Judgments about personal identity in childhood and adolescence

Judgments concerning personal identity were studied in children and adolescents. Each subject was asked to imagine entering a hypothetical machine which simultaneously produced two persons, with each person receiving one of four sets of the subject's characteristics: physical, active, social, or psychological. Subjects were asked to judge which of the resulting persons was most nearly identical with the self. Results from the first study with middle-class Americans demonstrated that the social characteristics are most frequently chosen by young adolescents. With age, the physical characteristics were less frequently selected and the psychological characteristics were more often selected. In Study 2, middle-class American children between the ages of 6 to 7 judged the psychological characteristics of self most important in preserving identity, even though their self-concepts as elicited by other methods appeared physicalistic. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for accounts of self-concept development.     

Empowering Leadership,Psychological Empowerment and Employee Outcomes: Testing a Multi‐level Mediating Model

This study examined the effects of empowering leadership on employees in a customer service organization, using data from 266 employees and their supervisors from 41 work teams in a division of a large Hong Kong telecommunications corporation. Empowering leadership had acceptable levels of within‐group agreement and between‐group variability, providing support for its analysis as a group‐level construct. Testing a multi‐level model in which psychological empowerment was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between both within‐group and between‐group empowering leadership and individual outcomes, empowering leadership was associated with psychological empowerment at both levels. There was evidence of significant mediation effects at both the individual and group levels. These findings underline the importance of analysing both within‐group and between‐group differences in empowering leadership and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviours.     

Creation of a social work practice plan: an attempt to learn from business and logic modelling

Social work practice is often criticised for lack of support of theories and research evidence. This article attempts to learn from business practice and proposes the creation of a plan as an essential part of social work practice and education to encourage the use of theories and research evidence in social work practice and to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and accountability of social work practice. Based on logic modelling, a modified logic social work practice plan is presented and illustrated using a case example. The plan incorporates basic social work elements and the elements of alternative interventions, monitoring and control as well as cost. The potential benefits of inclusion of practice plan in social work practice and the ways to promote the adoption of a practice plan in social work education and practice are discussed.     

A generalized drop-the-loser rule for multi-treatment clinical trials

Urn models are popular for response adaptive designs in clinical studies. Among different urn models, Ivanova's drop-the-loser rule is capable of producing superior adaptive treatment allocation schemes. Ivanova [2003. A play-the-winner-type urn model with reduced variability. Metrika 58, 1–13] obtained the asymptotic normality only for two treatments. Recently, Zhang et al. [2007. Generalized drop-the-loser urn for clinical trials with delayed responses. Statist. Sinica, in press] extended the drop-the-loser rule to tackle more general circumstances. However, their discussion is also limited to only two treatments. In this paper, the drop-the-loser rule is generalized to multi-treatment clinical trials, and delayed responses are allowed. Moreover, the rule can be used to target any desired pre-specified allocation proportion. Asymptotic properties, including strong consistency and asymptotic normality, are also established for general multi-treatment cases.     

An Empirical Investigation in Sustaining High‐Quality Performance

Many organizations that were once quality leaders have had challenges sustaining high‐quality performance. Although research has examined frameworks and concepts that lead to high‐quality performance, few studies examine how to sustain high‐quality performance. Sustaining performance may require additional capabilities from what it takes to achieve it. Drawing on quality management literature, organizational resilience literature, and the theory of dynamic capabilities in the strategy literature, this study empirically investigates the effects of four capabilities that help sustain high‐quality performance. The analysis shows that capabilities in improvement, innovation, sensing weak signals, and responsiveness all help sustain high‐quality performance. This suggests that what it takes to achieve high‐quality performance is different, in part, from what it takes to sustain it. The data comes from a survey of 147 manufacturing business units. The analysis shows that the relative benefits of these capabilities may depend on the level of competitive intensity and environmental uncertainty. The findings provide empirical support for a theoretical model and practical guidance for sustaining quality performance.     

Sensitivity of Concentration and Risk Predictions in the PRESTO and MMSOILS Multimedia Models: Regression Technique Assessment

This paper describes the application of two multimedia models, PRESTO and MMSOILS, to predict contaminant migration from a landfill that contains an organic chemical (methylene chloride) and a radionuclide (uranium-238). Exposure point concentrations and human health risks are predicted, and distributions of those predictions are generated using Monte Carlo techniques. Analysis of exposure point concentrations shows that predictions of uranium-238 in groundwater differ by more than one order of magnitude between models. These differences occur mainly because PRESTO simulates uranium-238 transport through the groundwater using a one-dimensional algorithm and vertically mixes the plume over an effective mixing depth, whereas MMSOILS uses a three-dimensional algorithm and simulates a plume that resides near the surface of the aquifer.A sensitivity analysis, using stepwise multiple linear regression, is performed to evaluate which of the random variables are most important in producing the predicted distributions of exposure point concentrations and health risks. The sensitivity analysis shows that the predicted distributions can be accurately reproduced using a small subset of the random variables. Simple regression techniques are applied, for comparison, to the same scenarios, and results are similar. The practical implication of this analysis is the ability to distinguish between important versus unimportant random variables in terms of their sensitivity to selected endpoints.     

