70 research outputs found
Researcher allegiance in research on psychosocial interventions: Meta-research study protocol and pilot study
No full textINTRODUCTION: One potential source of bias in randomised clinical trials of psychological interventions is researcher allegiance (RA). The operationalisation of RA differs strongly across studies, and there is not a generally accepted method of operationalising or measuring it. Furthermore, it remains unclear as to how RA affects the outcomes of trials and if it results in better outcomes for a preferred intervention. The aim of this project is to develop and validate a scale that accurately identifies RA, contribute to the understanding of the impact that RA has in a research setting and to make recommendations for addressing RA in practice. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: A scale will first be developed and validated to measure RA in psychotherapy trials. The scale will be validated by surveying authors of psychotherapy trials to assess their opinions, beliefs and preferences of psychotherapy interventions. Furthermore, the scale will be validated for use outside the field of psychotherapy. The validated checklist will then be used to examine two potential mechanisms of how RA may affect outcomes of interventions: publication bias (by assessing grants) and risk of bias (RoB). Finally, recommendations will be developed, and a feasibility study will be conducted at a national mental health agency in The Netherlands. Main analyses comprise inter-rater reliability of checklist items, correlations to examine the relationship between checklist items and author survey (convergent validity) as well as checklist items and trial outcomes and multivariate meta-regression techniques to assess potential mechanisms of how allegiance affects trial outcomes (publication bias and RoB). ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study has been reviewed and approved by the Scientific and Ethical Review Board (VCWE) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Study result and advancements will also be published on the Open Science Framework. Furthermore, main findings will be disseminated through articles in international peer-reviewed open access journals. Results and recommendations will be communicated to the Cochrane Collaboration, the Campbell Collaboration and other funding agencies. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. KEYWORDS: intellectual conflicts of interest; meta-analysis; methodology; outcome bias; psychotherapy depression; researcher allegiance; risk of bia
Writing Together A Study of Secondary ELA Preservice Teachers Participating in Peer Writing Communities
No full textabstract: This mixed methods study explores the work of five small writing communities formed within a university-based preservice English language arts writing methods course. Fifteen preservice English language arts teachers took part in the study and participated across five peer writing groups. The study shares the instructional design of the course as well as the writing activities and practices that took place within the groups over the course of one 15-week semester. The study draws on Wenger’s (1998, 2009) theory of communities of practice as well as activity theory (Engeström,1999, 2001; Russell, 1997) to understand the social supports, practices, and learning activities that assisted these preservice teachers as writers and as teachers of writing. The qualitative data included writing surveys, writing samples, and participant interviews as well as pre and post writing self-efficacy surveys as quantitative data. This study documents the affordances and constraints of peer writing groups in methods courses for preservice English language arts teachers and how these groups may influence their identities and practices as writers and as teachers of writing. These findings provide insight into ways we might strengthen the preparation of English language arts preservice teachers as teachers of writing and build communities of practice within preservice training courses and programs.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201
Social-economic change and its impact on violence: Homicide history of Qing China
No full textThis paper constructs a quantitative history of the homicide rate in Qing China and investigates its social and economic drivers. Estimates based on historical archives indicate that this annual rate ranged between 0.35 and 1.47 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1661-1898 period, a low level unmatched by Western Europe until the late 19th century. China's homicide rate rose steadily from 1661 to 1821 but declined gradually thereafter until the turn of the century. Although extreme, homicide represents a random sampling of the entire distribution of interpersonal violence; hence the homicide rate serves as a proxy for overall violence, and its rise implies a decline in personal security. We use national and cross-provincial panel data to show that population density, state capacity, local self-governance, interregional grain market integration, and grain price level (which captures crop failure and other survival distress) are all statistically significant drivers of the homicide rate in 18th- and 19th-century China.A&HCISSCIARTICLE,SI8-256
Reducing reagent waste through process improvement and preventive maintenance
No full textThesis: M.B.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2017.Thesis: S.M. in Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Engineering, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (page 91).Quest Diagnostics has committed to reducing operating expenses by $1.3B between 2012 and 2017. A portion of the cost-saving initiative focuses on reagents - expensive liquids that are combined with patient samples to detect compounds of interest. This project aims to reduce reagent waste for high-volume diagnostic tests run on an instrument platform that generates a relatively high amount of reagent waste. Waste, in this context, means any reagent that does not generate unique patient results. Therefore critical components of the quality system, such as quality control and calibration tests, are designated waste even though they are a necessary expenditure. Quality control (QC) samples and mechanical errors accounted for 5.2% and 4.4%, respectively, of all reagent usage prior to the start of the project. Mechanical errors occur when the diagnostic testing platform encounters something unexpected, such as debris or a reading that indicates insufficient sample volume, which interrupts sample processing. The instrument jettisons this test and attempts to repeat the assay. Initial discussions with laboratory representatives revealed differing interpretations of quality control requirements. All sites using the platform of interest were then surveyed to gauge the extent of variation. All sites met quality control requirements but several exceeded them. The most pertinent variations are listed below. 1. Frequency: Several sites ran control samples more often than established in Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) requirements, increasing total QC usage by over 70%. 2. Container size: The choice of container determines the amount of "dead volume", material that the instrument cannot access and must be discarded. Some sites used containers with 12.8 times the dead volume required in the smallest option. 3. Reuse policy: Some labs reuse containers of quality control materials across multiple batches. Reusing QC material further reduces the amount of dead volume discarded, but using new QC materials eliminates the possibility of evaporation between batches. An interdisciplinary team of experts tasked with maintaining the SOPs has reviewed these results and will clarify the appropriate SOP interpretation to unify practices across laboratories. In order to understand mechanical errors, I observed routine maintenance at four sites and found that business units did not consistently share best practices. Collaborating with vendor representatives and operators, I launched an Autonomous Maintenance (AM) pilot program in order to develop training materials capturing institutional knowledge and to test additional maintenance procedures. The AM activities generated 29 training documents, which were added to a national database of competency training materials. All operators certified to operate the testing platform will be required to review and pass comprehension quizzes on the training materials. As the Marlborough site continues to develop improvements to the maintenance procedures, these changes will be shared with the vendor and incorporated into training documents.by Amy Rose Gobel.M.B.A.S.M. in Engineering System
