Changing from PAPI to CAPI: A Longitudinal Study of Mode-Effects Based on an Experimental Design

This paper examines the implication of the move to CAPI for data quality by analyzing the conversion from PAPI to CAPI of a subsample of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which was done within an experimental design. The 2000 addresses for the sample E of SOEP were split into two subsamples E1 and E2 with the same structure using twin - sample points. Each of the 125 sample points contained 16 addresses (8 for E1 and 8 for E2) and had to be realized in the first wave alternately with PAPI and CAPI mode per interviewer. In the subsequent waves the PAPI mode was partly replaced by CAPI. With this experimental longitudinal design we are able to control for possible interviewer effects in the analysis of mode effects. The paper assesses whether any mode effects are apparent for the response rate. Within the data, we examine monetary dimensions such as gross income, item and unit nonresponse rates. We were able to find some minor effects but our main results show that we have made the shift without introducing strong mode effects.CAPI, Mode effects, data quality, interviewer effects

ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF A PROTEASE INHIBITOR ISOLATED FROM THE RHIZOME OF CURCUMA AMADA

  Objective: Protease inhibitors (PIs) are effective antimicrobial agents, and this study was aimed to study the antibacterial efficacy of a PI isolated from the rhizome of Curcuma amada.Methods: A proteinaceous protease inhibitor was isolated from the rhizome of C. amada and purified by Sephadex G-50 gel permeation chromatography. The purified inhibitor was denoted as Curcuma amada protease inhibitor (CAPI). The antibacterial effect of CAPI against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC), and minimal bactericidal concentration (MBC) of CAPI was studied in vitro, and the membrane disruption activity of CAPI was also analyzed.Results: CAPI was effective against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, with slightly higher concentrations required for Gram-negative bacteria. The MIC ranged from 75 to 100 μg/ml and the MBC ranged from 100 to 125 μg/ml of CAPI. The study of membrane disruption by CAPI revealed the release of cell contents, namely, reducing sugars and proteins from the bacterial cell.Conclusion: A PI was effectively isolated from the rhizome of C. amada, and the isolated inhibitor proved to be a promising antibacterial agent

The Effect of Locomotor Assisted Therapy on Lower Extremity Motor Performance in Typically Developing Children and Children with Cerebral Palsy

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Background: Ambulation is critical to a child’s participation, development of selfconcept, and quality of life. Children with cerebral palsy (CP) frequently exhibit limitation in walking proficiency which has been identified as the primary physical disability. Traditional rehabilitative treatment techniques to improve ambulation for children with CP reveal inconsistent results. Driven gait orthosis (DGO) training is a novel approach focusing on motor learning principles that foster cortical neural plasticity. Objective: The objectives are to determine if: (i) the lower extremity muscle activation patterns of children with CP are similar to age-matched TD children in overground (OG) walking, (ii) DGO training replicates muscle activation patterns in OG ambulation in TD children, (iii) the lower extremity muscle activation patterns in OG walking of children with CP are similar to their muscle activation patterns with DGO assistance, and (iv) DGO training promotes unimpaired muscle activation patterns in children with CP. Methods: Muscle activity patterns of the rectus femoris, semitendinosus, gluteus maximus and gluteus medius were recorded in the OG and DGO walking conditions of children with CP and age-matched TD. The gait cycles were identified and the data was averaged to produce final average gait cycle time normalized values. Results: In comparing the variability of the muscle activation patterns within the subject groups, CP DGO walking was considerably lower than CP OG. In comparing the muscle activation patterns in each condition, consistent differences (p < .05) were noted in terminal stance, pre-swing and initial swing phases of gait with the DGO condition consistently revealing greater muscle unit recruitment. Conclusion: The results indicate that training in the DGO provided the ability to practice with measurably repetitive movement as evidenced by decreased variability. Consistent differences were noted in muscle activation patterns in the terminal stance, pre-swing and initial swing phases of gait when most of these muscles are primarily inactive. The alteration in ground reaction force within the DGO environment may play a role in this variance. With the goal of normalizing gait, it is important that the effect of these parameters on ground reaction forces be considered in the use of DGO rehabilitation

Exploring the Behavior of Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) on IBM Power8+ Architecture and FlashSystem 900

The Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) is a general term for the infrastructure that provides high throughput and low latency path to the flash storage connected to the IBM POWER 8+ System. CAPI accelerator card is attached coherently as a peer to the Power8+ processor. This removes the overhead and complexity of the IO subsystem and allows the accelerator to operate as part of an application. In this paper, we present the results of experiments on IBM FlashSystem900 (FS900) with CAPI accelerator card using the "CAPI-Flash IBM Data Engine for NoSQL Software" Library. This library provides the application, a direct access to the underlying flash storage through user space APIs, to manage and access the data in flash. This offloads kernel IO driver functionality to dedicated CAPI FPGA accelerator hardware. We conducted experiments to analyze the performance of FS900 with CAPI accelerator card, using the Key Value Layer APIs, employing NASA's MODIS Land Surface Reflectance dataset as a large dataset use case. We performed Read and Write operations on datasets of size ranging from 1MB to 3TB by varying the number of threads. We then compared this performance with other heterogeneous storage and memory devices such as NVM, SSD and RAM, without using the CAPI Accelerator in synchronous and asynchronous file IO modes of operations. The results indicate that FS900 & CAPI, together with the metadata cache in RAM, delivers the highest IO/s and OP/s for read operations. This was higher than just using RAM, along with utilizing lesser CPU resources. Among FS900, SSD and NVM, FS900 had the highest write IO/s. Another important observation is that, when the size of the input dataset exceeds the capacity of RAM, and when the data access is non-uniform and sparse, FS900 with CAPI would be a cost-effective alternative.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication at 2019 International Workshop on OpenPOWER for HPC (IWOPH19) International Supercomputing Conference HPC Frankfurt, German

