Da ocupação à retomada: cartografando processos de subjetivação em território urbano

Os acontecimentos das últimas décadas revelam que atravessamos uma crise civilizatória a nível global, comprometendo, no presente, a capacidade de antever um projeto de futuro para a sociedade fora dos referenciais fabricados e sustentados pelo arsenal científico e histórico oriundos da Europa ocidental, desde que se projetou como bastião da modernidade. A tese apoia-se na ideia de que as catástrofes contemporâneas são sintomas, e não anomalias, do projeto de consolidação do modo de produção capitalista, ancorado pelos enunciados cartesianos que prevêem a canonização de um sujeito universal autodeterminado sustentado por uma nova tecnologia de subjetivação de categorização humana guiado pela raça, prerrogativa sobre a qual respaldará o maior e perpétuo genocídio, etnocídio e epistemicídio já visto na história humana contra populações e erritórios que cultivam diferentes modos de existência. Investigará, inspirado na genealogia foucaultiana, a hipótese de uma suposta aliança entre a prática de governo necropolítica - denunciado primeiramente por Achille Mbembe - com a racionalidade de mercado neoliberal - tendo como base Pierre Dardot e Christian Laval - que orientam os processos de subjetivação do planejamento urbano. Para estreitar as fronteiras do urbano com a produção de subjetividade, a tese foca nas manifestações contra-hegemônicas dos segmentos periféricos que, com sua inventividade política, mobilizaram repertórios de diferentes territorialidades no espaço urbano para reivindicar seu reconhecimento, pertencimento e participação como sujeitos históricos na construção do Brasil. Tendo como base a descolonização do ser, do poder e do saber, optou-se pelo recurso da cartografia levada ao grau de radicalidade, na medida em que o pesquisador decide habitar existencialmente por seis meses no Assentamento 20 de Novembro. Em particular, acompanha o processo da Ocupação Baronesa que, em sua trajetória, se firmou como o primeiro Centro de Referência Indígena-Afro do RS na área central de Porto Alegre. Tal acontecimento abasteceu novos paradigmas epistemológicos tanto para o planejamento urbano na esfera institucional, acadêmica quanto para a luta pela reforma urbana na esfera militante.The reports of the last decades reveal that we are going through a civilizational crisis at a global level, compromising, in the present, the ability to anticipate a future project of society outside of the references manufactured and sustained by the scientific and historical arsenal originating in Western Europe, therefore, projects itself as a bastion of modernity. The thesis starts from the idea that contemporary catastrophes are symptoms, not anomalies, of the project to consolidate the capitalist mode of production, anchored in Cartesian statements that envision the canonization of a self-determined universal subject supported by a new technology of subjugation of human categorization guided by race, the prerogative of which one will bear the greatest and perpetual genocide, ethnocide and epistemicide ever seen in human history against populations and territories that cultivate different modes of existence. Inspired by Foucaultian genealogy, it will investigate a hypothesis of a supposed alliance between a necropolitical governmental practice – mainly denounced by Achille Mbembe - with a neoliberal market rationality - based on Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval - which guides the processes of subjectivity of Urban Planning. To narrow the borders between Urbanism and the production of subjectivity, this thesis focus in the counter-hegemonic manifestations of peripheral segments that, with their political inventiveness, mobilizes repertoires of different territorialities in the urban space to claim their recognition, appreciation and participation as their historical subjects in the construction of urban space in Brazil. Based on the decolonization of being, power and knowledge, we opted for the use of cartography as their radical level, according as the researcher decides to reside existentially for six months in Assentamento 20 de Novembro. Particularly, keep up with the process of Ocupação Baronesa that, in its trajectory, established itself as the first Indigenous-Afro Reference Center of RS in the central zone of Porto Alegre. This event fueled new epistemological paradigms both for urban planning as well the institutional and academic sphere as for the urban reform resistance in the militant sphere

A genetic algorithm for optimal assembly of pairwise forced-choice questionnaires

The use of multidimensional forced-choice questionnaires has been proposed as a means of improving validity in the assessment of non-cognitive attributes in high-stakes scenarios. However, the reduced precision of trait estimates in this questionnaire format is an important drawback. Accordingly, this article presents an optimization procedure for assembling pairwise forced-choice questionnaires while maximizing posterior marginal reliabilities. This procedure is performed through the adaptation of a known genetic algorithm (GA) for combinatorial problems. In a simulation study, the efficiency of the proposed procedure was compared with a quasi-brute-force (BF) search. For this purpose, five-dimensional item pools were simulated to emulate the real problem of generating a forced-choice personality questionnaire under the five-factor model. Three factors were manipulated: (1) the length of the questionnaire, (2) the relative item pool size with respect to the questionnaire’s length, and (3) the true correlations between traits. The recovery of the person parameters for each assembled questionnaire was evaluated through the squared correlation between estimated and true parameters, the root mean square error between the estimated and true parameters, the average difference between the estimated and true inter-trait correlations, and the average standard error for each trait level. The proposed GA offered more accurate trait estimates than the BF search within a reasonable computation time in every simulation condition. Such improvements were especially important when measuring correlated traits and when the relative item pool sizes were higher. A user-friendly online implementation of the algorithm was made available to the user

Controlling for response biases in self-report scales: Forced-choice vs. psychometric modeling of likert items

