly in recent years. Although initially associated with experimental and quasi‐experimental methods, current practices and methods have become much more diverse. This paper provides a brief overview of the recent history of evaluation research – its meanings and purposes – and asks whether the current emphasis on ‘evidence‐based policy’ heralds a brighter future. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A comparison of subgroup identification methods in clinical drug development: Simulation study and regulatory considerations

With advancement of technologies such as genomic sequencing, predictive biomarkers have become a useful tool for the development of personalized medicine. Predictive biomarkers can be used to select subsets of patients, which are most likely to benefit from a treatment. A number of approaches for subgroup identification were proposed over the last years. Although overviews of subgroup identification methods are available, systematic comparisons of their performance in simulation studies are rare. Interaction trees (IT), model‐based recursive partitioning, subgroup identification based on differential effect, simultaneous threshold interaction modeling algorithm (STIMA), and adaptive refinement by directed peeling were proposed for subgroup identification. We compared these methods in a simulation study using a structured approach. In order to identify a target population for subsequent trials, a selection of the identified subgroups is needed. Therefore, we propose a subgroup criterion leading to a target subgroup consisting of the identified subgroups with an estimated treatment difference no less than a pre‐specified threshold. In our simulation study, we evaluated these methods by considering measures for binary classification, like sensitivity and specificity. In settings with large effects or huge sample sizes, most methods perform well. For more realistic settings in drug development involving data from a single trial only, however, none of the methods seems suitable for selecting a target population. Using the subgroup criterion as alternative to the proposed pruning procedures, STIMA and IT can improve their performance in some settings. The methods and the subgroup criterion are illustrated by an application in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.