Ethical and legal considerations regarding disputed authorship with the use of shared data

Little guidance is currently available for handling disputes between research mentors and students when working with shared data. This article analyzes how the ethical guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) can inform common disputes in this area. Additional insights about the nature of the research relationship are derived from contract and copyright law. Practice guidelines are proposed to safeguard student and faculty welfare in research collaboration, and recommendations are provided to help prevent and resolve disputes between students and faculty.     

The Integration of Two “Brotherhoods” into One Organizational Culture: A Psycho-social Perspective on Merging Police and Fire Services

While organizational mergers may not yet be as commonplace in public enterprise as in private industry, they present similar challenges in terms of the complexities of seamlessly blending the multiple stakeholders involved. As a result, despite their often grandiose ambitions, mergers have not always met with unequivocal success. While the reasons involved can be as divergent as the agencies themselves, research has tended to implicate merger administrators for insufficient attention to organizational culture as a key explanatory factor. In an effort to more closely examine this potential linkage as it relates to public sector mergers, the case study described herein analyzes the role of organizational culture in the merger of two independent entities (a sheriff’s office and fire-rescue services) and describes techniques employed to enhance the compatibility of their unification. Through a combination of interviews with transition team members and analysis of relevant records, the merger process is explored from three theoretical perspectives—i.e., work-related identity, person–environment “fit” (individual–cultural alignment), and employer–employee reciprocity. Using this theoretical framework, insights are provided into the manner in which these two distinct workplace cultures have been organizationally integrated.

Item response theory analysis of the Lichtenberg Financial Decision Screening Scale

The focus of these analyses was to examine the psychometric properties of the Lichtenberg Financial Decision Screening Scale (LFDSS). The purpose of the screen was to evaluate the decisional abilities and vulnerability to exploitation of older adults. Adults aged 60 and over were interviewed by social, legal, financial, or health services professionals who underwent in-person training on the administration and scoring of the scale. Professionals provided a rating of the decision-making abilities of the older adult. The analytic sample included 213 individuals with an average age of 76.9 (SD = 10.1). The majority (57%) were female. Data were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) methodology. The results supported the unidimensionality of the item set. Several IRT models were tested. Ten ordinal and binary items evidenced a slightly higher reliability estimate (0.85) than other versions and better coverage in terms of the range of reliable measurement across the continuum of financial incapacity.     

Home-Making: Supports and Barriers to the Process of Home

The process of home-making changes over a lifetime. For many, including newly resettled homeless people, the home-making process is difficult, challenging, and sometimes unsuccessful. This paper draws on research concerning the experiences of homeless individuals and families in New York and studies of single homeless adults in London and Dublin. It argues that there are supports and barriers to the home process, which include social, physical, environmental, financial, and practical factors. Central conclusions are that home does not arrive with a roof over a person's head, but rather that home-making is a complex social psychological process. Developing supports to home-making may offer tangible ways to enable this process to flourish.     

Object Permanence in Five‐and‐a‐Half‐Month‐Old Infants?

Event Set × Event Set designs were used to study the rotating screen paradigm introduced by Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). In Experiment 1, 36 5 1/2‐month‐old infants were habituated to a screen rotating 180° with no block, a screen rotating 120° up to a block, or a screen rotating 180° up to and seemingly through a block. All infants were then tested on the same 3 events and also a screen rotating 120° with no block. The results indicate that infants are using novelty and familiarity preference to determine their looking times. To confirm this, in Experiment 2, 52 5 1/2‐month‐old infants were familiarized on either 3 or 7 trials to a screen rotating 180° with no block or a screen rotating 120° with no block. All infants were then tested on the same test events as in Experiment 1. Infants with fewer familiarization trials were more likely to prefer the familiar rotation event. The results of these 2 experiments indicate that infants did not use the possibility or impossibility of events but instead used familiarity or novelty relations between the habituation events and the test events to determine their looking times, and suggest that the Baillargeon et al. study should not be interpreted as indicating object permanence or solidity knowledge in young infants.     

Understanding hoarding in older adults

Compulsive hoarding is a debilitating disorder that is only recently becoming understood. Hoarding has been studied primarily in the general population, with only a few researchers focusing on hoarding in older adults, even though the prevalence and severity of the disorder appears to increase with aging. Hoarding seriously affects the quality of one's life and can also cause safety and health problems for individuals and the community. Established treatments for hoarding are relatively new and often need to be extended over a long period of time. Nurses can play an important role in helping identify the problem of hoarding in older adults, determining the types of safety and health hazards that need to be addressed, and contacting the appropriate community agencies.     

The 4R-SUCCESS program: promoting children’s social and scholastic skills in dyadic classroom activities

Research on peer mediated learning shows that students learn through interactions with classmates, but little is known about the skills that children need to be productive learning partners, and educators lack programs for teaching children how to collaborate effectively with classmates. Described in this article is a program of research that was undertaken to address these needs by: (1) empirically creating a collaborative skills curriculum for grade school children, and (2) developing, refining, and implementing a class-wide program for improving grade school children’s social and scholastic skills for collaborative learning activities (i.e., the 4R-SUCCESS program).     

Methodological approaches to the analyses of elder abuse screening measures: Application of latent variable measurement modeling to the WC-RAPS

While several elder abuse screens exist, few measure risk and none target long-term support services. The aims were to examine the psychometric properties of the Weinberg Center Risk and Abuse Prevention Screen (WC-RAPS), comparing approaches to modeling self-reported risk and abuse in relation to reported Adult Protective Services contacts. Methods: The sample (n = 7,035), admissions to managed long-term care (79%) and short-term rehabilitation (20%), was primarily (66%) female, with mean age 77.6 (SD = 9.10); 7% each were African American and Latino and 12% Asian. Latent variable models were used to examine measurement properties of six indicators of abuse and five of risk. Results: Good model fit and stable subscale measurement models were observed across analyses. Reliability was >0.80 across methods, and concurrent criterion validity estimates were as expected. Conclusion: Evidence supported the reliability and concurrent criterion validity of the risk and abuse subscales in an ethnically diverse cohort.     

On the validity of the perturbation method in asymptotic theory

The perturbation methods and the Taylor expansions are very often used to obtain test statistics approximations in multivariate analysis (Specially in Principal Component and Canonical Analyses). These approximations are then used to obtain formal Edgeworth expransions of the distribution functions of the statistics. BHATTACHARYA and GHOSH 1978 have justified these practices under suitable assumptions. In this paper a non classical perturbation problem is solved in order to obtain almost surely expansions of test statistics