Ethnic and religious perspectives on disability and the helping professions

This note looks at ethnic and religious perspectives of people who are training for and/or working in the helping professions in regard to their views of disability. The Modified Issues in Disabilities Scale (MIDS) was administered to a sample of people training for and/or working in the helping professions. A statistically significant association was found between ethnic and religious perspectives and scores on the MIDS.     

Omnibus tests of multinormality based on skewness and kurtosis

Measures of univariate skewness and kurtosis have long been used as a test of univariate normality, several omnibus test procedures based on a combination of the measures having been proposed, see Pearson, D’Agestino and Bowman (1977) and Mardia (1979). Mardia (1970) proposed measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis, and constructed a test of multinormality based on these measures. we obtain the correlation between these measures and propose several omnibus tests using the two measures. The performances of these tests are compared by means of a Monte Carlo study.     

A statistical model of tracking

A method is proposed to model individual patterns of growth over time by linear combinations of optimally chosen weighted orthogonal vectors. The goal is to distinguish individuals who track from nontrackers. Nontrackers are defined as those who follow different, usually more complex, growth patterns than trackers. Thus, nontrackers require more vectors than do trackers in modeling their longitudinal observations. A method of specifying the class-specific vectors and individual weights is demonstrated. When the proportion of nontrackers in the population is small, a modified form of the Akaike maximum entropy criterion is used to select the number of vectors appopriate for each person and also to classify each person into a tracking category. When the proportion of nontrackers is large, the modified Akaike criterion together with scatterplots of the growth curve weights are needed to distinguish trackers from nontrackers. The apprach is illustrated with longitudinal observations of height measured in an epidemiologic survey of children.     

Retrospective Reporting of Household Wealth: Evidence From the 1983–1989 Survey of Consumer Finances

One way to obtain panel-like information on household wealth is to ask households about changes in their asset holdings. Yet the reliability of retrospective data is unclear, considering the potential for recall error. This article examines the reliability of retrospective reporting, using data from the 1983–1989 Survey of Consumer Finances. We find substantial inconsistencies between reported net investments in assets with measured changes in holdings. Inconsistencies are less severe for salient transactions like home sales and more severe for aggregated items like financial assets.     

Child outcome measures in the study of child care quality

This article assesses whether there are methodological problems with child outcome measures that may contribute to the small associations between child care quality and child outcomes found in the literature. Outcome measures used in 65 studies of child care quality published between 1979 and December 2005 were examined, taking the previous review by Vandell and Wolfe (2000) as the starting point. Serious methodological problems were not pervasive for child outcome measures. However, methodological concerns were most prevalent among measures of socioemotional development. Furthermore, psychometric information on outcome measures was often missing from published reports, and health outcomes and approaches to learning were infrequently studied. Future research should address alignment issues between aspects of quality and the specific child outcomes chosen for study.