Fisher Was Right

Invited address presented to the Educational Statistician’s Special Interest Group at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, May 1, 2010

Constructive Criticism

Attempts to attain knowledge as certified true belief have failed to circumvent Hume’s injunction against induction. Theories must be viewed as unprovable, improbable, and undisprovable. The empirical basis is fallible, and yet the method of conjectures and refutations is untouched by Hume’s insights. The implications for statistical methodology is that the requisite severity of testing is achieved through the use of robust procedures, whose assumptions have not been shown to be substantially violated, to test predesignated range null hypotheses. Nonparametric range null hypothesis tests need to be developed to examine whether or not effect sizes or measures of association, as well as distributional assumptions underlying the tests themselves, meet satisficing criteria

The Composite Hypothesis Contrast Procedure: A Novel Sequential Multiple-Comparison Approach

The sequential composite hypothesis contrast multiple-comparison procedure is introduced for comparing two treatment conditions with one or two control conditions on one or two outcome measures. The procedure deserves consideration insofar as its power advantage over other commonly applied multiple-comparison methods can be sizable

The sage hanbook for research in education : engaging ideas and enriching inquiry

xxii, 598 p. : il.; 24 cm

Contributions to the method of paired comparisons

A least-squares solution for the method of paired comparisons is given. The approach provokes a theorem regarding the amount of data necessary and sufficient for a solution to be obtained. This theorem establishes that it is possible to find a solution when there is a great deal of missing data. A measure of the internal consistency of the least-squares fit is developed. It is indicated that the method of paired comparisons need not be applied only to data obtained experimentally from the law of comparative judgment; indeed, an example (rating university football teams) involving observational data is worked out

Patient-related barriers to pain management: the Icelandic Barriers Questionnaire II

To access publisher full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links fieldThe Barriers Questionnaire-II (BQ-II) is used to evaluate eight attitudinal barriers to cancer pain management. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Icelandic BQ-II (IBQ-II). Icelandic adults (n=244) completed the IBQ-II, the Brief-Pain-Inventory, and demographic questions. Half the responders were male (52%), and 42.8% had pain on the day of data collection. Participants had a mean (SD) age of 34.73 (11.78) years and education of 15.08 (3.69) years. Factor analysis of the IBQ-II supported three factors. The alpha was 0.90. The mean (SD) IBQ-II total score was 2.32 (0.78), on a scale of 0 to 5, with higher scores indicating stronger barriers. IBQ-II total scores were inversely related to education (r=-0.21; P<0.01), and positively related to least pain (r=0.24; P<0.05), average pain (r=0.23; P<0.05), and pain interference with life activities (r=0.22; P<0.05) for those who had pain. There is support for reliability, validity, and feasibility of the IBQ-II