Public views of the Sustainable Development Goals across countries

The United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an extensive framework for coordinating and shaping government policies, and for engaging the public with sustainability. Public understanding of the SDGs and sustainability can influence this engagement, as people are more likely to accept and share information consistent with their own understanding. We identify public understandings of SDGs through mental maps of how people relate the SDGs to environmental, social and economic sustainability. Using responses from 12 developed/developing countries (n = 2,134), we identified four mental maps that varied mainly on two dimensions, which diverged from some expert models. Some people’s mental maps identified tension between achieving environmental versus social sustainability, whereas for others the tension was between economic sustainability and the other two sustainability elements. Some people related different SDGs to each element of sustainability, whereas others saw all SDGs as targeting the same sustainability element(s). These findings highlight opportunities and challenges to engage the public with sustainability more effectively, especially with wide-ranging initiatives such as a Green New Deal. We observed cultural differences but we also identified a dominant mental map across countries that could serve as a default model for communicating sustainability internationally

Motor function in Parkinson's disease and supranuclear palsy: simultaneous factor analysis of a clinical scale in several populations

BACKGROUND: In order to better understand the similarities and differences in the motor behaviour of different groups of patients, their scores on the Motor Examination section of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) were analysed simultaneously. The three groups consisted, respectively, of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) on medication, patients with Parkinson's disease withdrawn from anti-parkinsonian medication for at least 12 hours, and patients diagnosed with a specific Parkinsonism syndrome: Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). METHODS: A total of 669 consecutively sampled patients from three separate hospital-based clinics participated (294 PD on medication; 200 PD off medication: 175 PSP). The Motor Examination section of the UPDRS was administered by neurologists at the three participating clinics. The patient scores on each item were recorded. To assess similarities and differences among the components of the UPDRS in these samples, we performed simultaneous or multigroup factor analysis on the covariance matrices of the three groups. In addition, it was investigated whether a single model for the Motor Examination section of the UPDRS could be developed which would be valid for all three groups at the same time. RESULTS: A single six-dimensional factor solution was found that fitted all groups, although this was not straightforward due to differences between the tremor-at-rest variables. The factors were identified as Tremor-at-rest, Postural Tremor, Axial Dysfunctioning, Rigidity, Left Bradykinesia and Right Bradykinesia. The analysis also pointed to a somewhat lower lateralization in bradykinesia for PSP patients. The groups differed in intensity of motor impairment, especially with respect to Tremor-at-Rest, but the overall relationships between the variables were shared by the three groups. In addition, apart from the common factor structure evidence of differences in body part-specific and motor-specific variances was found. CONCLUSION: From a clinical point of view, the analyses showed that using the Motor Examination section of the UPDRS is also appropriate for patients with PSP, because the correlational structure of the items is directly comparable to that of Parkinson's patients. Methodologically, the analysis of all groups together showed that it is possible to evaluate similarities and differences between factor structures in great detail

My Multiway Analysis: From Jan de Leeuw to TWPack

This paper is a mixture of my personal experiences of Jan de Leeuw as a supervisor of my master's and Ph.D. theses, as well as a sketch of how three-way analysis, the subject Jan chose for me, developed over time. The emphasis is on where it is and was applied, and to what extent it stole the hearts of applied researchers in different disciplines. Furthermore, the paper contains some musings about how we should go about promoting the use of the techniques, especially in the social and behavioural sciences. Finally, an overview is provided of available software and attention is paid to how (three-way) software may be designed to encourage its use by the scientific community, as it befits a paper in the Journal of Statistical Software