589 research outputs found
Defining the gap between research and practice in public relations programme evaluation - towards a new research agenda
The current situation in public relations programme evaluation is neatly summarized by McCoy who commented that 'probably the most common buzzwords in public relations in the last ten years have been evaluation and accountability' (McCoy 2005, 3). This paper examines the academic and practitioner-based literature and research on programme evaluation and it detects different priorities and approaches that may partly explain why the debate on acceptable and agreed evaluation methods continues. It analyses those differences and proposes a research agenda to bridge the gap and move the debate forward
On ordinal utility, cardinal utility, and random utility Â
Though the Random Utility Model (RUM) was conceivedÂ
entirely in terms of ordinal utility, the apparatus throughwhich it is widely practised exhibits properties ofÂ
cardinal utility.  The adoption of cardinal utility as aÂ
working operation of ordinal is perfectly valid, providedÂ
interpretations drawn from that operation remain faithfulÂ
to ordinal utility.  The paper considers whether the latterrequirement holds true for several measurements commonlyÂ
derived from RUM.  In particular it is found thatÂ
measurements of consumer surplus change may depart fromÂ
ordinal utility, and exploit the cardinality inherent inÂ
the practical apparatus.
Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers
With a sample of 700 future public sector primary teachers in India, a Discrete Choice Experiment is used to measure job preferences, particularly regarding location. General skills are also tested. Urban origin teachers and women are more averse to remote locations than rural origin teachers and men respectively. Women would require a 26-73 percent increase in salary for moving to a remote location. The results suggest that existing caste and gender quotas can be detrimental for hiring skilled teachers willing to work in remote locations. The most preferred location is home, which supports decentralised hiring, although this could compromise skills
Inferring from an imprecise PlackettâLuce model : application to label ranking
Learning ranking models is a difficult task, in which data may be scarce and cautious predictions desirable. To address such issues, we explore the extension of the popular parametric probabilistic PlackettâLuce model, often used to model rankings, to the imprecise setting where estimated parameters are set-valued. In particular, we study how to achieve cautious or conservative inference with it, and illustrate their application on label ranking problems, a specific supervised learning task
Imaginative Representations of Two- and Three-Dimensional Matrices in Children with Nonverbal Learning Disabilities
Children with non-verbal learning disabilities (NLD) are characterized by high verbal and poor non-verbal intelligence, poor cognitive abilities, school difficulties, andâsometimesâdepressive symptoms. NLD children lack visuospatial working memory, but it is not clear whether they encounter difficulties in mental imagery tasks. In the present study, NLD adolescents without depressive symptoms, depressed adolescents without NLD symptoms, and a control group were administered a mental imagery task requiring them to imagine to move along the cells of a 2-D (5 Ă 5) or 3-D (3 Ă 3 Ă 3) matrix. Results showed that NLD adolescents had difficulty at performing the imagery task when a 3-D pattern was involved. It is suggested that 3-D mental imagery tasks tap visuospatial processes which are weak in NLD individuals. In addition, their poor cognitive performance cannot be attributed to a depressive state, as the depressed group had a performance similar to that of controls
Cognitive Performance in Patients with Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators: Associations with Objective Sleep Duration, Age and Anxiety
Sex Offendersâ Perceptions of the Police and Courts:Are There Spill-Over Effects?
Individuals convicted of sexual offenses are rarely asked their views of the police and courts. The aims of this study were to examine the impact of feelings of guilt on perceptions of the police and police interview outcomes and spill-over effects from perceptions of the police to perceptions of the courts. Participants were 116 adult males incarcerated for sexual offenses who were invited to report their perceptions of police interviewers, feelings at the time of interview, interview outcomes, and perceptions of the court process. Feelings of guilt were related to perceptions of the police. Both feelings of guilt and perceptions of the police were associated with interview outcomes. Spill-over effects were found as perceptions of the police were directly related to perceptions of the courts. The findings highlight the important role of police officers as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, with associated implications for police officersâ training and practice
Childbearing intentions in a low fertility context: the case of Romania
This paper applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to find out the predictors of fertility intentions in Romania, a low-fertility country. We analyse how attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control relate to the intention to have a child among childless individuals and one-child parents. Principal axis factor analysis confirms which items proposed by the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS 2005) act as valid and reliable measures of the suggested theoretical socio-psychological factors. Four parity-specific logistic regression models are applied to evaluate the relationship between the socio-psychological factors and childbearing intentions. Social pressure emerges as the most important aspect in fertility decision-making among childless individuals and one-child parents, and positive attitudes towards childbearing are a strong component in planning for a child. This paper also underlines the importance of the region-specific factors when studying childbearing intentions: planning for the second child significantly differs among the development regions, representing the cultural and socio-economic divisions of the Romanian territory
Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges
Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and
busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these
events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In
this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and
interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model
(RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective
socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss
different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential
feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or
trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology
missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable
predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding
effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns.
One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is
that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination
problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely
long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a
theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating
decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models
(that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several
minor improvements along reviewers' comment
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