Evaluation of the location of cities in terms of land cover on the example of Poland

Urban Ecosystems - The increasing availability of remote sensing materials of varying spatial resolution inclines to look for methods enabling their use, both at planning the spatial structure of...     

Complex Couples: Multi‐Theoretical Couples Counselling with Traumatised Adults Who have a History of Child Sexual Abuse

One of the major ways child sexual abuse can have an impact on individuals is in their later ability to have and maintain fulfilling couple relationships. Survivors may experience avoidance behaviours that become problematic in their adult intimate relationships. If couple therapists fail to focus on these traumatic imprints, the therapy may founder. This paper proposes that a multi‐theoretical approach enables the couple therapist to deal with the complex problems such couples present including sexuality and intimacy concerns. Such an approach integrates trauma theory, attachment theory, feminist principles, body‐oriented psychotherapy, and systemic couple therapy.     

Properties of preliminary test estimators and shrinkage estimators for evaluating multiple exposures - Application to questionnaire data from the SONIC study

Epidemiology studies increasingly examine multiple exposures in relation to disease by selecting the exposures of interest in a thematic manner. For example, sun exposure, sunburn, and sun protection behavior could be themes for an investigation of sun-related exposures. Several studies now use pre-defined linear combinations of the exposures pertaining to the themes to estimate the effects of the individual exposures. Such analyses may improve the precision of the exposure effects, but they can lead to inflated bias and type I errors when the linear combinations are inaccurate. We investigate preliminary test estimators and empirical Bayes type shrinkage estimators as alternative approaches when it is desirable to exploit the thematic choice of exposures, but the accuracy of the pre-defined linear combinations is unknown. We show that the two types of estimator are intimately related under certain assumptions. The shrinkage estimator derived under the assumption of an exchangeable prior distribution gives precise estimates and is robust to misspecifications of the user-defined linear combinations. The precision gains and robustness of the shrinkage estimation approach are illustrated using data from the SONIC study, where the exposures are the individual questionnaire items and the outcome is (log) total back nevus count.