Analysis of rolling group therapy data using conditionally autoregressive priors

Group therapy is a central treatment modality for behavioral health disorders such as alcohol and other drug use (AOD) and depression. Group therapy is often delivered under a rolling (or open) admissions policy, where new clients are continuously enrolled into a group as space permits. Rolling admissions policies result in a complex correlation structure among client outcomes. Despite the ubiquity of rolling admissions in practice, little guidance on the analysis of such data is available. We discuss the limitations of previously proposed approaches in the context of a study that delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy for depression to clients in residential substance abuse treatment. We improve upon previous rolling group analytic approaches by fully modeling the interrelatedness of client depressive symptom scores using a hierarchical Bayesian model that assumes a conditionally autoregressive prior for session-level random effects. We demonstrate improved performance using our method for estimating the variance of model parameters and the enhanced ability to learn about the complex correlation structure among participants in rolling therapy groups. Our approach broadly applies to any group therapy setting where groups have changing client composition. It will lead to more efficient analyses of client-level data and improve the group therapy research community's ability to understand how the dynamics of rolling groups lead to client outcomes.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS434 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Software trends;Hardware characteristics; Computer research studies, 5

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/1155/thumbnail.jp

Just Friends / music by John Klenner; words by Sam M. Lewis

Cover: photo of Red McKenzie; Publisher: Robbins Music Corporation (New York)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/sharris_e/1016/thumbnail.jp

Come Rain or Come Shine / music by Harold Arlen; words by Johnny Mercer

Cover: drawing of a well-dressed African American couple; Publisher: A-M Music Corporation (New York)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/sharris_e/1078/thumbnail.jp

A Development Environment for Visual Physics Analysis

The Visual Physics Analysis (VISPA) project integrates different aspects of physics analyses into a graphical development environment. It addresses the typical development cycle of (re-)designing, executing and verifying an analysis. The project provides an extendable plug-in mechanism and includes plug-ins for designing the analysis flow, for running the analysis on batch systems, and for browsing the data content. The corresponding plug-ins are based on an object-oriented toolkit for modular data analysis. We introduce the main concepts of the project, describe the technical realization and demonstrate the functionality in example applications

Europium doping of zincblende GaN by ion implantation

Eu was implanted into high quality cubic (zincblende) GaN (ZB-GaN) layers grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Detailed structural characterization before and after implantation was performed by x-ray diffraction (XRD) and Rutherford backscattering/channeling spectrometry. A low concentration ( direction, while a Ga substitutional site is observed for W-GaN:Eu. The implantation damage in ZB-GaN:Eu could partly be removed by thermal annealing, but an increase in the wurtzite phase fraction was observed at the same time. Cathodoluminescence, photoluminescence (PL), and PL excitation spectroscopy revealed several emission lines which can be attributed to distinct Eu-related optical centers in ZB-GaN and W-GaN inclusions

Exploring the role of professional associations in collective learning in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firm clusters.

The value of regional economies for collective learning has been reported by numerous scholars. However often work has been criticised for lacking analytical clarity and failing to explore the architectures of collective learning and the role of the knowledge produced in making firms in a cluster economy successful. This paper engages with these problematics and investigates how collective learning is facilitated in the advertising and law professional service firm clusters in London and New York. It explores the role of professional associations and investigates how they mediate a collective learning process in each city. It argues that professional associations seed urban communities of practice that emerge outside of the formal activities of professional associations. In these communities individual with shared interests in advertising and law learn from one-another and are therefore able to adapt and evolve one-another approaches to common industry challenges. The paper suggests this is another form of the variation Marshall highlighted in relation to cluster-based collective learning. The paper also shows how the collective learning process is affected by the presence, absence and strength of an institutional thickness. It is therefore argued that a richer understanding of institutional affects is needed in relation to CL