Urbanization homogenizes the interactions of plant-frugivore bird networks

Urban Ecosystems - Anthropogenic activities are the main cause of habitat loss and fragmentation, which directly affects biodiversity. Disruption in landscape connectivity among populations may...     

The Effects of Questionnaire Translation on Demographic Data and Analysis

The collection of demographic data in developing and, increasingly, developed countries often requires the translation of a survey instrument. This article addresses the implications for data and analysis of two of the most common modes of translation. The first, the officially sanctioned—though not empirically verified—method, involves the pre-fieldwork production of a standardized translation of the template questionnaire into all or most languages in which interviews are expected to be conducted. The second, rarely acknowledged in the literature but quite common in the field, occurs where there is a mismatch between the language of the questionnaire available to the interviewer and the language in which the actual interview is conducted. In this case, it is up to the interviewer to translate from the language of the questionnaire to the language of the interview. Using the 1998 Kenya DHS, in which 23% of interviews were translated in this non-standardized manner, we explore the effects of the two translation modes on three indicators of measurement error and on estimated multivariate relations. In general we find that the effects of non-standardized translation on univariate statistics—including higher-order variance structures—are rather moderate. The effects become magnified, however, when multivariate analysis is used. This suggests that the advantages of—and also costs associated with—standardized translation depend on the ultimate purposes of data collection.

A Conceptual-Referent Theory of Happiness: Heterogeneity and its Consequences

This paper puts forward The Conceptual Referent Theory of Happiness (CRT), which states that a person’s conceptual referent for a happy life plays a role in the judgment of her life and in the appraisal of her happiness. A typology of eight conceptual referents for happiness is made on the basis of a review of philosophical essays on happiness.The theory contributes to the understanding of happiness by focusing on a cognitive factor involved in the judgment process: A person’s notion of what a happy life is, of what she understands for being well. Thus, CRT complements previous research by studying what a person thinks, rather than what she feels, at the time of appraising her life. CRT also stresses the importance of heterogeneity; this is: the conceptual referent is not the same for every person; people have different conceptions of what a happy life is. Hence, the investigation studies the issue of superiority in the conceptual referent for happiness. It shows that no conceptual referent can be considered as superior in the sense of being associated to greater happiness. However, there are a few conceptual referents that are clearly inferior. The investigation also studies the influence of socioeconomic and demographic variables in the conceptual referent a person holds. It shows that the probability of embracing a particular conceptual referent for happiness is contingent on a person’s socioeconomic and demographic situation. The empirical investigation is based on data from a large survey applied in Mexico.     

Promoting youth purpose: a review of the literature

This article reviews the research literature on teaching and supporting purpose in adolescence and young adulthood. An extensive search revealed that most studies on youth purpose examine psychological correlates and neglect instructional and social supports. School is an effective context for fostering purpose, yet reported approaches for explicitly instructing for purpose are rare after the early 1990s, reflecting a trend away from a language of purpose as a discrete endeavor in education since at least the 1960s. Furthermore, research on the outcomes of early purpose instruction curricula is not present in empirical journal articles. Nevertheless, a concern for fostering youth purpose has not disappeared from education; rather, it is subsumed under approaches that foster more comprehensive positive student outcomes, such as character, civic engagement, and positive youth development. Key curricular approaches to these outcomes are therefore also reviewed and examined for insights into how purpose can be fostered.     

On the Use of Student Evaluation of Teaching: A Longitudinal Analysis Combining Measurement Issues and Implications of the Exercise

Social Indicators Research - Multi item questionnaires are widely used to collect students’ evaluation of teaching at university. This article makes an attempt to analyse students’...     

Nonlinear filters based on taylor series expansions ∗

The nonlinear filters based on Taylor series approximation are broadly used for computational simplicity, even though their filtering estimates are clearly biased. In this paper, first, we analyze what is approximated when we apply the expanded nonlinear functions to the standard linear recursive Kalman filter algorithm. Next, since the state variable α_t and α_t-t are approximated as a conditional normal distribution given information up to time t - 1 (i.e., I_t-1) in approximation of the Taylor series expansion, it might be appropriate to evaluate each expectation by generating normal random numbers of α_t and α_t-1 given I_t-1 and those of the error terms θ and η_t. Thus, we propose the Monte-Carlo simulation filter using normal random draws. Finally we perform two Monte-Carlo experiments, where we obtain the result that the Monte-Carlo simulation filter has a superior performance over the nonlinear filters such as the extended Kalman filter and the second-order nonlinear filter.