A New Strategy For Repairing Consumer Trust: Targeting Negative Emotions

Companies sometimes violate the trust of consumers, and those trust violations can cause consumers to experience strong negative emotions. In this research we examine the different types of negative emotions that trust violations by companies can cause, and whether acting to reduce those negative emotions allows trust to be repaired

Intermittent Faking of Personality Profiles in High-Stakes Assessments: A Grade of Membership Analysis

In high stakes assessments of personality and similar attributes, test takers may engage in impression management (aka faking). This paper proposes to consider responses of every test taker as a potential mixture of ‘real’ (or retrieved) answers to questions, and ‘ideal’ answers intended to create a desired impression, with each type of response characterized by its own distribution and factor structure. Depending on the particular mix of response types in the test taker profile, grades of membership in the ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ profiles are defined. This approach overcomes the limitation of existing psychometric models that assume faking behavior to be consistent across test items. To estimate the proposed Faking-as-Grade-of-Membership (F-GoM) model, two-level factor mixture analysis is used, with two latent classes at the response (within) level, allowing grade of membership in ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ profiles, each underpinned by its own factor structure, at the person (between) level. For collected data, units of analysis can be item or scale scores, with the latter enabling analysis of questionnaires with many measured scales. The performance of the F-GoM model is evaluated in a simulation study, and compared against existing methods for statistical control of faking in an empirical application using archival recruitment data, which supported the validity of latent factors and classes assumed by the model using multiple control variables. The proposed approach is particularly useful for high-stakes assessment data and can be implemented with standard software packages

Preferences for Physical Activity: a Conjoint Analysis Involving People with Chronic Knee Pain

Objective To investigate individual preferences for physical activity (PA) attributes in adults with chronic knee pain, to identify clusters of individuals with similar preferences, and to identify whether individuals in these clusters differ by their demographic and health characteristics. Design An adaptive conjoint analysis (ACA) was conducted using the Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) method to determine preference weights representing the relative importance of six PA attributes. Cluster analysis was performed to identify clusters of participants with similar weights. Chi-square and ANOVA were used to assess differences in individual characteristics by cluster. Multinomial logistic regression was used to assess associations between individual characteristics and cluster assignment. Results The study sample included 146 participants; mean age 65, 72% female, 47% white, non-Hispanic. The six attributes (mean weights in parentheses) are: health benefit (0.26), enjoyment (0.24), convenience (0.16), financial cost (0.13), effort (0.11) and time cost (0.10). Three clusters were identified: Cluster 1 (n = 33): for whom enjoyment (0.35) is twice as important as health benefit; Cluster 2 (n = 63): for whom health benefit (0.38) is most important; and Cluster 3 (n = 50): for whom cost (0.18), effort (0.18), health benefit (0.17) and enjoyment (0.18) are equally important. Cluster 1 was healthiest, Cluster 2 most self-efficacious, and Cluster 3 was in poorest health. Conclusions Patients with chronic knee pain have preferences for PA that can be distinguished effectively using ACA methods. Adults with chronic knee pain, clustered by PA preferences, share distinguishing characteristics. Understanding preferences may help clinicians and researchers to better tailor PA interventions

Associations among socioeconomic status, perceived neighborhood control, perceived individual control, and self-reported health

Recent research has suggested that perceived control and a person's perceptions of their neighborhood environment may mediate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health. This cross-sectional study assessed whether perceptions of informal social control mediated the association between SES and self-reported health, and if these two constructs represented distinct mechanisms linking SES with self-reported health. The sample consisted of 869 adults residing in 300 census tracts in Montreal, Canada. Multilevel methods were used to assess the associations among self-reported health, SES, perceived control, and perceived informal social control adjusting for sociodemographic variables. Perceived control (mediation estimate=-0.06,p<.001) and perceived informal social control (mediation estimate=-0.05, p<.05) partially mediated the association between SES and self-reported health. Perceived control did not mediate the association of perceived informal social control with self-reported health. Perceived informal social control may act alongside but distinct from perceived control as a mechanism linking SES to self-reported health

Regressor and random-effects dependencies in multilevel models

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72623/1/j.0039-0402.2003.00254.x.pd

Intermittent faking in high-stakes assessments (Faking as Grade of Membership)

In high stakes assessments of personality and similar attributes, test takers may engage in impression management (aka faking). We propose to consider responses of every test taker as a potential mixture of ‘real’ (or retrieved) answers to questions, and ‘ideal’ answers intended to create a desired impression, with each type of response characterized by its own distribution and factor structure. Depending on the particular mix of response types in the test taker profile, grades of membership in the ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ profiles are defined. This approach overcomes the limitation of existing psychometric models that assume faking behavior to be consistent across test items

On Believing Our Imagination: the Role of Mental Imagery in Belief Generation and Resilience

We propose that imagery-provoking messages (e.g., narrative) induce both deliberate beliefs-due to the strength of the arguments and/or the credibility of the source-and implicit beliefs-due to the experience of mental images generated by the message-, whereas abstract messages (e.g., product ratings) induce only deliberate beliefs. Consistent with this proposition, three studies show that i) imagery-provoking product claims are considered more believable than abstract ones, ii) mental imagery generated by a message weakens the effect of source credibility on product evaluation, and iii) attitudes generated by imagery-provoking messages are stronger than those generated by abstract ones. [to cite]