One important problem in the measurement of non-cognitive characteristics such as personality traits and attitudes is that it has traditionally been made through Likert scales, which are susceptible to response biases such as social desirability (SDR) and acquiescent (ACQ) responding. Given the variability of these response styles in the population, ignoring their possible effects on the scores may compromise the fairness and the validity of the assessments. Also, response-style-induced errors of measurement can affect the reliability estimates and overestimate convergent validity by correlating higher with other Likert-scale-based measures. Conversely, it can attenuate the predictive power over non-Likert-based indicators, given that the scores contain more errors. This study compares the validity of the Big Five personality scores obtained: (1) ignoring the SDR and ACQ in graded-scale items (GSQ), (2) accounting for SDR and ACQ with a compensatory IRT model, and (3) using forced-choice blocks with a multi-unidimensional pairwise preference model (MUPP) variant for dominance items. The overall results suggest that ignoring SDR and ACQ offered the worst validity evidence, with a higher correlation between personality and SDR scores. The two remaining strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages. The results from the empirical reliability and the convergent validity analysis indicate that when modeling social desirability with graded-scale items, the SDR factor apparently captures part of the variance of the Agreeableness factor. On the other hand, the correlation between the corrected GSQ-based Openness to Experience scores, and the University Access Examination grades was higher than the one with the uncorrected GSQ-based scores, and considerably higher than that using the estimates from the forced-choice data. Conversely, the criterion-related validity of the Forced Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) scores was similar to the results found in meta-analytic studies, correlating higher with Conscientiousness. Nonetheless, the FCQ-scores had considerably lower reliabilities and would demand administering more blocks. Finally, the results are discussed, and some notes are provided for the treatment of SDR and ACQ in future studiesThis project was partially supported by three grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (PSI2015-65557-P, PSI2017-85022-P, and FPI BES-2016-077814

Improving reliability estimation in cognitive diagnosis modeling

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are used in educational, clinical, or personnel selection settings to classify respondents with respect to discrete attributes, identifying strengths and needs, and thus allowing to provide tailored training/treatment. As in any assessment, an accurate reliability estimation is crucial for valid score interpretations. In this sense, most CDM reliability indices are based on the posterior probabilities of the estimated attribute profiles. These posteriors are traditionally computed using point estimates for the model parameters as approximations to their populational values. If the uncertainty around these parameters is unaccounted for, the posteriors may be overly peaked, deriving into overestimated reliabilities. This article presents a multiple imputation (MI) procedure to integrate out the model parameters in the estimation of the posterior distributions, thus correcting the reliability estimation. A simulation study was conducted to compare the MI procedure with the traditional reliability estimation. Five factors were manipulated: the attribute structure, the CDM model (DINA and G-DINA), test length, sample size, and item quality. Additionally, an illustration using the Examination for the Certificate of Proficiency in English data was analyzed. The effect of sample size was studied by sampling subsets of subjects from the complete data. In both studies, the traditional reliability estimation systematically provided overestimated reliabilities, whereas the MI procedure offered more accurate results. Accordingly, practitioners in small educational or clinical settings should be aware that the reliability estimation using model parameter point estimates may be positively biased. R codes for the MI procedure are made availableOpen Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work has been funded by the Community of Madrid through the Pluriannual Agreement with the Universidad de Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in its Programa de Estímulo a la Investigación de Jóvenes Doctores (Reference SI3/ PJI/2021-00258), and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FPI BES-2016-077814

A Two-Dimensional Multiple-Choice Model Accounting for Omissions

This paper presents a new two-dimensional Multiple-Choice Model accounting for Omissions (MCMO). Based on Thissen and Steinberg multiple-choice models, the MCMO defines omitted responses as the result of the respondent not knowing the correct answer and deciding to omit rather than to guess given a latent propensity to omit. Firstly, using a Monte Carlo simulation, the accuracy of the parameters estimated from data with different sample sizes (500, 1,000, and 2,000 subjects), test lengths (20, 40, and 80 items) and percentages of omissions (5, 10, and 15%) were investigated. Later, the appropriateness of the MCMO to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Advanced 2015 mathematics and physics multiple-choice items was analyzed and compared with the Holman and Glas' Between-item Multi-dimensional IRT model (B-MIRT) and with the three-parameter logistic (3PL) model with omissions treated as incorrect responses. The results of the simulation study showed a good recovery of scale and position parameters. Pseudo-guessing parameters (d) were less accurate, but this inaccuracy did not seem to have an important effect on the estimation of abilities. The precision of the propensity to omit strongly depended on the ability values (the higher the ability, the worse the estimate of the propensity to omit). In the empirical study, the empirical reliability for ability estimates was high in both physics and mathematics. As in the simulation study, the estimates of the propensity to omit were less reliable and their precision varied with ability. Regarding the absolute item fit, the MCMO fitted the data better than the other models. Also, the MCMO offered significant increments in convergent validity between scores from multiple-choice and constructed-response items, with an increase of around 0.02 to 0.04 in R2 in comparison with the two other methods. Finally, the high correlation between the country means of the propensity to omit in mathematics and physics suggests that (1) the propensity to omit is somehow affected by the country of residence of the examinees, and (2) the propensity to omit is independent of the test contents