Interparental Conflict and Preschoolers' Peer Relations: The Moderating Roles of Temperament and Gender

The relations between destructive interparental conflict (IPC) and three‐ to six‐year‐olds’ (N = 62) peer relations were examined as a function of child temperament and gender. Regression analyses indicated that effortful control moderated the relations of IPC with children's amount of peer interaction as well as with their problematic relations with peers. Specifically, high IPC was associated with low amount of interaction and high problematic relations for preschoolers low in effortful control, but it was related to high amount of interaction and low problems for those high in effortful control. Additionally, gender differences in the relations between IPC and the amount of peer interaction indicated that IPC was negatively related to the amount of interaction for girls but positively related to the amount for boys. The findings highlight the need for examining individual differences in the relations between IPC and the development of early peer relations.     

Family and sociodemographic influences on patterns of leaving home in Postwar Britain

We identify child-level and parent-level characteristics associated with children’s patterns of leaving home. We use a multilevel discrete-time hazards model to examine the impact of family and demographic factors at both levels, and utilize the Alternating Conditional Expectation algorithm optimally to transform the dependent and independent variables. We find that measured variables at both the child and the parent level have important influences, as do period and cohort factors. However, unmeasured parent-level factors have an influence on the departure of children that is broadly similar in magnitude to measured factors.     

A new class of measurement-error models,with applications to dietary data

Measurement-error modelling occurs when one cannot observe a covariate, but instead has possibly replicated surrogate versions of this covariate measured with error. The vast majority of the literature in measurement-error modelling assumes (typically with good reason) that given the value of the true but unobserved (latent) covariate, the replicated surrogates are unbiased for latent covariate and conditionally independent. In the area of nutritional epidemiology, there is some evidence from biomarker studies that this simple conditional independence model may break down due to two causes: (a) systematic biases depending on a person's body mass index, and (b) an additional random component of bias, so that the error structure is the same as a one-way random-effects model. We investigate this problem in the context of (1) estimating distribution of usual nutrient intake, (2) estimating the correlation between a nutrient instrument and usual nutrient intake, and (3) estimating the true relative risk from an estimated relative risk using the error-prone covariate. While systematic bias due to body mass index appears to have little effect, the additional random effect in the variance structure is shown to have a potentially important effect on overall results, both on corrections for relative risk estimates and in estimating the distribution of usual nutrient intake. However, the effect of dietary measurement error on both factors is shown via examples to depend strongly on the data set being used. Indeed, one of our data sets suggests that dietary measurement error may be masking a strong risk of fat on breast cancer, while for a second data set this masking is not so clear. Until further understanding of dietary measurement is available, measurement-error corrections must be done on a study-specific basis, sensitivity analyses should be conducted, and even then results of nutritional epidemiology studies relating diet to disease risk should be interpreted cautiously.     

The Structure of Mental Health: Higher-Order Confirmatory Factor Analyses of Psychological Distress and Well-Being Measures

Social Indicators Research - This paper addresses the question of whether psychological distress and subjective well-being are the opposite poles of the same axis of mental health or independent...     

Assessing outcomes in an English authority (The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea)

The local authority has used the Looking After Children materials to develop needs-led and outcome-oriented services at both individual and strategic planning levels. A specific study used data from the Assessment and Action Records to identify priority needs and desired outcomes for young people leaving care.     

A biweight approach to estimate currency exchange rate: the Nigerian example

In this article, we propose a biweight approach to a real-life location problem, namely, the estimation of a realistic exchange rate for the Nigerian currency, naira (for easy reference, we denote the exchange rate parameter byθ).

Our proposal is essentially a critic of the methods being used by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to derive its estimate θ_CBN of θ. The CBN generates the necessary data by periodically organizing a foreign exchange market (FEM) where it sells a certain amount of US dollars to authorized foreign exchange dealers. (The amount of dollars available for sale is usually inadequate to meet aggregate demand, so there is literally a 'scramble' among dealers for a 'slice of the cake'.) During each session of FEM, each dealer quotes: (a) how much naira (variable Y) it will pay for US$1, and (b) the amount of US dollars (variable X) it wants to buy. The CBN estimates, based on observations of Y, have been found to be unstable and part of the problem seems to lie with the fact that a few atypical or outlier values are generated at FEM sessions and CBN estimation methods are not resistant to these extreme values.

This article presents a robust/resistant model which is designed to tackle the problem of outliers head on: we exploit the resistance property of the biweight to help reduce the influence of any outlier on the final biweight estimate θ_bw. Furthermore, we use the biweight weight, in conjunction with X, as an instrument to check against generation of outliers at FEM.