Ethical challenges of community based participatory research: exploring researchers’ experience

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) has been proposed as an equitable, empowering partnership approach to collaborative research. International literature about the ethical implications of CBPR suggests a continuing strong interest in the topic. However, there is a notable lack of research that captures the experience of ethical challenges of researchers from different countries who engage in CBPR. The aim of this research was to address this lack of evidence by exploring researchers’ experience of ethical challenges in CBPR at an international level. An innovative data collection method was designed utilising a purpose-built blog. Balancing participant protection and autonomy, partnership tensions, and enduring impacts of the researcher role emerged as the main themes. These findings illustrate the specific conflicts faced by researchers engaged in CBPR. This is largely as a result of the complexities of CBPR coupled with rigid ethics committee review that does not always take into account the more fluid nature of the approach.     

Ratio tests of a unit root

Based on the maximal invariant principle, we derive two ratio tests (locally best invariant test and point optimal test) for a unit root and compare them with previously proposed ratio tests. We also show that our ratio tests tend to have better powers than the Dickey-Fuller test and the modified Dickey-Fuller test.     

Best linear unbiased and invariant estimation in location-scale families based on double-ranked set sampling

Abstract

In this article, we propose the best linear unbiased estimators (BLUEs) and best linear invariant estimators (BLIEs) for the unknown parameters of location-scale family of distributions based on double-ranked set sampling (DRSS) using perfect and imperfect rankings. These estimators are then compared with the BLUEs and BLIEs based on ranked set sampling (RSS). It is shown that under perfect ranking, the proposed estimators are uniformly better than the BLUEs and BLIEs obtained via RSS. We also propose the best linear unbiased quantile (BLUQ) and the best linear invariant quantile (BLIQ) estimators for normal distribution under DRSS. It is observed that the proposed quantile estimators are more efficient than the BLUQ and BLIQ estimators based on RSS for both perfect and imperfect orderings.     

Should Macroeconomic Forecasters Use Daily Financial Data and How?

We introduce easy-to-implement, regression-based methods for predicting quarterly real economic activity that use daily financial data and rely on forecast combinations of mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regressions. We also extract a novel small set of daily financial factors from a large panel of about 1000 daily financial assets. Our analysis is designed to elucidate the value of daily financial information and provide real-time forecast updates of the current (nowcasting) and future quarters of real GDP growth.     

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants have knowledge of a hand‐grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12‐month‐olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self‐produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.     

Pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in multicultural teacher education

To show the potential and limitations of pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in anti-racist and multicultural teacher education, this paper engages in an in-depth analysis of two ‘critical moments’ that are drawn from a series of teacher workshops. The purpose of the analysis is to show how discomfort and empathy may be combined together pedagogically in the context of multicultural and antiracist teacher education. The contribution to the literature is to highlight the importance of foregrounding attention to teachers’ discomfort and its pedagogical implications in multicultural teacher education.     

The Dangers of Assessing the Financial Vulnerability of Nonprofits Using Traditional Measures

This article analyzes the financial vulnerability of 228 British nongovernmental development organizations (NGDOs) during the period 2008–2012. To do this, we use the Financial Vulnerability Index developed by Trussel et al. (2002). This index is commonly used in the literature on nonprofit organizations. However, we observe a very poor adaptation of the index to the reality of this industry, at least in predictive terms. The article goes deeply into each of the variables that are used to calculate this index, and we offer explanations of their inadequacy to this subsector of nonprofits.