Intertemporal consumer behaviour under structural changes in income

In this paper we analyze models of forward looking consumer behaviour and give empirical evidence for aggregate quarterly data for the Netherlands, 1967-1984. Special attention is devoted to the implications of unanticipated structural changes in the income process, which because of replanning, will have an impact on the consumption decision. We start with the life cycle hypothesis. Since the fall in aggregate consumption in the Netherlands in the eighties can not be explained by the life cycle model, the theory is reformulated by assuming that the planning horizon of the consumers moves ahead as time goes on. As a result, an error correction mechanism has to be introduced in the consumption function.The modified model is found to be in agreement with the data.     

A Berry–Esséen Bound for M-estimators

We prove a Berry–Esséen bound for general M-estimators under optimal regularity conditions on the score function and the underlying distribution. As an application we obtain Berry–Esséen bounds for the sample median, the L_p -median, p > 1 and Huber's estimator of location     

ISSUE INVOLVEMENT AND RESPONSE EFFECTS IN PUBLIC OPINION SURVEYS

This research tests the widespread assumption that responseeffects due to variations in question form, wording, or contextwill be greatest among respondents who are least involved withan issue. A meta-analysis of results from 15 split-ballot experimentsconducted over a five-year period indicates that the responseeffects of using counterarguments or middle alternatives insurvey questions are significantly larger, as would be expected,among respondents who are less involved with a given issue thanamong those who are highly involved with it. But the effectsof question order and response order appear to be largely unrelatedto how involved a respondent is with a particular issue. Issueinvolvement, then, appears to specify some response effects,but not others.     

The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children

Policy makers, parents, and the public are concerned with perceived declines in parents’ time with children. Data from two national surveys (N = 1,159 and N = 821) used in this study show that nearly half of parents report feeling too little time with children. Work hours are strongly related to these feelings, even controlling for time spent with children, and explain why fathers more than mothers feel time strain. For fathers, those whose youngest child is an adolescent feel more strain than similarly situated mothers. Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children.     

A Bayesian method of sample size determination with practical applications

Summary.  The problem motivating the paper is the determination of sample size in clinical trials under normal likelihoods and at the substantive testing stage of a financial audit where normality is not an appropriate assumption. A combination of analytical and simulation-based techniques within the Bayesian framework is proposed. The framework accommodates two different prior distributions: one is the general purpose fitting prior distribution that is used in Bayesian analysis and the other is the expert subjective prior distribution, the sampling prior which is believed to generate the parameter values which in turn generate the data. We obtain many theoretical results and one key result is that typical non-informative prior distributions lead to very small sample sizes. In contrast, a very informative prior distribution may either lead to a very small or a very large sample size depending on the location of the centre of the prior distribution and the hypothesized value of the parameter. The methods that are developed are quite general and can be applied to other sample size determination problems. Some numerical illustrations which bring out many other aspects of the optimum sample size are given.     

What is Peace Psychology the Psychology of?

Peace psychology emerged as a distinct area of research and practice during the Cold War, when the preeminent concern was the prevention of nuclear war. Now global in scope, the focal concerns of peace psychologists are nuanced by geohistorical contexts and the distinction between episodic violence and structural violence, the latter of which also kills people, albeit slowly through the deprivation of basic need satisfaction. Accordingly, the focal concerns of contributors to this issue vary depending on geohistorical context: some being primarily concerned with patterns of behavior and cognition involved in the prevention of violent episodes and others with the amelioration of structural violence. A systems perspective is used as a framework for integrating episodes and structures of violence and peace. Articles emphasizing "systemic violence" demonstrate the interplay between structures and episodes of violence. Articles on "systemic peacebuilding" examine intergroup contact, the nonviolent management of conflict, and movement toward socially just structures, thereby yielding an increase in cooperative and equitable relationships across levels, from interpersonal to intergroup.     

