Research note: Monthly strategies for discretion: shopping for sanitary towels and tampons

Collected as part of a small-scale qualitative study of socio-cultural aspects of menstruation, interview data dealing with the task of buying sanitary towels and tampons are presented. They reveal a potentially embarrassing dilemma between an overarching requirement for discretion in menstrual matters and the necessity to ‘go public’ when shopping. Strategies for managing this dilemma form the substance of the paper.     

On two approximations to the F-distribution: Application to testing for intraclass correlation in family studies

Two approximations to the F-distribution are evaluated in the context of testing for intraclass correlation in the analysis of family data. The evaluation is based on a computation of empirical significance levels and a comparison between p-values associated with these approximations and the corresponding exact p-values. It is found that the approximate methods may give very unsatisfactory results, and exact methods are therefore recommended for general use.     

Complexity of process and role in the evaluation of an interdisciplinary mental health education program: The deacon's masterpiece

Research and literature on program evaluation must attend to problems of application, which can have major effect on the outcome. Increasing numbers of innovative, multifaceted programs operating in complex settings are presenting for evaluation. Evaluation process must become flexible, creative, and multifaceted in order to produce valid and comprehensive results, and to meet the needs of this field. Evaluators and evaluation, the evaluated program, and the environment become a mutually interacting system in the process of evaluation. Evaluation goals and roles must be conceptualized, agreed upon, sanctioned, and appropriately implemented or conflict and ineffectiveness will result. Three models of evaluation emerge: objective and independent, objective but serving one interest, and pseudo-scientific public relations. Evaluation of an interdisciplinary mental health education program illustrates these issues. Evaluation technology, process, and roles must all be attended to or the weak link undermines the rest.     

Psychosocial maturity and teenage contraceptive use: An investigation of decision-making and communication skills

The developmental factors influencing teenage women's contraceptive decision-making with first sexual partner are investigated. A discriminant function analysis of results of a study of 17- to 19-year-old women shows the following: Pill users are distinguished from women who have not used any method by having had a longer relationship with their partner, having a more negative attitude towards becoming premaritally pregnant themselves, being older at the time of their sexual debut, engaging in more frequent sexual intercourse, being more trusting of their partner, and perceiving the risks of unprotected pregnancy as greater. Women who are protected by the use of condom are distinguished from women not protected by any method by having had more discussions with male friends about a variety of topics, having better role-taking skills, having a less negative attitude about becoming premaritally pregnant, and having discussed their sexual debut with their partner beforehand. Results are consistent with a conceptualization which distinguishes contraceptive methods on the basis of the psychosocial costs their use incurs for young women.Research supported by Grant #HD09813, National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Thanks are due to Robin Halliday, Allyson Myhre, and Carolyn Scheve for help in conducing this investigation.     

Fire Risk Analysis for Nuclear Power Plants: Methodological Developments and Applications

A methodology to quantify the risk from fires in nuclear power plants is described. This methodology combines engineering judgment, statistical evidence, fire phenomenology, and plant system analysis. It can be divided into two major parts: (1) fire scenario identification and quantification, and (2) analysis of the impact on plant safety. This article primarily concentrates on the first part. Statistical analysis of fire occurrence data is used to establish the likelihood of ignition. The temporal behaviors of the two competing phenomena, fire propagation and fire detection and suppression, are studied and their characteristic times are compared. Severity measures are used to further specialize the frequency of the fire scenario. The methodology is applied to a switchgear room of a nuclear power plant.     

An empirical test of ordinal independence

In this article, we test Green and Jullien's (1988) Ordinal Independence (OI) Axiom, an axiom necessary for any rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) model, including Cumulative Prospect Theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992). We observe systematic violations of OI (some within-subject violation rates of over 50%). These patterns of choice cannot be explained by any RDEU theory alone. We suggest that subjects are employing an editing operation prior to evaluation: if an outcome-probability pair is common to both gambles, it is cancelled when the commonality is transparent; otherwise, it is not cancelled. We interpret the results with respect to both original and cumulative prospect theory and the known empirical properties of the weighting function.