Developing a pilot test for an empirical research on managerial competency in Thailand's public health sector

The aim of this paper is to show the process of conducting a pilot test on rural managers’ managerial competency conducted in the primary healthcare units in Patthalung- a province in southern Thailand. This paper explains the justification process of developing the instrument prior to the main doctoral study. The instrument comprises five parts - personality, motivation, organizational culture, managerial competency, and respondent’s personal background. The pilot testing process was divided into six steps respectively; firstly, the researcher asked one bilingual expert to translate the questionnaire from English to Thai language. Then, the managerial competency elements were cross-checked with the heads of department of the Provincial Public Health Office in Thailand’s Songkhla Province. Next, five experts in healthcare industry were asked to critique the instrument. After that, three primary care unit managers were randomly selected to read and answer the full set of questions as well as to validate its content in line with the Thai culture. After that, the researcher asked another bilingual expert to translate the said questionnaire back from Thai into English. Finally, 110 questionnaires were mailed to public health managers in Patthalung province and they then were analyzed using the mean and percentage methods. The techniques that were used for developing the instrument were the Delphi technique, the small group technique, the forward translation, the back translation, the survey technique, and the telephone interview. Overall, the researchers believe that the pilot test had helped to improve the quality and the efficiency of the instrument in determining the managerial competencies of primary care unit managers

An initial psychometric evaluation of the German PROMIS® v1.2 Physical Function item bank in patients with a wide range of health conditions

Objectives: To translate the PROMIS® Physical Function (PF) item bank version 1.2 into German, and to investigate psychometric properties of resulting full bank and seven derived short forms. Design: Cross-sectional psychometric study. Setting: Inpatient and outpatient clinics of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. Subjects: Ten adult patients with various chronic diseases participated in cognitive debriefing interviews. The final item bank was administered to n=266 adult patients with a broad range of medical conditions. Interventions: Patient-reported outcome assessment as part of routine care. Main measures: PROMIS v1.2 PF bank; MOS SF-36® PF scale (PF-10). Results: Cross-cultural adaptation of the item bank followed established guidelines. For the final German translation, the corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.44 to 0.84. Cronbach’s Alpha was high for each PROMIS PF short form (α=0.88-0.96). The full PROMIS PF bank and most short forms correlated highly with the SF-36 PF-10 (r=0.85-0.90), with the exception of PROMIS Upper Extremity (r=0.64). PROMIS Upper Extremity showed ceiling effects and lower agreement with the full bank than other short forms. Unidimensionality was supported for all PROMIS PF measures using traditional factor analysis and nonparametric item response theory. Conclusions: The German PROMIS PF bank was found to be conceptually equivalent to the English version and fulfilled the psychometric requirements for use of short forms in clinical practice. Future studies should pay particular attention to samples with upper extremity functional limitations to further investigate the dimensional structure of physical function as conceptualized according to PROMIS

Multilingual Schema Matching for Wikipedia Infoboxes

Recent research has taken advantage of Wikipedia's multilingualism as a resource for cross-language information retrieval and machine translation, as well as proposed techniques for enriching its cross-language structure. The availability of documents in multiple languages also opens up new opportunities for querying structured Wikipedia content, and in particular, to enable answers that straddle different languages. As a step towards supporting such queries, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying mappings between attributes from infoboxes that come from pages in different languages. Our approach finds mappings in a completely automated fashion. Because it does not require training data, it is scalable: not only can it be used to find mappings between many language pairs, but it is also effective for languages that are under-represented and lack sufficient training samples. Another important benefit of our approach is that it does not depend on syntactic similarity between attribute names, and thus, it can be applied to language pairs that have distinct morphologies. We have performed an extensive experimental evaluation using a corpus consisting of pages in Portuguese, Vietnamese, and English. The results show that not only does our approach obtain high precision and recall, but it also outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We also present a case study which demonstrates that the multilingual mappings we derive lead to substantial improvements in answer quality and coverage for structured queries over Wikipedia content.Comment: VLDB201

Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality?

Neural machine translation (NMT) is often criticized for failures that happen without awareness. The lack of competency awareness makes NMT untrustworthy. This is in sharp contrast to human translators who give feedback or conduct further investigations whenever they are in doubt about predictions. To fill this gap, we propose a novel competency-aware NMT by extending conventional NMT with a self-estimator, offering abilities to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. The self-estimator encodes the information of the decoding procedure and then examines whether it can reconstruct the original semantics of the source sentence. Experimental results on four translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method not only carries out translation tasks intact but also delivers outstanding performance on quality estimation. Without depending on any reference or annotated data typically required by state-of-the-art metric and quality estimation methods, our model yields an even higher correlation with human quality judgments than a variety of aforementioned methods, such as BLEURT, COMET, and BERTScore. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show better robustness of competency awareness in our model.Comment: accepted to EMNLP 202

Assessing Translated Questions via Cognitive Testing

This chapter presents arguments showing that cognitive testing provides crucial information regarding how translated questions are understood, the underlying cognitive processes that respondents undergo to answer them, and how this relates to respondents' interpretation of the same questions in the source language. It describes challenges found in multilingual research and different approaches to instrument production in multilingual research. The chapter provides some context by describing translation procedures and translation assessment techniques for survey research. It focuses on the need for pretesting as part of the translation assessment procedures. Idiosyncrasies of cognitive testing of survey translations are also discussed. Finally, the chapter presents examples of problems discovered through the use of cognitive testing of survey translations. Conducting cognitive interviews with individuals who speak the different variations might also be more feasible than finding translation experts from each regional variation

Urdu Translation and Validation of Academic Resilience Scale in Pakistani School Students

The present study was conducted to translate and validate the Academic Resilience Scale (Martin & Marsh 2006) in Urdu on Pakistani school students. For this purpose forward and backward translation method (Brislin, 1976) was utilized to translate original English version into Urdu. Urdu version had high test-retest reliability coefficient i.e. r=.903**. For validation, a sample of 340 students was selected conveniently from different schools Multan, Pakistan. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to measure the factor structure of scale and it was discovered to be one-dimensional. ARS – Urdu version had significantly good reliability coefficient (α = .843). The scale validity and reliability were found to be satisfactory. Therefore, its findings demonstrated that it is appropriate for measuring academic resilience of school students