Do consensus meetings undermine the validity of assessment centres?

In this study the effects of latent-informal processes operating in assessment centre consensus meetings is investigated with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Non-participative observation is carried out in several consensus meetings, and auditory recordings made in three of these. In an analysis of the transcript of a consensus meeting in one organization, evidence is found for several latent-informal processes. These include active attempts by assessors to persuade other assessors, and the group facilitator, to appoint candidates; the use of assessors’ general impressions of candidates in this persuasion process; and the active use of power derived from an assessors’ relative seniority in the organization. Evidence consistent with the use of seniority-derived power is also found in a quantitative analysis of the selection decisions made in consensus meetings about 413 candidates. The results of the study are considered in relation to the practical utility of consensus meetings, and it is concluded that the use of such meetings is difficult to justify

Evidence of Changes Brought about by the Michigan Sage Routes to School Program

Abstract This paper describes changes in student and parent beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors resulting from participation in the Michigan Safe Routes to School program. All 50 states are receiving federal funds to implement programs and build infrastructure that encourages school-aged children to walk or bike to school. This research applies a modified model of the Theory of Planned Behavior, which aims to explain the relationship between beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Specifically, 20 schools were evaluated pre-program and post-program using attitudinal and behavioral data collected from students and their parents, as well as classroom tallies for daily transportation behaviors. Findings show positive changes in student and parent attitudes and beliefs, while changes in intentions or behaviors were minimal. These results represent an early step forward in improving the ability of school-age students to walk and bike to school safely. We believe that affecting intentions and behaviors is a long-term process that requires the continued collaboration of students, parents, school officials, and community leaders

Accessible Design in Rural Health Care: Usability Profile of Outpatient Health Care Facilities in Rural West Virginia

The purpose of this research is to better understand the physical and environmental features of outpatient healthcare facilities that act as barriers to healthcare access in rural West Virginia and factors that contribute to non-compliance with the ADA. The research aims to explore the prevalence of barriers in rural West Virginia health facilities and the relationship between building characteristics (like year of construction and original purpose) and accessibility. The researcher evaluated ten rural outpatient member-sites of the West Virginia Practice-Based Research Network using the Outpatient Health Care Usability Profile to measure essential features for a facility to be considered ‘usable’. The results indicate that once adjusted for items that did not apply to specific clinics, surveyed clinics scored an average of 73% in overall accessibility. Counters, restrooms, and exam rooms were the lowest scoring categories. The study found a moderate positive correlation between year of construction and mobility (Pearson r =0.765) and overall score (r=0.637). This research supports the notion that physical and environmental barriers to healthcare access still exists and that older clinical buildings run a higher risk of being non-compliant with essential ADA items and thus contribute to barrier creation. This research design was approved by the West Virginia University Institutional Review Board (IRB), protocol number 1802995833

Reviews

Danny Saunders and Nina Smalley (eds.), The International Simulation and Gaming Research Yearbook — Volume 8: Simulations and Games for Transition and Change, London: Kogan Page, 2000. ISBN: 0–7494–3397–3. Hardback, viii+271 pages, £40.00

Complicating the Resilience Model: A Four-Country Study About Misinformation

The resilience model to disinformation (Humprecht et al., 2020, 2021) suggests that countries will differ in exposure and reactions to disinformation due to their distinct media, economic, and political environments. In this model, higher media trust and the use of public service broadcasters are expected to build resilience to disinformation, while social media use and political polarization undermine resilience. To further test and develop the resilience model, we draw on a four-country (the US, Canada, the UK, and France) survey conducted in February 2021. We focus on three individual-level indicators of a lack of resilience: awareness of, exposure to, and sharing of misinformation. We find that social media use is associated with higher levels of all three measures, which is consistent with the resilience model. Social media use decreases resilience to misinformation. Contrary to the expectations of the resilience model, trust in national news media does not build resilience. Finally, we consider the use of public broadcasting media (BBC, France Télévisions, and CBC). The use of these sources does not build resilience in the short term. Moving forward, we suggest that awareness of, exposure to, and reactions to misinformation are best understood in terms of social media use and left–right ideology. Furthermore, instead of focusing on the US as the exceptional case of low resilience, we should consider the UK as the exceptional case of high resilience to misinformation. Finally, we identify potential avenues to further develop frameworks to understand and measure resilience to misinformation

Accounting for Spatial and Temporal Variation in Macroinvertebrate Community Abundances When Measuring the Food Supply of Stream Salmonids

The goal of salmonid habitat monitoring programs is to measure habitat attributes linked to salmonid productivity based on protocols that have sufficient precision to detect environmental variation at relevant spatial and temporal scales. Benthic macroinvertebrate community composition often is evaluated as part of habitat monitoring and assessment protocols, despite a lack of direct relationships between benthic composition and salmonid production. Macroinvertebrate drift provides a direct measure of the food resources available to stream salmonids, but drift is rarely evaluated as part of habitat monitoring protocols. This reluctance may stem from the complex spatial and temporal variability inherent in macroinvertebrate drift abundances and an assumed inability to obtain precise estimates of drift abundance at relevant spatial and temporal scales. We evaluated an extensive set of paired drift and benthic macroinvertebrate samples to characterize variation in the biomass and density (i.e., counts) of macroinvertebrate samples across a hierarchy of spatial and temporal scales. Results suggest that estimates of total drift biomass may offer the most precise approach for detecting differences in salmonid food availability among stream reaches and, thus, may be more appropriate than benthic sampling for incorporation into salmonid habitat monitoring programs

Adaptive Pose Priors for Pictorial Structures

Pictorial structure (PS) models are extensively used for part-based recognition of scenes, people, animals and multi-part objects. To achieve tractability, the structure and parameterization of the model is often restricted, for example, by assuming tree dependency structure and unimodal, data-independent pairwise interactions. These expressivity restrictions fail to capture important patterns in the data. On the other hand, local methods such as nearest-neighbor classification and kernel density estimation provide nonparametric flexibility but require large amounts of data to generalize well. We propose a simple semi-parametric approach that combines the tractability of pictorial structure inference with the flexibility of non-parametric methods by expressing a subset of model parameters as kernel regression estimates from a learned sparse set of exemplars. This yields query-specific, image-dependent pose priors. We develop an effective shape-based kernel for upper-body pose similarity and propose a leave-one-out loss function for learning a sparse subset of exemplars for kernel regression. We apply our techniques to two challenging datasets of human figure parsing and advance the state-of-the-art (from 80% to 86% on the Buffy dataset [8]), while using only 15% of the training data as exemplars