Minimizing Non-Response in The Delphi Process: How to Respond to Non-Response

When using the Delphi process, investigators need not only to achieve a desirable response rate in the initial round but they must also concern themselves with maintaining high response rates in the following iterations. Due to the potential scarcity of qualified participants and the relatively small number of subjects used in a Delphi study, the ability to achieve and maintain an ideal response rate can either ensure or jeopardize the validity of a Delphi study. The purpose of this paper is to discuss possible options to achieve and maintain a desirable response rate when engaged in a Delphi research project. These possible options focus on the importance of seeking help from well recognized experts or endorsed individuals, the value in establishing the first contact with each participant, the option of utilizing different forms and formats of questions, the use of incentives to encourage response and finally, strategies for dealing with non-respondents. Accessed 17,861 times on https://pareonline.net from December 07, 2007 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

The Delphi Technique: Making Sense of Consensus

The Delphi technique is a widely used and accepted method for gathering data from respondents within their domain of expertise. The technique is designed as a group communication process which aims to achieve a convergence of opinion on a specific real-world issue. The Delphi process has been used in various fields of study such as program planning, needs assessment, policy determination, and resource utilization to develop a full range of alternatives, explore or expose underlying assumptions, as well as correlate judgments on a topic spanning a wide range of disciplines. The Delphi technique is well suited as a method for consensus-building by using a series of questionnaires delivered using multiple iterations to collect data from a panel of selected subjects. Subject selection, time frames for conducting and completing a study, the possibility of low response rates, and unintentionally guiding feedback from the respondent group are areas which should be considered when designing and implementing a Delphi study. Accessed 68,465 times on https://pareonline.net from August 30, 2007 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Prioritizing disease candidate genes by a gene interconnectedness-based approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genome-wide disease-gene finding approaches may sometimes provide us with a long list of candidate genes. Since using pure experimental approaches to verify all candidates could be expensive, a number of network-based methods have been developed to prioritize candidates. Such tools usually have a set of parameters pre-trained using available network data. This means that re-training network-based tools may be required when existing biological networks are updated or when networks from different sources are to be tried.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a parameter-free method, interconnectedness (ICN), to rank candidate genes by assessing the closeness of them to known disease genes in a network. ICN was tested using 1,993 known disease-gene associations and achieved a success rate of ~44% using a protein-protein interaction network under a test scenario of simulated linkage analysis. This performance is comparable with those of other well-known methods and ICN outperforms other methods when a candidate disease gene is not directly linked to known disease genes in a network. Interestingly, we show that a combined scoring strategy could enable ICN to achieve an even better performance (~50%) than other methods used alone.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>ICN, a user-friendly method, can well complement other network-based methods in the context of prioritizing candidate disease genes.</p

Alternative Assessment and Portfolios: Review, Reconsider, and Revitalize

The concept of evaluating performance in relation to an established objective is certainly not a new idea. The use and application of alternative assessments is likewise not a revolutionary notion. However, the mechanics and potential applications of the portfolio as one area of alternative assessment do deserve reconsideration with the purpose of a renaissance of this valuable and self-motivating type of formative and summative evaluation. The application of the portfolio to student, teacher, employment, and program areas provides the unique ability to assess performance based on selected work that demonstrates ability as well as potential. The ideal portfolio is a "living" document that allows individual expression of work while still meeting a uniform criterion of expected performance. In the same way that the benefits of student-centered over teacher-centered learning is being discussed, centering the assessment burden upon the student, teacher, employee, or program by providing the tools for authentic demonstration of their performance through the portfolio deserves another look

Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism

Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.This work was supported in part by H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL under Grant 761586, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Contract MOST 106-2218- E-009-018

Method-specific suicide rates and accessibility of means:a small-area analysis in Taipei City, Taiwan

Abstract. Background: Few studies have investigated whether means accessibility is related to the spatial distribution of suicide. Aims: To examine the hypothesis that indicators of the accessibility to specific suicide methods were associated with method-specific suicide rates in Taipei City, Taiwan. Method: Smoothed standardized mortality ratios for method-specific suicide rates across 432 neighborhoods and their associations with means accessibility indicators were estimated using Bayesian hierarchical models. Results: The proportion of single-person households, indicating the ease of burning charcoal in the home, was associated with charcoal-burning suicide rates (adjusted rate ratio [aRR] = 1.13, 95% credible interval [CrI] = 1.03–1.25). The proportion of households living on the sixth floor or above, indicating easy access to high places, was associated with jumping suicide rates (aRR = 1.16, 95% CrI, 1.04–1.29). Neighborhoods’ adjacency to rivers, indicating easy access to water, showed no statistical evidence of an association with drowning suicide rates (aRR = 1.27, 95% CrI = 0.92–1.69). Hanging and overall suicide rates showed no associations with any of these three accessibility indicators. Limitations: This is an ecological study; associations between means accessibility and suicide cannot be directly inferred as causal. Conclusion: The findings have implications for identifying high-risk groups for charcoal-burning suicide (e.g., vulnerable individuals living alone) and preventing jumping suicides by increasing the safety of high buildings

Multimodal Social Skills, Communication and Behavioral Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Comparison of Multiple Indices for Treatment Effectiveness

The study aimed to investigate the treatment effectiveness of evidence-based intervention program called Multimodal Social Skills, Communication and Behavioral (MSSCB) program. 34 participants with the diagnosis of high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged between 3 to 12 year-old were recruited  (F=9, M=25；Mean age =8.03, SD=2.14) at the beginning. The study collected and analyzed the data of participants’ socio-demographic characteristics as well as their psychometric outcomes measuring their cognitive, social, communication, behavioral, emotional, and other adaptive function. We used t-test and SPSS to analyze the data that were obtained at the beginning and at the time six months later on. The mean of the scores from the social domain of parents’ ASD screening questionnaires declined significantly (t=-2.15, p<0.05, α = .05). The means of the standardized scores in overall performance, communication domain, and social domains of Vinland’s Adaptive Rating Scale (Interview Version) elevated significantly (t=3.40, 3.69, & 2.35 respectively, P<0.01, α = .05). Additional significant improvements were noticed in the scores of syndrome scales of withdrawn/depressed, social problems, and aggressive behavior reported by parents and the scores of the externalized problem scale and syndrome scale of rule-breaking behavior reported by teachers (p-value ranged from 0.004 to 0.050, α = .05).   The present study implies that MSSCB program might be effective for children with high-functioning ASD detected by several psychometric measurements. Nevertheless, not all indices consistently and significantly supported benefits of the program. Further discussion and suggestions were made for the establishment and examination of an evidence-based intervention program for children with AS