Permutation approach for ordinal preference data

Best et al. (Best, D. J., Rayner, J. C. W., O'Sullivan, M. G. (2000 Best, D. J., Rayner, J. C. W., O'Sullivan, M. G. (2000). Product maps for consumer categorical data. Food Quality and Preference 11:91–97.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Product maps for consumer categorical data. Food Quality and Preference, 11:91–97) suggested tests based on partitioning the X² statistic into relevant components of location, dispersion, and skewness effects for testing equality of each effect for ordinal preference data. It is known that the chi-square approximation requires large counts for categories. For this purpose, in this study, we investigate a permutation approach for these statistics and compare the performance of these tests with simulation study. In addition, the permutation approach can be used to produce a product map that classifies the products. We illustrate the approach with a real data example.     

Comparison of confidence intervals for the Behrens-Fisher problem

The Behrens–Fisher problem concerns the inferences for the difference between means of two independent normal populations without the assumption of equality of variances. In this article, we compare three approximate confidence intervals and a generalized confidence interval for the Behrens–Fisher problem. We also show how to obtain simultaneous confidence intervals for the three population case (analysis of variance, ANOVA) by the Bonferroni correction factor. We conduct an extensive simulation study to evaluate these methods in respect to their type I error rate, power, expected confidence interval width, and coverage probability. Finally, the considered methods are applied to two real dataset.     

The democratic interface: technology,political organization,and diverging patterns of electoral representation

Democracies are experiencing historic disruptions affecting how people engage with core institutions such as the press, civil society organizations, parties, and elections. These processes of citizen interaction with institutions operate as a democratic interface shaping self-government and the quality of public life. The electoral dimension of the interface is important, as its operation can affect all others. This analysis explores a growing left-right imbalance in the electoral connection between citizens, parties, elections, and government. This imbalance is due, in part, to divergent left-right preferences for political engagement, organization, and communication. Support on the right for clearer social rules and simpler moral, racial and nationalist agendas are compatible with hierarchical, leader-centered party organizations that compete more effectively in elections. Parties on the left currently face greater challenges engaging citizens due to the popular meta-ideology of diversity and inclusiveness and demands for direct or deliberative democracy. What we term connective parties are developing technologies to perform core organizational functions, and some have achieved electoral success. However, when connective parties on the left try to develop shared authority processes, online and offline, they face significant challenges competing with more conventionally organized parties on the right.     

An Overview of a Hospital-Based Child Advocacy Center’s Experience from Turkey

The purpose of the present study was to investigate sociodemographic variables, features of sexual abuse (SA), and first psychiatric evaluation results of abused children, and to analyze the relation of the psychiatric evaluation results to the children’s age and gender, type and duration of abuse, abuser–child relationship, and marital status of the children’s parents, at one of the most experienced Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) in Turkey. All data were obtained from reports prepared by child and adolescent psychiatrists. The sample of this study consists of 436 child sexual abuse (CSA) cases who admitted ?zmir CAC between April 2014 and November 2015. The statistical analyses yielded significant relations between psychiatric symptoms and chronic abuse, the gender of the children, and type of abuse. Suicidal ideation and behaviors due to sexual abuse (SA) were also examined. According to our results, it is fair to say that children exposed to SA benefit from immediate psychiatric help because of their vulnerability for psychiatric disorders due to abuse. In this context, CACs are very important multidisciplinary establishments to determine children’s multiple needs to ease their trauma with collaborative teamwork. Psychiatric evaluation should be part of this multidisciplinary context.     

Are Turkish EFL pre-service teachers ready to manage intercultural challenges?

English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, as the backbone of language teaching system, are expected to raise the awareness level of students’ intercultural communication competence by helping them relate their own culture to foreign cultures, empathise with foreign cultures’ perspectives and tolerate the ambiguities or differences. This study examines the relationship between certain personal factors such as age, gender, year of study, overseas experience and students’ preferences for Turkish movies over foreign ones and three predictors of intercultural communication competence namely, ambiguity tolerance, empathy and open-mindedness. The sample group of the study consisted of 145 prospective English teachers in the Educational Faculty of a state university in Turkey. The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire consisting of two parts which investigated their background and perceived levels of ambiguity tolerance, open-mindedness and empathy in Turkish EFL context. The results indicated that half of pre-service EFL teachers had poor intercultural communication competence. In particular, males, the final-year students and those who had been abroad indicated higher levels of tolerance than their respective counterparts. Besides, age and students’ preferences for Turkish or foreign movies were not significant factors in any of the predictors of intercultural communication competence.     