Development of an Attitudes Measure for Prenatal Screening in Diverse Populations

Background: Prenatal screening for chromosomalabnormalities is routinely offered to allpregnant women who present for care by their20th gestational week. Not all women,however, choose to undergo one of these tests,and choice of which test(s) to undergo alsovary. The reasons for variation in screeningtest behavior have not been fully explored.Methods: We examined the psychometricproperties of scales developed to measurefactors related to prenatal screening usingdata collected as part of a survey of 448racial/ethnically diverse pregnant women. These women were consecutively recruited fromprenatal care clinics when they were betweentheir 12th and 20th week ofpregnancy. The Theory of Reasoned Action wasused to develop to measures of attitudes towardand beliefs about prenatal screening. All itemswere subjected to factor analysis. Scalesidentified in the factor analysis were thensubjected to reliability analysis. Allanalysis was conducted for the entire studygroup as well as separately for eachracial/ethnic group.Results: Six scales emerged: who makes medicaldecisions, fatalism, health care trust, valueof screening, fear of screening and value ofpregnancy. All scales had adequate reliabilitywhen the analysis was conducted for the entirestudy group; however there were differences inreliability across racial/ethnic group.Conclusions: Because of these between groupdifferences comparisons of racial/ethnic groupmay be difficult to interpret and potentiallylead to erroneous conclusions.     

The abused and neglected foster child: Determinants of emotional conflict and oppositional behavior

Behavioral and emotional problems have been observed in emotionally vulnerable children in foster care under certain circumstances. A common pattern involves the unpredictable appearance of a previously absent or unavailable natural parent. Such an occurrence precipitates the reawakening of the child's ambivalent feelings toward both natural and foster parents as well as their fears of abandonment. This frequently leads to behavior that is oppositional and difficult to manage. If the foster parents find the child's behavior unmanageable, and if they are not provided with appropriate professional support during this difficult period, a crisis often follows that precipitates the child's removal from the foster home. Individual, familial, and systemic contributions to this dilemma are discussed. This article emphasizes the origins and nature of the intrapsychic dilemma faced by these children. Particular emphasis is placed on the manifestations of a conflict of loyalty, in the child, and its relationship to the oppositional behavior of these children in foster care. Additional considerations include the impact of inconsistent parenting, abuse and neglect by the natural parents, the assumption of a parental role by the child and a concomitant renunciation of the child's dependency needs, as well as an examination of the role of the foster parent's fantasy of what it will be like to parent a traumatized child.     

An empirical investigation of human dyadic systems in the time and frequency domains

This paper presents time and frequency domain analyses of psychotherapy data drawn from a unique dyadic system--the patient/therapist (P/T) system. The data are constituted by a time series defined by which member of the P/T system held the speaker role at each second of ten recorded psychotherapy consultations. The series reflects a specific property of communication within the dyad. Each series significantly followed a first order autoregressive model. That is, each was highly sensitive to the prior state of the system, or equivalently, the system showed feedforward of its prior state. These models became more significant after intervention analysis further clarified the underlying autoregressive structure. The histograms of the frequency of the length of each utterance indicated an underlying Poisson model for the emergence of speech. The parameters of the Poisson and autoregressive models were used to determine blindly which of four pairs of interviews involved the same therapist with two different patients. The method correctly identified three of the therapist four pairs but failed to identify different interviews with the same patient, a significantly negative result. These results suggest that certain time domain measures are therapist-dominated, so that the therapist drives change in these areas within the P/T system more strongly than the patient. In the frequency domain, the coherency between each of the 45 pairs of speaker series was used in an attempt to identify which time series corresponded systematically to the same therapists or patients. This proved futile because no two pairs of series--no P/T system--showed significant non-zero coherency. This result suggests that the harmonics of the switching of the speaker role are not determined by the therapist or patient alone but by the P/T system as an entity. We conclude that human dyadic systems may show predominant influence of one member or jointly determined patterns that are highly distinctive.     

Estimating variation from data with varying element sizes

In some applications (repeated surveys, process control, monitoring use of resources etc), observations are often based on elements of varying size. This paper describes two methods of estimating the underlying variation. One method measures deviations from an overall estimate of a location parameter, while the other method is based on successive differences. Both are 'one-pass' estimates and are thus programmable without storing all the data.