Folk feminism: the women of the American folk revival
No full textThis dissertation approaches the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s from a feminist perspective, offering the concept of folk feminism as an analytical framework for understanding the way women found empowerment within and through the masculinist world of folk performance. With attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality within the New Left and in the broader context of the early Cold War and civil rights movement, this research intervenes in hegemonic narratives of the folk revival to argue that women not only achieved forms of social liberation through folk fandom and performance, but also played a critical role in laying the aesthetic and political groundwork for the entire folk revival in its early years. Contrary to historiography that couples the folk revival with whiteness, this research emphasizes Odetta Holmes, a Black woman, and Joan Baez, whose father was from Mexico and whose mother was born in Scotland to English parents. It traces how Odetta’s rare positionalities—on the margins of mid-Fifties society but at the center of progressive music—combined with her personal performance style would eventually allow her to move the folk movement into the 1960s, at which point Baez rose to fame in her footsteps.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Culture in the Time of Tolerance: Al-Andalus as a Model for Our Time
No full textMaría Rosa Menocal is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. This is the text of a lecture given at the closing dinner of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar (MELSS), Istanbul, Turkey, May 9, 2000. These remarks are all adapted from material in the author\u27s forthcoming book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain to be published by Little, Brown and Company in the spring of 2002
Labour market regulation and professional sport: The case of the Victorian Football League’s Coulter Law, 1930-1970
No full textIn most professional team sports, salary caps – first used in the mid-1980s – stabilise the financial position of teams and promote balanced competitions. Teams that do not comply with labour market regulations face heavy penalties and there is a debate about whether such labour markets should operate like competitive markets in general – with wages directing players to the teams that value their contributions most. Analysis of earlier restrictions on the mobility of players and the movement of wages may raise new questions about the effects of noncompliance. The Coulter Law was a set of Victorian Football League (VFL) recruiting and payment rules that operated from 1930 to 1970. The conventional view – that most VFL clubs breached the maximum player wage rules to maximise the utility derived from winning games – is supported only by anecdotal evidence. A new data set reveals that the Coulter Law did restrict earnings in the VFL, except for a small number of elite players. Clubs allowed players to take up more lucrative jobs in other leagues and their subsequent on-field performance reflected the level of talent of replacement players.
Three Women/Three Margins: Political Engagement and the Art of Claude Cahun, Jeanne Mammen, and Paraskeva Clark
No full textEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Gender, representation and online participation: A quantitative study of stackoverflow
No full textCopyright @ 2012 Academy of Science and EngineeringOnline communities are flourishing as social meeting web-spaces for users and peer community members. Different online communities require different levels of competence for participants to join, and scattered evidence suggests that women can be overly under-represented. Moreover, anecdotal evidence of the Q&A website StackOverflow suggests that women withdraw
from unfriendly online communities. Due to the lack of empirical evidence on the matter, this paper provides a quantitative study of the phenomenon, in order to assess the representation and social impact of gender in StackOverflow. This study positions itself within recent and focused international initiatives, launched by the European Commission in order to encourage women in the field of sciences and technology. Our findings confirm that men represent the vast majority of contributors to StackOverflow. Moreover, men participate more, earn more reputation, and engage in the
“game” more than women do.This study is partly funded by the F.R.S-F.N.R.S. under grant BSS-2012/V 6/5/015
Women writers in Tudor England: male occluded female agency and the recovery of authorial voice
No full textThis thesis examines the relationship between occluded authorial agency and women writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, looking at the work of four writers – Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Grymeston – and the different genres in which they wrote: religious translation, memoir, secular poetry, maternal advice. Through examining their works, this thesis analyses the ways in which paratextual techniques negotiate women’s precarious position on the margins of mainstream male literary culture. It argues that, despite these patriarchal beliefs, early modern women writers still succeed in achieving agency and an authorial voice. Although More Roper’s religious translation is ushered into print through male intervention and she remains anonymous, paratextual apparatuses disclose who the real author is. Askew, despite heavy intrusion by two major male reformers – John Bale and John Fox – manages to manifest her suffering and consequent death at the hands of the Catholic clergy to the outside world. Whitney moves into the public sphere by writing secular verse which challenges conventional male traditions. Grymeston uses the maternal advice book to showcase her various rhetorical skills while remaining within an acceptable female genre which permits her to make it into print.
In this study, it is contended that precisely due to this complex relationship between female authors and male authorities, sixteenth-century women writers remained side-lined by their contemporary readers and, subsequently, modern critics. By understanding these women’s various struggles – limited educational opportunities with the exception of few women who managed to acquire an instruction, the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, a rigid patriarchal culture, distortion of female-authored texts by male authorities – the twenty-first-century reader can comprehend better these women writers’ contribution to the literary world and admire them not just for their rhetorical skills but also for succeeding in leaving their own legacies
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