Centro Universitário Farias Brito: FB UNI Portal de Periódicos
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Free and (Mostly) Open Source Data Analysis Software for Academic Research
No full textData analysis is a crucial task in knowledge creation in the social sciences. Free resources for data analysis provide researchers with greater freedom and make the research process more accessible and democratic. This is particularly crucial for researchers, students, and institutions in the Majority World (also called Global South), where a lack of access to expensive proprietary software often creates barriers to quality research and training. This article lists some free software that can perform basic and advanced statistical data analysis tasks. Some software that can perform other tasks, such as text mining and qualitative data analysis, is also introduced. It explores critical emerging trends, including the integration of AI into the research workflow. Ease of use and functionality are the major criteria for selecting these software packages
Liberalizing Refugee Hosting Policies without Losing the Vote
No full textInclusive refugee policies -- granting refugees the right to work, use public services, and move freely -- benefit both refugees and host countries' economies. Yet many governments hesitate to liberalize such policies, fearing electoral backlash. Can governments minimize backlash by pairing expansions of refugee rights with policies that reduce burdens on host communities? We examine this question in Uganda, Africa's largest refugee hosting country. Alongside refugee policy liberalization, Uganda mandated reallocating a share of refugee aid to communities near refugee centers. Combining refugee settlement data with election returns (2001--2021) and a generalized difference-in-differences design, we show first that the vote share of the incumbent president was significantly lower in areas with high refugee presence before the 2010 reforms. Afterwards, a one standard deviation increase in refugee presence was associated with a four percentage point increase in the vote share of the incumbent government. Using public goods data, public opinion surveys, newspaper data, and parliamentary speech records, we find that infrastructure investments in hosting communities and the reluctance of opposition parties to rally against popular policies account for our findings
The Anti-Depression Computer Program: Results of an Effectiveness Study
No full textThis study is aimed at evaluating the efficiency of the iCognito Anti-Depression computer program, which combines cognitive-behavioural therapy, mindfulness, and problem-solving therapy methods, and is delivered by a conversational agent (chatbot) in Russian language via a smartphone application. The program was designed for mass usage to fill in the gap of insufficient mental health service provision in countries with large Russian-speaking population, such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. A randomized wait-list controlled trial was conducted on a sample with moderate or severe depression (N = 73). The intervention consisted of fully automatized work with a computer program for 2 weeks. Сompleting the iCognito Anti-Depression program is associated with decreased depression, stress, anxiety, rumination, and sleep disturbance, as well as increased level of self-compassion, mindfulness, positive problem orientation, self-efficacy, subjective well-being, and optimism; with the interaction effect being insignificant for reflection and negative problem orientation. The program has been downloaded by approximately 400 000 Russian-speaking users since its release in 2020 and received positive user reviews (4.5 out of 5). Both the efficiency study and user demand demonstrate that mass computer programs such as “Anti-Depression” are able to expand access to basic psychological assistance internationally
Prosodic Phrasing and Syllable Prominence in Spoken Prose. A Validated Coding Manual
No full textCurrent systems for predicting prosodic prominence and boundaries in texts focus on syntax/semantic-based automatic decoding of sentences that need to be annotated syntactically (Atterer & Klein 2002; Windmann et al. 2011). However, to date, there is no phonetically validated replicable system for manually coding prosodic boundaries and syllable prominence in longer sentences or texts. Based on work in the fields of metrical phonology (Liberman & Prince 1977), phrase formation (Hayes 1989) and existing pause coding systems (Gee and Grosjean 1983), we developed a manual for coding prosodic boundaries (with 6 degrees of juncture) and syllable prominence (8 degrees).
