Assessing the Reliability of the Gambling Functional Assessment: Revised

Dixon and Johnson (Anal Gambl Behav 1: 44–49, 2007) proposed the Gambling Functional Assessment as a tool to identify the consequences maintaining the respondent’s gambling behavior, but subsequent studies on its psychometric properties suggested that it could use improvement. The present study investigated the internal consistency of the Gambling Functional Assessment—Revised using the responses of 1,060 undergraduate students. Temporal reliability was assessed by a second administration of the measure four (n = 87) or twelve (n = 98) weeks after the first administration. Temporal reliability was also compared to the South Oaks Gambling Screen (Lesieur and Blume in Am J Psychiatry 144: 1184–1188, 1987), which was also administered at both time points. Internal consistency measures were good to excellent, even when potential non-gamblers were excluded from the analyses. Temporal stability was also very good, with the possible exception of the consequence of “escape” at 12 weeks. The Gambling Functional Assessment—Revised represents a potentially useful tool for researchers and therapists interested in why respondents are gambling.     

Control‐based imputation for sensitivity analyses in informative censoring for recurrent event data

In clinical trials, missing data commonly arise through nonadherence to the randomized treatment or to study procedure. For trials in which recurrent event endpoints are of interests, conventional analyses using the proportional intensity model or the count model assume that the data are missing at random, which cannot be tested using the observed data alone. Thus, sensitivity analyses are recommended. We implement the control‐based multiple imputation as sensitivity analyses for the recurrent event data. We model the recurrent event using a piecewise exponential proportional intensity model with frailty and sample the parameters from the posterior distribution. We impute the number of events after dropped out and correct the variance estimation using a bootstrap procedure. We apply the method to an application of sitagliptin study.     

Residential Remittances and Food Security in the Upper West Region of Ghana

In recent years, out migration from the Upper West Region to the southern belt of Ghana for farming has become commonplace. The natural question that has arisen is: what is the potential impact of remittances from this migration pattern on food security in the region? Using multivariate ordered logistic regression this study assesses the linkage between remittances and household food security (derived using the HFIAS) among urban and rural households (n=1,438) in the region. The findings show that urban remittance‐receiving households and rural remittance and non‐remittance receiving households were more likely (OR=2.44, p<0.05; OR=2.46, p<0.001; and OR=1.49, p<0.1, respectively) to report being more severely food‐insecure than urban non‐remittance receiving households. The findings demonstrate that household strategies such as migration and remittances on their own are not sufficient to ameliorate the precarious food insecurity situation of the region. The study calls for development of alternative livelihoods in the region.     

Do anti-bullying laws work? New evidence on school safety and youth violence

This study is the first to comprehensively examine the effect of state anti-bullying laws (ABLs) on school safety and youth violence. Using existing data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys and the Uniform Crime Reports, and newly-collected data on school shootings, we find little evidence that the typical state ABL is effective in improving school safety and student well-being. However, this null finding masks substantial policy heterogeneity. State mandates that require school districts to implement strong, comprehensive anti-bullying policies are associated with a 7 to 13 % reduction in school violence and an 8 to 12 % reduction in bullying. In addition, our results show that strong anti-bullying policy mandates are associated with a reduction in minor teen school shooting deaths and violent crime arrests, suggesting potentially important spillover effects.     

Who is a volunteer? A cultural and temporal exploration of volunteerism

This study’s purpose was to develop a temporal and cultural definition of volunteering in China. Using a comparative mixed-methods approach, N₁ = 218 Chinese students in Hong Kong were surveyed about their perceptions of volunteering. These quantitative data were compared cross-culturally with a sample of adults in the United States who used the same instrument called Who is a Volunteer? Subsequently, N₂ = 40 of these same students voluntarily participated in a series of focus groups, to further explore more in-depth their opinions about volunteering. The main quantitative results revealed that at the extreme ends of the volunteer scale, both the U.S. and Chinese samples could readily distinguish what volunteering was or was not. The more nuanced empirical differences on the scale (24% of the 21 items) were explained either by unique cultural differences, or the longer and more prominent history that volunteering has had in North America versus China. Main qualitative findings revealed additional between-group cultural differences exemplified by (1) a more family-centric and collectivist Chinese culture versus a more individualistic American culture, (2) a role blurring about volunteer activities versus paid work activities, and (3) that both organizational and cultural context must be seriously considered when defining volunteerism. This study adds to the growing definitional literature on this transformational concept and represents the largest comparative empirical investigation on this subject from East Asia.     

Asymptotic inference in poverty indices: an empirical processes approach

We derive an empirical poverty index containing most of those proposed in the literature. Then, we study its asymptotic behavior by using empirical processes theory. From the results obtained, we derive a Wald-type test for comparing a vector of theoretical poverty indices to a vector of reference indices. We study the test statistic under the null hypothesis of equality, fixed alternatives, and a sequence of local alternatives. A simulation experiment conducted shows that our test performs well for exponential and Pareto data.