Evaluating the Economic Impact of Casino Liberalization in Macao

This paper aims to evaluate the economic impact after Macao decided to liberalize its gaming industry. By analysing both objective data of official statistics and subjective data of the perceptions of quality of life, we painted a picture of mixed blessings. Although objective indicators showed strong economic growth in terms of a rise in per capita GDP and public revenue as well as a decline in unemployment rate, subjective indicators revealed that local residents were less than optimistic about their own employment outlook and did not perceive any improvement in their overall economic situation. While casino liberalization brought forth tremendous economic gain, the general population did not subjectively feel the benefits. An integrative analysis of both objective and subjective indicators would therefore allow us to look closer how residents?? lives in the micro-level could have been adversely affected by the prosperous economic outlook at the macro-level.     

Adapting the sample size planning of a phase III trial based on phase II data

Traditionally, in clinical development plan, phase II trials are relatively small and can be expected to result in a large degree of uncertainty in the estimates based on which Phase III trials are planned. Phase II trials are also to explore appropriate primary efficacy endpoint(s) or patient populations. When the biology of the disease and pathogenesis of disease progression are well understood, the phase II and phase III studies may be performed in the same patient population with the same primary endpoint, e.g. efficacy measured by HbA1c in non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus trials with treatment duration of at least three months. In the disease areas that molecular pathways are not well established or the clinical outcome endpoint may not be observed in a short-term study, e.g. mortality in cancer or AIDS trials, the treatment effect may be postulated through use of intermediate surrogate endpoint in phase II trials. However, in many cases, we generally explore the appropriate clinical endpoint in the phase II trials. An important question is how much of the effect observed in the surrogate endpoint in the phase II study can be translated into the clinical effect in the phase III trial. Another question is how much of the uncertainty remains in phase III trials. In this work, we study the utility of adaptation by design (not by statistical test) in the sense of adapting the phase II information for planning the phase III trials. That is, we investigate the impact of using various phase II effect size estimates on the sample size planning for phase III trials. In general, if the point estimate of the phase II trial is used for planning, it is advisable to size the phase III trial by choosing a smaller alpha level or a higher power level. The adaptation via using the lower limit of the one standard deviation confidence interval from the phase II trial appears to be a reasonable choice since it balances well between the empirical power of the launched trials and the proportion of trials not launched if a threshold lower than the true effect size of phase III trial can be chosen for determining whether the phase III trial is to be launched.     

Psychometric Analysis of the Orientations to Happiness Questionnaire in Taiwanese Undergraduate Students

The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Orientations to Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ; Peterson et al. in J Happiness Stud 6(1):25–41, 2005) in Taiwanese students. The participants were 578 undergraduate students (M_age = 18.64, SD = 1.02) and completed the OHQ, satisfaction with life scale (Diener et al. in J Personality Assess 49:71–75, 1985), and subjective happiness. Confirmation factor analysis indicated that a three-factor model with 17 items was the better fit model. Cross-validation also supported the modified Chinese version of the OHQ. Besides, the OHQ significantly predicted life satisfaction and subjective happiness with an exception of life of pleasure. Overall, it was concluded that the Chinese version of the OHQ would be useful for assessing individual’s orientations to happiness.     

Alegría! Flow in Leisure and Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Event Satisfaction Using Data from an Acrobatics Show

The aim of the current study was to examine the role of satisfaction-with-event as a mediator in the relations between flow and life satisfaction based on the bottom-up theory (Andrews and Withey in Social indicators of well-being: Americans’ perceptions of life quality. Plenum, New York, 1976; Lee et al. in J Macromarketing 22(2): 158–169, 2002). Four hundred and thirty-four participants with a mean age of 35.60 (SD = 11.76) were recruited from the audience of a “Cirque du Soleil” acrobatics show, performed in Taiwan in 2009. Participants completed the flow scale (Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row, New York, 1990), a satisfaction-with-event scale (Lin and Hsu in Mark Rev 3(4): 497–528, 2008), and a satisfaction-with-life scale (Diener et al. in J Pers Assess 49:71–75, 1985) immediately after viewing the show. Structural equation modeling was conducted to examine our hypothesis that satisfaction-with-event levels would fully mediate the relationship between flow and overall life satisfaction. Results supported our prediction and are discussed in terms of bottom-up theory. Implications of the study are also provided for the leisure managers.