A facet-theoretical approach to item equivalency

"Three notions of item equivalency are distinguished. They correspond to the back-translation approach, the psychometric IRT approach, and the facet-theoretical approach. The latter defines equivalent item as items that answer the same questions. The question, then, is explicated in terms of its design. This yields the item's blueprint. One can extract such blueprints by studying given items, but the result is generally not unique. Nevertheless, it makes it possible to predict empirical regularities for the items and, therefore, tests for equivalency. If the tests fail, however, item non-equivalency is just one possible explanation. Design-equivalency is, on the other hand, a definitional issue, not an empirical one. The enmpirical issue is the design's usefulness for a particular purpose, usually for answering the research question." (author's abstract

Help at Your Fingertips: A Twenty-First Century Response to the Pro Se Phenomenon

In July 2001, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. fired Susan Hudock, an award-winning sales representative suffering from shingles. Angered and frustrated, Ms. Hudock retained an attorney and filed suit against her former employer, alleging that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to make reasonable accommodations that would enable her to perform certain job-related functions. After incurring over $18,000 in legal fees over two years and with no end in sight, Ms. Hudock decided to take a drastic step: she fired her attorney and proceeded with her case pro se. Despite being warned by her former attorney that she would never survive summary judgment, Ms. Hudock did just that, largely through the aid of legal resources she found on the Internet. When her trial finally began in June 2005, Ms. Hudock rose from the sole chair at the plaintiffs table and began her opening statement by telling the jury, I have to tell you, I\u27m terrified. Nevertheless, she forged ahead with her case, struggling with evidentiary procedures, witness examination, and general trial strategy; her well-represented adversary had no such difficulties. Although the jury ultimately found for Aventis, Ms. Hudock remains undeterred. She plans to represent herself again on appeal. Ms. Hudock\u27s experience has become increasingly common in recent years, with both state and federal courts seeing a marked increase in pro se civil litigation. In the federal district courts, non-prisoner pro se litigants filed over twenty thousand cases in a recent one-year period; the federal appellate courts saw a twenty percent increase in pro se appeals between 1993 and 2004. Though the trend shows no signs of abating, not all members of the legal community have welcomed it. Both scholarly and practical debates have centered on the appropriate balance between an individual\u27s right to represent himself and the need for judicial efficiency

Inside and Outside Perspectives on the Relation of People’s Personal Values and Their Acceptance of Legal Norms

Based on a representative survey on crime prevention, this paper studies how personal values are related to persons’ acceptance of legal norms (LNA). We here take a closer look at these relations than previous research. Offenses, in particular, are classified into different offense types, and the persons’ ratings are studied both as observed and as individually centered data. It is found that conservation-oriented persons give higher and less differentiated badness ratings to all offenses than persons striving for hedonism and stimulation. The correlational structure of basic personal values and norm acceptance ratings for 14 different offenses, when represented via multidimensional scaling, exhibits that conservation orientation becomes a better predictor of LNA of all offense types if it is augmented by an additional value, peace of mind. When looking at centered ratings (i.e., controlling for each person’s mean ratings), social values become the best predictors of offenses such as tax evasion, benefits fraud, or taking bribes. Statements on the impact of personal values on general norm acceptance should, therefore, be replaced with more differentiated relations on how particular values are related to people’s attitudes towards particular offenses

Früh- versus Spätantworter

'Es wird untersucht, ob die in der Umfrageforschung verbreitete, aber bislang kaum untersuchte These, daß sich Frühantworter von Spätantwortern systematisch unterscheiden, empirisch haltbar ist. Hierfür wird eine Intranet-Organisationsumfrage eines weltweit tätigen Unternehmens verwendet. Die Intranet-Administration ermöglichte es, den genauen Zeitpunkt der Abgabe des Fragebogens zu erfassen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen bei keiner der 95 Meinungs- und Einstellungsitems substantielle Trends über der Zeit der Fragebogenabgabe, insbesondere nicht bei Arbeitszufriedenheit und Commitment zur Organisation. Man erkennt lediglich regionale Unterschiede im Aufbau der Stichprobe über die Zeit.' (Autorenreferat)'This paper investigates the common but little studied survey research hypothesis that early respondents differ systematically from late respondents. An intranet employee survey conducted in a company operating world-wide is utilized to test this hypothesis. The survey was conducted on-fine, which made it possible to assess the exact points-in-time of questionnaire returns. The results show no substantial relations of return time to any of the 95 attitude and opinion items. In particular, there is no correlation of job satisfaction or of organizational commitment to time. The only systematic interesting effects are some regional differences in the accumulation of the returns over time.' (author's abstract)

The Past, Present, and Future of Multidimensional Scaling

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) has established itself as a standard tool for statisticians and applied researchers. Its success is due to its simple and easily interpretable representation of potentially complex structural data. These data are typically embedded into a 2-dimensional map, where the objects of interest (items, attributes, stimuli, respondents, etc.) correspond to points such that those that are near to each other are empirically similar, and those that are far apart are different. In this paper, we pay tribute to several important developers of MDS and give a subjective overview of milestones in MDS developments. We also discuss the present situation of MDS and give a brief outlook on its future

Utilizing personal values to explain people's attitudes towards legal norms

The aim of this study is to clarify whether personal values explain delinquents’ and non-delinquents’ general attitudes towards legal norms. We expect that 10 basic personal values form a circular scale common to all individuals, both delinquents and non-delinquents, that people’s ratings of the importance of these 10 values predict their norm acceptance in a sinusoidal way, with higher predictability for delinquents, and that the correlations of personal values with norm acceptance are highest for those delinquents with a broad spectrum of offences. Finally, we expect that gender does not have an impact on these profiles, whereas controlling for age does. Our analyses are based on four studies on community crime prevention. The results are in line with the above expectations

Explorative Multidimensionale Skalierung

"Die Verwendung der multidimensionalen Skalierung (MDS) als exploratives Datenanalyseverfahren wird dargestellt mit Hilfe einiger Beispiele. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf den verschiedenen Ansätzen zur Interpretation von MDS-Darstellungen. Diskutiert und illustriert werden Dimensionen, Richtungen, Regionen, Gebiete und Cluster aus Lehrbuch- und aus praxisorientierter Perspektive." (Autorenreferat)"How to use multidimensional scaling (MDS) as an exploratory data analysis technique is discussed with the help of various examples. The emphasis is on interpreting MDS representations. Discussed and illustrated are dimensions, directions, regions, patches and clusters in textbook form and from an applied perspective." (author's abstract

Attitudes of demographic item non-respondents in employee surveys

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether the participants in an employee survey who do not answer one or more demographic items differ systematically from those who fill out all demographic items. Logistic regression, with affective commitment, job satisfaction, and attitude towards leadership as predictors of responding to demographic items is used to analyze the data of an employee survey in a German company. Survey participants with low commitment, poor job satisfaction, and negative attitudes towards leadership are more likely not to provide demographic information, while highly committed participants tend to answer all demographic items. Non-respondents are also more concerned that their skills become obsolete, and they feel that employees do not have enough say. The paper does not distinguish among demographic item non-respondents on the basis of how many and which items are omitted. Future research should take a closer look at the different sensitivity of the demographic items. Managers should be aware that it is likely that the results of an employee survey for their organizational subunits tend to be biased and show a picture that is too optimistic as compared to company-wide results. The value of the paper lies in demonstrating a systematic and practically important bias in employee survey statistics that has been overlooked so far. (author's abstract