An International Study of Research Misconduct Policies

Research misconduct is an international concern. Misconduct policies can play a crucial role in preventing and policing research misconduct, and many institutions have developed their own policies. While institutional policies play a key role in preventing and policing misconduct, national policies are also important to ensure consistent promulgation and enforcement of ethical standards. The purpose of this study was to obtain more information about research misconduct policies across the globe. We found that twenty-two of the top forty research and development funding countries (55%) had a national misconduct policy. Four countries (18.2%) are in the process of developing a policy, and four (18.2%) have a national research ethics code but no misconduct policy. All twenty-two countries (100%) with national policies included fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in the definition of misconduct, but beyond that there was considerable diversity. Unethical authorship was mentioned in 54.6% of the misconduct definitions, followed by unethical publication practices (36.4%), conflict of interest mismanagement (36.4%), unethical peer review (31.8%), misconduct related to misconduct investigations (27.3%), poor record keeping (27.3%), other deception (27.3%), serious deviations (22.7%), violating confidentiality (22.7%), and human or animal research violations (22.7%). Having a national policy was positively associated with research and development funding ranking and intensiveness. To promote integrity in international research collaborations, countries should seek to harmonize and clarify misconduct definitions and develop procedures for adjudicating conflicts when harmonization does not occur.     

The Relationship of Ecological and Geographic Factors to Gambling Behavior and Pathology

The current study examined the effect of neighborhood disadvantage and gambling availability on gambling participation and pathology. A national telephone survey included 2631 US adults. Census data was used to characterize the respondents neighborhood, and the distance from the respondents home to gambling facilities was calculated. Logistic and linear regressions were performed to predict gambling participation and pathology. Results showed that the neighborhood disadvantage was positively related to frequency of gambling and problem/pathological gambling. The presence of a casino within 10miles of the respondents home was positively related to problem/pathological gambling. The permissiveness of gambling laws was positively related to any gambling in the past year, as well as frequent gambling. These results were interpreted to mean that the ecology of disadvantaged neighborhoods promotes gambling pathology, and that availability of gambling opportunities promotes gambling participation and pathology.     

Evaluation of a preventive intervention for bereaved children

One hundred eighty four families completed a twelve month parent-guidance (experimental) or a parent telephone-monitoring (comparison) intervention initiated during one parent's terminal cancer illness and continued until six months after the death. Children in the parent-guidance intervention reported greater reduction in trait anxiety and greater improvement in their perceptions of the surviving parent's competence and communication, a primary goal of the intervention. Identified problems in implementing evaluations of experimental interventions with bereaved children include the following: (1) Available and commonly used standardized psychopathology measures do not adequately capture changes in non-psychopathological but bereaved distressed, grieving children and adolescents. (2) Experimental and control samples usually have very few children with psychopathology (scores). Relatively small changes in scores within the normal range may be insufficient to allow measurement of meaningful differences between interventions. (3) Both experimental and control interventions must provide sufficient help to retain families for later evaluation. The level of general support and referral for other treatments, if adequately done, may be sufficient to blur differences in standardized psychopathology measure scores between any two interventions. It may only be in the specifically targeted intervention area that differences can be expected to be significant in adequately resourced families.     

Exact tests of binomial p=1/2 when one binomial event possibly has different probability

The data are n independent random binomial events, each resulting in success or failure. The event outcomes are believed to be trials from a binomial distribution with success probability p, and tests of p=1/2 are desired. However, there is the possibility that some unidentified event has a success probability different from the common value p for the other n?1 events. Then, tests of whether this common p equals 1/2 are desired. Fortunately, two-sided tests can be obtained that simultaneously are applicable for both situations. That is, the significance level for a test is same when one event has a different probability as when all events have the same probability. These tests are the usual equal-tail tests for p=1/2 (based on n independent trials from a binomial distribution).     

Interviewing as social interaction

This paper, based on the premise that the interview is a unique form of social interaction and, as such, deserves greater attention, addresses the interactional dynamics of the interview by weaving experience into analysis, as well as reviewing relevant literature. Four types of interviewing situations are distinguished, with the focus of discussion on two of these types (survey-interviewing and professional-interviewing), specifically in regard to varying interactional effects. The author concentrates on the focused or indepth interview, organizing the discussion around the sequence of events which contribute to the construction of the focused interviewing situation, drawing examples from her interviewing experience. The aim is to emphasize the differences between the indepth and other types of interviewing methods. I would like to thank Harriet Gross and Muriel Beadle for editorial advice.     

Semiparametric methods for survival data with measurement error under additive hazards cure rate models

Lifetime Data Analysis - It is well established that measurement error has drastically negative impact on data analysis. It can not only bias parameter estimates but may also cause loss of power...     

Shrinkage and pretest estimators for longitudinal data analysis under partially linear models

In this paper, we develop marginal analysis methods for longitudinal data under partially linear models. We employ the pretest and shrinkage estimation procedures to estimate the mean response parameters as well as the association parameters, which may be subject to certain restrictions. We provide the analytic expressions for the asymptotic biases and risks of the proposed estimators, and investigate their relative performance to the unrestricted semiparametric least-squares estimator (USLSE). We show that if the dimension of association parameters exceeds two, the risk of the shrinkage estimators is strictly less than that of the USLSE in most of the parameter space. On the other hand, the risk of the pretest estimator depends on the validity of the restrictions of association parameters. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed estimators relative to that of the USLSE. A real data example is applied to illustrate the practical usefulness of the proposed estimation procedures.