Understanding learning behavior using location and prior performance as moderators

This study proposes and validates a research model that examines individuals’ learning behavior. Drawing on social cognitive theory (SCT), this study postulates self-efficacy, outcome expectations, social influence, and facilitating conditions as the key drivers of individuals’ learning behavior. Learners’ residential location and prior performance are also considered as moderators in the proposed model. This study contributes to the education literature by extending traditional SCT models to examine the previously unexplored area of environmental factors containing social influence and facilitating conditions, by validating idiosyncratic drivers of learning behavior and by presenting an operationalization of location and prior performance as two moderators in the learning behavioral formation. Finally, implications and limitations of the research are also provided.     

Acceptance sampling plans under progressive interval censoring with likelihood ratio

The paper investigates the design of life test plans under progressively interval censored test. Based on the likelihood ratio, the proposed life test plans are established so that the required producer and consumer risks can be satisfied simultaneously. The advantage of the proposed method is that the developed sampling procedure depends on the likelihood ratio only so that the method can be applied to any lifetime distribution when only one parameter is unknown. A numerical study is conducted and some of the sampling plans for the Weibull lifetime distribution with different shape parameters are tabulated for illustration. Moreover, the influence of the removal schemes on the proposed sampling plans is discussed.     

Geneticizing Ethnicity: A study on the “Taiwan Bio-Bank”

Taiwan as an island country is an immigrant society where interethnic marriages have been common. In the past centuries, it has not been unusual that people in Taiwan change their ethnic identities for various reasons. Its “four great ethnic groups” (sida zuqun)—the Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlanders, and aboriginal peoples—exist only as a social construction that arose in the 1990s in a specific political–cultural context. In 2005, a major government-sponsored research project, the Taiwan Biological Sample Bank—or Taiwan Bio-Bank (TBB)—was organized by a group of scientists and physicians. The purpose of the project is to collect genetic data from the “four great ethnic groups” of Taiwan in order to build a national database. This paper has three parts. First, I briefly review how the relationship between genetic attribution and the conceptualization of race/ethnicity has been addressed by social scientists and medical researchers since the mid twentieth century. Secondly, I analyze the history of biomedicine in Taiwan and the social and political context of the formation of the TBB project and its precursors. Thirdly, I examine the TBB’s theoretical and methodological assumptions about race/ethnicity in Taiwan. I point out that the rise of biomedicine since the 1990s has contributed to the “ethnicization of biomedicine,” in the sense that scientists have used dubious ethnic/racial categories with increasing frequency in practicing biomedicine.     

Covariance Matrix Estimation via Network Structure

In this article, we employ a regression formulation to estimate the high-dimensional covariance matrix for a given network structure. Using prior information contained in the network relationships, we model the covariance as a polynomial function of the symmetric adjacency matrix. Accordingly, the problem of estimating a high-dimensional covariance matrix is converted to one of estimating low dimensional coefficients of the polynomial regression function, which we can accomplish using ordinary least squares or maximum likelihood. The resulting covariance matrix estimator based on the maximum likelihood approach is guaranteed to be positive definite even in finite samples. Under mild conditions, we obtain the theoretical properties of the resulting estimators. A Bayesian information criterion is also developed to select the order of the polynomial function. Simulation studies and empirical examples illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methods.     

Does globali zation affect human well-being?

The prevailing theorizing of globalization’s influence of human well-being suggests to assess both the favorable and unfavorable outcomes. This study formulates a dialectical model, adopts a comprehensive globalization measure and uses a three-wave panel data during 1980–2000 to empirically test direct and indirect effects of global flows’ human consequences. The outcomes from random effect modeling reveal significant positive impacts of political globalization, whereas economic and social globalization do not generate favorable influences when development level and regional differences are operated as controls. The overall globalization index is found to generate expected favorable influence on an overall human development index. Within developing countries, globalization’s human influence was not as significant as in industrial countries, however. Several hypotheses about globalization’s potential negative effects through increasing societal instabilities and reducing state power and social spending are not supported in analysis. It is concluded that globalization identified by increased global flows and exchanges contributes rather than hampers progress in human welfare.     

Mapping Civic Engagement in Later Life: A Scoping Review of Gerontological Definitions and Typology Proposal

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Research on older people’s civic engagement has increased significantly in the last two decades, as have policy and...     

Further evidence of automatic reinforcement effects on verbal form

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The form of a verbal response allows for reinforcement mediation and language transmission across cultures. Reinforcement, in turn, plays a decisive role in...     

The effect of longevity on schooling and fertility: evidence from the Brazilian Demographic and Health Survey

This paper presents microevidence on the effect of adult longevity on schooling and fertility. Higher longevity is systematically associated with higher schooling and lower fertility. The paper looks at the 1996 Brazilian Demographic and Health Survey and constructs an adult longevity variable based on the mortality history of the respondent's family. Families with histories of high adult mortality in previous generations have systematically higher fertility and lower schooling. These effects are not associated with omitted variables and remain unchanged after a large array of factors is accounted for (demographic characteristics, family-specific child mortality, regional development, socioeconomic status, etc.).

Social messengers as the new frontier of organization-public engagement: A WeChat study

Mobile-based social messengers have overtaken social networking sites as the new frontier for organizations to engage online stakeholders. This study provides one of the earliest empirical investigations on the antecedents and relational outcomes of pubic engagement with companies via WeChat—one of the world’s most popular social messaging apps. Publics’ social messenger dependency and privacy perception of the medium are found to effectively drive public engagement, which in turn enhances organization-public relationships. Strategic guidelines based on the study findings are provided.