Using a Community Participatory Research Approach to Understand Satisfaction with Psychopharmacology Among Families of Children with Psychiatric Co-Morbidities

How do parents of children with psychiatric co-morbidities perceive their children’s use of psychiatric medications? To learn more, the Parent/Professional Advocacy League of Massachusetts (PAL), representing families of children with mental health needs, collaborated with researchers on a community-based participatory research (CBPR) study. A questionnaire assessed satisfaction with psychiatric medication as it pertained to children with psychiatric co-morbidities (n = 212). Satisfied parents were likely to employ alternative therapies and feel that prescribers had informed them about medication use and side effects. Results reinforce the need for prescribers to discuss psychopharmacology with families. CBPR improved study relevance and supported PAL’s advocacy efforts.     

Contextual Factors Related to African American Adolescent Career Development

African American adolescents’ career development has gained increased attention in light of various barriers affecting their educational and career development goals. The author examined relationships among career decision self‐efficacy, ethnic identity, and academic self‐concept of 104 African American high school students enrolled in Upward Bound programs. Participants responded to measures of career decision self‐efficacy, ethnic identity, and academic self‐concept. Results indicated that career decision self‐efficacy was significantly and positively correlated with ethnic identity and academic self‐concept. In addition, academic self‐concept was found to be a stronger predictor of career decision self‐efficacy than was ethnic identity. The results of this study may assist counselors, teachers, administrators, and parents to understand career decision self‐efficacy as it relates to ethnic identity, academic self‐concept, and demographic variables. This research supports the need for continued career‐related interventions within the schools designed to focus on factors related to ethnic minorities to help foster their career development.     

Pseudo maximum-likelihood estimation of the univariate GARCH (1,1) and asymptotic properties

One provides in this paper the pseudo-likelihood estimator (PMLE) and asymptotic theory for the GARCH (1,1) process. Strong consistency of the pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) is established by appealing to conditions given in Jeantheau (1998) concerning the existence of a stationary and ergodic solution to the multivariate GARCH (p, q) process. One proves the asymptotic normality of the PMLE by appealing to martingales' techniques.     

Empirical Processes in Survey Sampling with (Conditional) Poisson Designs

It is the main purpose of this paper to study the asymptotics of certain variants of the empirical process in the context of survey data. Precisely, Functional Central Limit Theorems are established under usual conditions when the sample is drawn from a Poisson or a rejective sampling design. The framework we develop encompasses sampling designs with non‐uniform first order inclusion probabilities, which can be chosen so as to optimize estimation accuracy. Applications to Hadamard differentiable functionals are considered.     

Consumer Trust in the U.S. Food System: An Examination of the Recreancy Theorem*

Abstract Because consumer opinions to an increasing extent affect the structure and management of the U.S. food system, it is important for social scientists to accurately model consumer trust in this system so they can better understand and anticipate public responses to existing or proposed food‐related regulatory policies and facilitate effective partnership building between food‐system representatives and the public. The recreancy theorem posits that individuals' trust in and support for societal institutions reflects their perceptions of the competence and fiduciary responsibility of institutional actors. This theorem might prove effective at identifying the key determinants of consumers' trust in and support for institutional actors within the U.S. food system, whether these actors be representatives of large‐scale, internationally operated firms or small‐scale, locally operated businesses. We used data from two nationwide samples of adults to test the recreancy theorem for seven to nine pertinent institutional actors each within five areas of the U.S. food system: food safety, nutrition, treatment of workers, environmental protection, and treatment of livestock. The resulting 55 tests of the theorem entailed the estimation of 55 structural equation models to evaluate model fit and the efficacy of perceived competence and fiduciary responsibility in explaining trust and support. The results of analyzing the structural equation models separately and overall indicate support for the recreancy theorem. Based upon our results, we offer suggestions for enhancing public‐private partnership formation within the U.S. food system.     

Extrapolation of subsampling distribution estimators: The i.i.d. and strong mixing cases

Politis & Romano (1994) proposed a general subsampling methodology for the construction of large‐sample confidence regions for an arbitrary parameter under minimal conditions. Nevertheless, the subsampling distribution estimators may sometimes be inefficient (in the case of the sample mean of i.i.d. data, for instance) as compared to alternative estimators such as the bootstrap and/or the asymptotic normal distribution (with estimated variance). The authors investigate here the extent to which the performance of subsampling distribution estimators can be improved by interpolation and extrapolation techniques, while at the same time retaining the robustness property of consistent distribution estimation even in nonregular cases; both i.i.d. and weakly dependent (mixing) observations are considered.