Central Perspectives and Debates in Strategic Change Research

This paper appraises and evaluates more than three decades of empirical research on strategic change. Strategic change research has traditionally built on either the deterministic view or the voluntaristic view – two opposing perspectives with fundamentally different assumptions about the influence of managers on the fortunes of organizations. In addition, a dialectical view on strategic change, which aims to bridge the two traditional views, has emerged. Despite the richness and value of research within these three perspectives, the continued accumulation of isolated and idiosyncratic insights adds little to the understanding of strategic change. In this paper, therefore, the authors assess, contrast and integrate research across the three perspectives in order to foster one cumulative body of knowledge about strategic change and to provide guidance for future research. Based on an analysis of 119 studies published in the leading academic journals in the fields of strategy and management, they consolidate existing knowledge and identify shortcomings in the cumulative body of research. On the basis of this assessment concerning prior research foci, study designs and assumptions, the authors propose four pathways for future research across the three perspectives that they believe can help foster full understanding of strategic change: (1) examinations of different types, processes and outcomes of strategic change; (2) expansion of the scope of actors considered in relation to strategic change; (3) exploration of the non‐linear nature of strategic change; and (4) investigations of strategic change conundrums.     

Start-up-Nation Israel und risikoaverses Deutschland im Austausch: Voneinander lernen im Rahmen eines Leadership Development Programms

The article provides an overview over the landscape of innovation in Germany and Israel and compares both countries concerning their societal and leadership cultures. In light of the question what and how participants in a German-Israeli leadership development program can learn from each other, the authors then provide insight into the state of research regarding training with heterogeneous participant groups. They present empirical findings regarding outcomes as well as process factors that were perceived as helpful or hindering in learning from each other.     

Die Legitimität von Finanzregimen

In this article we propose a financial regime typology that adds the role of cultural legitimacy to financial market regulation. Bridging Comparative Political Economy and Economic Sociology we refer to a German Weberian tradition of institutionalist research that has stressed the intermediate position of institutions between social values and concrete market action. Financial regimes do not only define formal rules and organizational patterns, they also install symbolic boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate finance, providing cultural acceptance to these morally and historically “problematic” markets. The article then explores four fields of institutional regulation of stock exchanges in Germany and UK since the 19th century: (1) the creation of an official arena, (2) rules of market access, (3) the legitimate trading goods and (4) rules for penalizing misconduct. We show that German financial regulation was integrative and wanted to protect the real economy by corporatively embedding finance and restrain harmful transactions. In contrast, British financial regulation was segmental and tried to protect the real economy by installing a socially exclusive club of traders governed by professional expertise and hierarchy. This new typification of financial regimes will help to understand the resilience of national financial regulatory patterns across crises and the obstacles to a transnational harmonization of rules. Political reform-making is tied to institutional principles of the past.     

Testing exchangeability of copulas in arbitrary dimension

A test for exchangeability of copulas for arbitrary dimensions is proposed, generalising and extending a result by Genest et al. [(2012), ‘Tests of Symmetry for Bivariate Copulas’, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, 64, 811–834]. Three test statistics together with some modifications are presented and their asymptotical behaviour is analysed. Empirical p-values are computed by using a bootstrap-procedure proposed by Rémillard and Scaillet [(2009), ‘Testing for Equality between Two Copulas’, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 100, 377–386] and suggested by Bücher and Dette [(2010), ‘A Note on Bootstrap Approximations for the Empirical Copula Process’, Statistics & Probability Letters, 80, 1925–1932], based on a multiplier central limit theorem by van der Vaart and Wellner [(1996), Weak Convergence and Empirical Processes, Springer Series in Statistics, New York: Springer]. Finally a simulation study compares various versions of the proposed tests.