Three independent annotators applied the coding system to the beginning pages of four German novels and to four short stories (20 058 syllables, Fleiss kappa .82). For the phonetic validation, eight professional speakers read the excerpts of the novels aloud. We annotated the speech signal automatically with MAUS (Schiel 1999). Using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink 2019), we extracted pitch, duration, and intensity for each syllable, as well as several phonetic parameters for pauses, and compared all measures obtained to the theoretically predicted levels of syllable prominence and prosodic boundary strength. The validation with the speech signal shows that our annotation system reliably predicts syllable prominence and prosodic boundaries. Since our annotation works with plain text, there are many potential applications of the coding system, covering research on prose rhythm, synthetic speech and (psycho)linguistic research on prosody
Harming In Order To Help: An Empirical Characterization of Prosocial Aggression
No full textPeople sometimes inflict harm with the intent to help the very target of their aggression. Across six studies (N=1,527), we examined the nature of such prosocial aggression. Many participants believed that altruistically-motivated aggression exists and exhibited a self-serving bias in which most believed their aggression was more altruistic than others’ — beliefs that were linked to greater antisocial and prosocial traits. Translating these beliefs to behavior, participants were often prosocially-aggressive when given the chance — inflicting more harm when their aggression could also help (versus only hurt) the target. Such prosocial aggression also exhibited features of both aggression (i.e., it was positively correlated with dispositional aggressiveness) and altruism (i.e., it was preferentially doled out to people who had been previously kind to participants and even when it was personally costly to do so). We also independently varied the amount of harm and help that prosocial aggression provided, revealing that participants sought to maximize the help and minimize the harm done to people who had been kind to them but not towards those who had provoked them. Our findings argue against models that conceptualize harm- and help-based motives as opponent processes, showing that these motives readily coexist and dynamically interact to shape aggressive behavior — even towards the same target
Parental burnout features and their family context: A temporal network approach in mothers
No full textMany parents have days where they encounter emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from their children, and feeling fed up with being a parent. Some parents experience these characteristics to a severe extent—a clinical phenomenon termed parental burnout. Parental burnout arises when parents chronically endure severe stress without sufficient resources to cope, which may lead to detrimental consequences not only for the parent, but also for their partner (e.g., marital conflict) and children (i.e., neglect and violence). However, uncertainty remains regarding how these features interact and trigger one another over time (potentially becoming increasingly severe), nor how the daily variations of the family context influence these features. Therefore, in this study, we recruited 50 parents (with main analyses focusing on 43 mothers with a coparent, and sensitivity analyses with the full sample) from the general population to rate the core features of parental burnout and the family context daily over 56 days. We used multilevel vector autoregressive models to generate network models. Results suggest that exhaustion contributes to parental burnout: it self-predicts and is closely associated with feeling fed up and finding children difficult to manage. Distance, by contrast, is mainly negatively connected to sharing positive moments with children. Contextual variables also interact with parental burnout features, illustrating the relevance of examining parenting within the family system context. If future research confirms a central role of exhaustion in parental burnout development, prevention efforts can focus on decreasing parental exhaustion
Generalizability Crisis Meets Heterogeneity Revolution: Determining Under Which Boundary Conditions Findings Replicate and Generalize
No full textIntensive longitudinal studies typically examine phenomena that vary across time, individuals, contexts, and other boundary conditions. This poses challenges to the conceptualization and identification of replicability and generalizability, which refer to the invariance of research findings across samples and contexts as crucial criteria for trustworthiness. Some of these challenges are specific to intensive longitudinal studies, others are similarly relevant for the work with other complex datasets that contain multilayered sources of variation (individuals nested in different types of activities or organizations, regions, countries, etc.).
This article opens with discussing the reasons why research findings may fail to replicate. We then analyze reasons why research findings may falsely appear to be non-replicable when in fact they were as such replicable, but lacked generalizability due to heterogeneity between samples, subgroups, individuals, time points, and contexts. Following that, we propose conceptual and methodological approaches to better disentangle non-replicability from non-generalizability and to better understand the exact causes of either problem. In particular, we apply Lakatos’s proposition to examine not only whether but under what boundary conditions a theory is a useful description of the world, to the question whether and under which conditions a research finding is replicable and generalizable. Not only will that contribute to a more systematic understanding of and research on replicability and generalizability in longitudinal studies and beyond, but it will also be a contribution to what has been called the heterogeneity revolution (Bryan et al., 2021; Moeller, 2021)
How Effective Are Interventions Against Misinformation?
No full textEfforts to combat misinformation have intensified in recent years. In parallel, our scientific
understanding of misinformation and the information ecosystem has improved. Here, I propose
ways to improve interventions against misinformation based on this growing body of
knowledge. Research shows that misinformation consumption is minimal and highly
concentrated, that interest in news is falling while news avoidance is growing, and that although
people can tell the truth from falsehood, they tend to be overly skeptical of reliable information
and sources. This suggests that instead of focusing on misinformation, it would be more
productive to increase the uptake of reliable information and trust. Still, a handful of powerful
individuals push misinformation and give it visibility. We should target these ‘superspreaders’
and strengthen norms and institutions that not only deter the sharing of false information but
also hateful, deceptive, or misleading information. Finally, we need to understand the demand
for misinformation and address the reasons why it resonates with some people but not others.
Misinformation success is often a symptom of deep societal issues, such as corruption or
polarization, which require structural solutions
Socioeconomic inequalities in survival to retirement age: a register-based analysis
No full textAround the world, people are increasingly living to older ages. This challenges the sustainability of
the pension systems. In Denmark, statutory retirement age increases gradually to account for
changes in life expectancy. However, the chances of reaching retirement age are not equal across
the Danish population, and raising the retirement age could disproportionally impact those of lower
socioeconomic status. In this study, we investigated socioeconomic inequalities in mortality before
reaching retirement age in Denmark and how a higher retirement age would affect survival to
retirement across socioeconomic groups. We used Danish registry data over a 30-year period,
focusing on 19 consecutive birth cohorts: 1936–1954. We assessed the probability of dying between
age 50 and retirement age, set at 65 and 67, across socioeconomic groups using three dimensions of
socioeconomic status: education, occupation, and income. We found that the gap in survival has
widened over time between the lowest and highest socioeconomic groups for each indicator, driven
mostly by limited or stagnant improvements in the lowest socioeconomic groups. Our findings
show that raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 disproportionately affects individuals from lower
socioeconomic groups, especially men, in absolute terms. Pension reforms that link retirement age
to life expectancy are sharpening inequalities, as lower-SES groups are not only facing higher early
mortality, but also experience much slower improvements in mortality