A General Interviewer Training Curriculum for Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (GIT-CAPI) (Version 1.0)

Interviewer training is essential to ensure high-quality data in interviewer-administered surveys. Basically, interviewer training can be divided into general interviewer training which provides interviewers with fundamental knowledge about their role in the data collection process as well as succinct practical advice and project-specific interviewer training which provides additional project-specific qualifications. This survey guideline consists of two parts (I) the introductory and explanatory text and (II) the General Interviewer Training for Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (GIT-CAPI) Curriculum. The GIT-CAPI aims at offering guidance on how to design, structure, and implement general interview training for Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI). It includes seven training modules addressing the following topics: (1) procedural view on surveys, (2) quality perspective on surveys, (3) gaining respondents’ cooperation, (4) survey administration and survey instruments, (5) interviewing techniques and fieldwork, (6) professional standards and ethics, data protection and privacy, and (7) a technical tutorial. The GIT-CAPI is written primarily for survey research institutes and large survey projects, but they are also aimed at individual researchers and university research projects to provide them with information on relevant basic interviewer qualifications and allow them to incorporate some modules of the GIT-CAPI into their own interviewer training program. This GIT-CAPI will be revised regularly

Questions Administered by Telephone or In Person: Differences in Interviewer-Respondent Interactions

When choosing a mode for data collection of computer-assisted surveys, a researcher has three main options available: the computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), the computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI) or a web interview (i.e., a self-adminstered interview). Generally, CAPI allows for collecting most complex data, of the highest quality, but only when interviewers are well-trained and effort is made to monitor and manage interviewers during field work. This higher data quality in CAPI interviews may be due to the finding that presence of an interviewer reduces the amount of respondents’ satisficing behaviors (i.e., not investing the required effort to provide meaningful answers, see Heerwegh 2008). An interviewer can motivate respondents, presumably by means of rapport (Garbarski et al 2016) to invest the amount of cognitive effort required to answer questions thoughtfully. However, with interviewers administering the survey their social presence may also give rise to respondents’ reflection of social consequences of providing information to a relative stranger. By looking at response distributions it has been shown that social desirability bias and satisficing are more prevalent in CATI than in CAPI (see Holbrook et al 2003), and lowest in (self-administered) Web interviews. To fully explain such effects, it makes sense to study actual behaviors in interviewer-respondent interactions. In this approach, generally referred to as interaction coding or behavior coding (see Ongena and Dijkstra, 2006), interactions are systematically evaluated on deviations of the so-called paradigmatic sequence. A paradigmatic sequence is the interaction as intended by the researcher, with a sequence consisting of only two or three actions: the interviewer reading the question exactly as worded, the respondent providing an answer that exactly matches one of the response options, and optionally, an interviewer acknowledgement. Any deviation from this sequence may indicate problems in the questionnaire or the interviewing procedure. However, to our knowledge, CATI and CAPI interactions have never been systematically compared. By analyzing interactions of 60 CATI and 54 CAPI interviews that originated from a mixed-mode experiment using the European Social Survey questionnaire (Haan 2015), we found mixed differences with respect to behaviors in CATI and CAPI interactions. For example, interviewer laughter appeared to be more common in CATI than in CAPI, but apologetic utterances such as ‘sorry’ occurred equally often in both modes. Furthermore, a significant difference was found in the number of words uttered. Question-answer sequences contained more words in CATI than in CAPI. This is partly explained by the fact that for many questions in the CAPI survey show cards were used. Lack of show cards in CATI extends interactions due to less efficient communication about response alternatives. Further analysis showed that respondents in CATI had more difficulty in formulating their response than in CAPI. These task-related issues may contribute to the effect of decreased trust and motivation of respondents in CATI interviews, and may subsequently explain the increased level of satisficing and social desirability bias in this survey mode compared to CAPI

An Experimental Evaluation of Popular Well-Being Measures

Drawing on data from two multitrait multimethod experiments carried out in the context of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper identifies questionnaire designs that minimize measurement error in reports of subjective well-being. Among the survey instruments most often used to measure well-being, the analysis focuses on three response formats (11-point, 7-point and magnitude satisfaction scales) and three modes of data collection (self-administered paperand-pencil questionnaires (SAQ), personal paper-and-pencil interviews (PAPI) and computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI)). Results show that both the choice of a response format and the choice of a mode of data collection make a difference in terms of measurement error: The 11-point satisfaction scale and both CAPI and PAPI improve the quality of subjective well-being data. The paper also reports differences between response formats in terms of their ease of administration and illustrates that the choice of a survey instrument affects conclusions drawn from applied well-being research.

Mode and Context Effects of Measuring Household Assets

Differences in answers in Internet and traditional surveys can be due to selection, mode, or context effects. We exploit unique experimental data to analyze mode and context effects controlling for arbitrary selection. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) surveys a random sample of the US 50+ population, with CAPI or CATI core interviews once every two years. In 2003 and 2005, random samples were drawn from HRS respondents in 2002 and 2004 willing and able to participate in an Internet interview. Comparing core and Internet survey answers of the same people, we analyze mode and context effects, controlling for selection. We focus on household assets, for which mode effects in Internet surveys have rarely been studied. We find some large differences between the first Internet survey and the other three surveys which we interpret as a context and question wording effect rather than a pure mode effect.Internet surveys;CAPI;CATI;portfolio choice