Enhancing parent-child interaction during foster care visits: experimental assessment of an intervention

Mothers of young children recently placed in foster care participated in an intervention to enhance parent-child interaction during visits. The mothers all reported substantial loss and trauma histories. Immediately prior to the visits, the mothers were coached on strategies for separating from their children at the visit's end. The mothers displayed more behavioral strategies for supporting their children when the visit was over, but were less engaged with their children during the leave-taking sequence and displayed fewer ways of maintaining the child's involvement in mother-child interaction during leave-taking than those in a comparison group. This article discusses consideration of parents' trauma history in designing interventions to enhance parent-child interaction.     

新年寄语

节日似乎是一瞬间的事情,而新的一年对你来说才刚刚开始。或许就是这一刻,在零时零分我们都做着同样的事情,认真地倒数时间,给你最重要的人来自第一时间的祝福和问候。在静默的空气中,用心凝视自己,在一个时间的起始点与自己对话。每天都被很多最流行的元素包围,却很少停下来与自己交谈。过去的一年我们对自己满意吗?对未来还有多少期待仍...     

Comparing mortality estimates based on different administrative records

This study investigates how age and race are reported in interviews and on death certificates and how these demographic assignments affect life expectancy estimates for the total population, for males and females, and for blacks and whites. Differential reporting of demographic characteristics can produce different estimated life expectancies and thus differential assessments of the sex and race gaps in life expectancy. This difference underscores the need to define demographic characteristics carefully and to examine multivariate models and projections cautiously.     

Does Higher Socioeconomic Status Increase Contact Between Minorities and Whites? An Examination of Interracial Romantic Relationships Among Adolescents*

Objectives. We examine how socioeconomic status of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian adolescents affects their likelihood of dating across racial lines and the racial characteristics of their romantic partners. Methods. We analyze data nationally representative sample of adolescents in 1994–1995 using logistic regression models. Results. Socioeconomic status has little effect on whether adolescents choose an interracial partner except in the case of Hispanics. However, higher socioeconomic status blacks and Asians who interracially date are more likely to have white partners than their SES counterparts. Conclusion. Although social class does not increase the odds of interracial contact, it does increase contact with whites compared to other groups for blacks and Asians.     

Applicability of the WHOQOL-BREF on early adolescence

The WHOQOL-BREF is one of the cross-cultural and widely used measures for assessing health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Previous studies of the HRQOL using the WHOQOL-BREF mainly focused on adult; however, there has been less work carried out on assessing the HRQOL on early adolescence. The goal of this study was to examine the applicability of the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version in early adolescent sample. A total of 365 junior high school students participated in this study. Participants completed the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version and five visual-analogue items on HRQOL evaluation. The results supported the originally designed four-factor model, and also indicated good item discrimination, internal reliability, factorial validity (by using confirmatory factor analysis) and construct validity (e.g., predictive validity, discriminant and convergent validity) after deleting two physical health items (i.e., “To what extent do you feel that your pain hinders you in doing what you need to do”; “Do you need medical treatment to cope with your daily life?”) and one social relationships item (i.e., “Are you satisfied with your sex life?”). Overall, this study provides the applicability of the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version in early adolescence. In addition, the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version may be of use to health professionals in the assessment and comparison of different age groups from early adolescence to adulthood.     

A multi-index model for quantile regression with ordinal data

In this paper, we propose a quantile approach to the multi-index semiparametric model for an ordinal response variable. Permitting non-parametric transformation of the response, the proposed method achieves a root-n rate of convergence and has attractive robustness properties. Further, the proposed model allows additional indices to model the remaining correlations between covariates and the residuals from the single-index, considerably reducing the error variance and thus leading to more efficient prediction intervals (PIs). The utility of the model is demonstrated by estimating PIs for functional status of the elderly based on data from the second longitudinal study of aging. It is shown that the proposed multi-index model provides significantly narrower PIs than competing models. Our approach can be applied to other areas in which the distribution of future observations must be predicted from ordinal response data.     

Encoding dissimilarity data for statistical model building

We summarize, review and comment upon three papers which discuss the use of discrete, noisy, incomplete, scattered pairwise dissimilarity data in statistical model building. Convex cone optimization codes are used to embed the objects into a Euclidean space which respects the dissimilarity information while controlling the dimension of the space. A “newbie” algorithm is provided for embedding new objects into this space. This allows the dissimilarity information to be incorporated into a smoothing spline ANOVA penalized likelihood model, a support vector machine, or any model that will admit reproducing kernel Hilbert space components, for nonparametric regression, supervised learning, or semisupervised learning. Future work and open questions are discussed. The papers are: