The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors. A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader: how we attribute 'mental illness' to someone's behavior why we call some forms of suffering 'mental' but not others what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of 'mental illness' why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse 'mental health' how we can rethink the 'hearing of voices' more ecologically how self-identity has evolved historically how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads. Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new 'post-internal' psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.

This volume presents a collection of articles selected from Teaching of Psychology, sponsored by APA Division 2. It contains the collective experience of teachers who have successfully dealt with students' statistics anxiety, resistance to conducting literature reviews, and related problems. For those who teach statistics or research methods courses to undergraduate or graduate students in psychology, education, and the social sciences, this book provides many innovative strategies for teaching a variety of methodological concepts and procedures in statistics and research methods courses.

In this volume, academics and researchers across disciplines including education, psychology and health studies come together to discuss personal, political and professional narratives of struggle, resilience and hope. Contributors draw from a rich body of auto/biographical research to examine the role of narrative and how it can be constructed to compose a life story, considering the roles of significant others, inspirational, educational and fictional characters, and those in myth and legend. The book discusses how personal narrative, often neglected in social and psychological enquiry, can be a valuable resource across a range of settings. Reference is made to the evolving role of narrative in education and health care, medicine and psychotherapy. This includes how particular narratives are hardwired into culture in ways that stifle personal and social understanding. Rather than providing a 'how to' guide, the book illustrates the range and power of narrative, including poetry, to re-awaken senses of self and agency in extremis. Each chapter draws on specific research, describing the context, explaining the methodology, and illuminating important findings. Discussing implications for research and practice, this book will be key reading for postgraduate and doctoral students in auto/biographical and narrative studies, and across a range of disciplines, including education, health and social care, politics, counselling and psychotherapy. It will be of interest to academics teaching research methods, and those developing biographical and auto/biographical narrative research.

Compliance with federal equal employment opportunity regulations, including civil rights laws and affirmative action requirements, requires collection and analysis of data on disparities in employment outcomes, often referred to as adverse impact. While most human resources (HR) practitioners are familiar with basic adverse impact analysis, the courts and regulatory agencies are increasingly relying on more sophisticated methods to assess disparities. Employment data are often complicated, and can include a broad array of employment actions (e.g., selection, pay, promotion, termination), as well as data that span multiple protected groups, settings, and points in time. In the era of "big data," the HR analyst often has access to larger and more complex data sets relevant to employment disparities. Consequently, an informed HR practitioner needs a richer understanding of the issues and methods for conducting disparity analyses. This book brings together the diverse literature on disparity analysis, spanning work from statistics, industrial/organizational psychology, human resource management, labor economics, and law, to provide a comprehensive and integrated summary of current best practices in the field. Throughout, the description of methods is grounded in the legal context and current trends in employment litigation and the practices of federal regulatory agencies. The book provides guidance on all phases of disparity analysis, including: How to structure diverse and complex employment data for disparity analysis How to conduct both basic and advanced statistical analyses on employment outcomes related to employee selection, promotion, compensation, termination, and other employment outcomes How to interpret results in terms of both practical and statistical significance Common practical challenges and pitfalls in disparity analysis and strategies to deal with these issues

Compliance with federal equal employment opportunity regulations, including civil rights laws and affirmative action requirements, requires collection and analysis of data on disparities in employment outcomes, often referred to as adverse impact. While most human resources (HR) practitioners are familiar with basic adverse impact analysis, the courts and regulatory agencies are increasingly relying on more sophisticated methods to assess disparities. Employment data are often complicated, and can include a broad array of employment actions (e.g., selection, pay, promotion, termination), as well as data that span multiple protected groups, settings, and points in time. In the era of "big data," the HR analyst often has access to larger and more complex data sets relevant to employment disparities. Consequently, an informed HR practitioner needs a richer understanding of the issues and methods for conducting disparity analyses. This book brings together the diverse literature on disparity analysis, spanning work from statistics, industrial/organizational psychology, human resource management, labor economics, and law, to provide a comprehensive and integrated summary of current best practices in the field. Throughout, the description of methods is grounded in the legal context and current trends in employment litigation and the practices of federal regulatory agencies. The book provides guidance on all phases of disparity analysis, including: How to structure diverse and complex employment data for disparity analysis How to conduct both basic and advanced statistical analyses on employment outcomes related to employee selection, promotion, compensation, termination, and other employment outcomes How to interpret results in terms of both practical and statistical significance Common practical challenges and pitfalls in disparity analysis and strategies to deal with these issues

This short book introduces the main ideas of statistical inference in a way that is both user friendly and mathematically sound. Particular emphasis is placed on the common foundation of many models used in practice. In addition, the book focuses on the formulation of appropriate statistical models to study problems in business, economics, and the social sciences, as well as on how to interpret the results from statistical analyses. The book will be useful to students who are interested in rigorous applications of statistics to problems in business, economics and the social sciences, as well as students who have studied statistics in the past, but need a more solid grounding in statistical techniques to further their careers. Jacco Thijssen is professor of finance at the University of York, UK. He holds a PhD in mathematical economics from Tilburg University, Netherlands. His main research interests are in applications of optimal stopping theory, stochastic calculus, and game theory to problems in economics and finance. Professor Thijssen has earned several awards for his statistics teaching.

Human behavior is fascinating so it's no surprise that psychologists and neuroscientists spend their lives designing rigorous experiments to understand it. MATLAB is one of the most widely used pieces of software for designing and running behavioral experiments, and it opens up a world of quick and flexible experiment programming. This book offers a step-by-step guide to using MATLAB with Psychtoolbox to create customisable experiments. Its pocket size and simple language allow you to get straight to the point and help you to learn fast in order to complete your work in great time. In nine simple steps, it guides you all the way from setting parameters for your experiment to analysing the output. Gone are the daunting days of working through hundreds of irrelevant and complicated documents, as in this handy book, Erman Misirlisoy coaxes you in the right direction with his friendly and encouraging tricks and tips. If you want to learn how to develop your own experiments to collect and analyse behavioral data, then this book is a must-read. Whether you are a student in experimental psychology, a researcher in cognitive neuroscience, or simply someone who wants to run behavioral tasks on your friends for fun, this book will offer you the skills to succeed.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The rising reliance on testing in American education and for licensure and certification has been accompanied by an escalation in cheating on tests at all levels. Edited by two of the foremost experts on the subject, the Handbook of Quantitative Methods for Detecting Cheating on Tests offers a comprehensive compendium of increasingly sophisticated data forensics used to investigate whether or not cheating has occurred. Written for practitioners, testing professionals, and scholars in testing, measurement, and assessment, this volume builds on the claim that statistical evidence often requires less of an inferential leap to conclude that cheating has taken place than do other, more common sources of evidence. This handbook is organized into sections that roughly correspond to the kinds of threats to fair testing represented by different forms of cheating. In Section I, the editors outline the fundamentals and significance of cheating, and they introduce the common datasets to which chapter authors' cheating detection methods were applied. Contributors describe, in Section II, methods for identifying cheating in terms of improbable similarity in test responses, preknowledge and compromised test content, and test tampering. Chapters in Section III concentrate on policy and practical implications of using quantitative detection methods. Synthesis across methodological chapters as well as an overall summary, conclusions, and next steps for the field are the key aspects of the final section.

This training book is designed to help professionals enhance their knowledge of community quality-of-life indicators, and to develop viable community projects. Chapter 1 describes the theoretical concepts that guide the formulation of community indicator projects. Chapter 2 creates a sample community indicator project as a template of the entire process. Chapter 3 describes the planning process: how to identify sponsors, secure funding, develop an organizational structure, select a quality-of-life model, select indicators, and so on. Chapter 4 focuses on data collection. Finally, Chapter 5 describes efforts related to dissemination and promotion of community indicators projects. Written by a stalwart in the field of quality-of-life research, this book provides the tools of sound community project planning for quality-of-life researchers, social workers, social marketers, community research organizations, and policy-makers.

Psychological tests provide reliable and objective standards by which individuals can be evaluated in education and employment. Therefore accurate judgements must depend on the reliability and quality of the tests themselves. Originally published in 1986, this handbook by an internationally acknowledged expert provided an introductory and comprehensive treatment of the business of constructing good tests. Paul Kline shows how to construct a test and then to check that it is working well. Covering most kinds of tests, including computer presented tests of the time, Rasch scaling and tailored testing, this title offers: a clear introduction to this complex field; a glossary of specialist terms; an explanation of the objective of reliability; step-by-step guidance through the statistical procedures; a description of the techniques used in constructing and standardizing tests; guidelines with examples for writing the test items; computer programs for many of the techniques. Although the computer testing will inevitably have moved on, students on courses in occupational, educational and clinical psychology, as well as in psychological testing itself, would still find this a valuable source of information, guidance and clear explanation.

This volume contains a collection of essays and discussions which serve as an introduction and guide to current research in the area of drawing inferences from self-selected samples. This topic is of direct interest to a professional audience of survey researchers, pollsters, market researchers, policymakers, statisticians, demographers, economists, and sociologists. The essays themselves and their associated critical discussions are clear and careful; the contributors are among the foremost experts in the field.

There have been many important changes in the participation of women and men in American society over the past quarter-century. Tests play a role in those changes by providing evidence of the diverse achievement and proficiency of women and men. They aid the learning process and reflect inequalities in opportunity to learn and participate. In addition, they provide useful information in considering what alternatives in education and work make most sense for individuals and influence views about groups of students, educational programs, and a wide range of issues. For all of these reasons, it is important that tests assess fairly and reflect accurately the ways young people are and are not achieving as well as desired. The test performance of women and men is a research topic of historical interest and has received much attention in recent years. Because of this increased interest, there is a great deal of new research and data available. The purpose of the study presented in this volume was to review this new information with two objectives in mind: *to clarify patterns of gender difference and similarity in test performance and related achievements, and *to see what implications those findings might have for fair assessment and, as a corollary, examine the assessment process as a possible source of gender differences. This study is interested in tests used in education to assess developed knowledge and skill. In order to gain a broader view of gender similarity and difference, the contributors looked at other types of measures and other characteristics of young women and men. Their hope is to contribute to a firmer basis for insuring fairness in tests--an objective which is particularly important as the field moves increasingly to new forms of assessment in which there is less experience.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Narratives of Recovery from Mental Illness presents research that challenges the prevailing view that recovery from 'mental illness' must take place within the boundaries of traditional mental health services. While Watts and Higgins accept that medical treatment may be a vital start to some people's recovery, they argue that mental health problems can also be resolved through everyday social interactions, and through peer and community support. Using a narrative approach, this book presents detailed recovery stories of 26 people who received various diagnoses of 'mental illness' and were involved in a mutual help group known as 'GROW'. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of each story, chapters offer new understandings of the journey into mental distress and a progressive entrapment through a combination of events, feelings, thoughts and relationships. The book also discusses the process of ongoing personal liberation and healing which assists recovery, and suggests that friendship, social involvement, compassion, and nurturing processes of change all play key factors in improved mental well-being. This book provides an alternative way of looking at 'mental illness' and demonstrates many unexplored avenues and paths to recovery that need to be considered. As such, it will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, nursing, social work and occupational therapy, as well as to service providers, policymakers and peer support organisations. The narratives of recovery within the book should also be a source of hope to people struggling with 'mental illness' and emotional distress

Offering a deep look into the moral uncertainty in the contemporary social sciences and American society, this book explores an in-depth solution. This solution, as articulated by Pitirim A. Sorokin in the 20th century, is the theory of Integralism; a perspective dating back to Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Sorokin initially applied Integralism by locating and analyzing three dominant super socio-cultural systems over 2500 years of Graeco-Roman and Western history. Each super system was unified by a central philosophical principle based either on materialism (the senses), or the rational, or the supersensory/super-rational. A super system declines when it reaches the limits of its potential to achieve its true reality and value, to be replaced by another super system. Sorokin described a trendless rotation of the three super socio-cultural systems. The current dominant super socio-cultural system in the West is a materialist version emphasizing science and technology with little thought given to supersensory/super-rational reality. Sorokin asserted contemporary materialist culture was in a state of collapse due to the breakup of its moral values. As a consequence he saw a struggle for power occurring between egoistic individuals and groups often resulting in revolutions, wars and inter-human strife. In response to the one sided materialist view of reality the goal of Integralism is to unify all three forms of reality into an integral culture that harmoniously balances materialist and supersensory/super-rational orientations. A solution to the contemporary moral confusion, Sorokin argued, can be found in the application of supra-conscious intuition that would enable a human to know what is eternal in the ordinary and reach the transcendent; an experience not accessible to the senses or the rational intellect alone. The supra-conscious is the source for reaching the supreme moral value; creative unselfish altruism which can be shared by all cultures to produce peace and harmony in the world.

This text focuses on the experimental methods and the associated terminology encountered in the research literature of psychology. Initially, the content is kept simple, so as not to distract from the information on research technique and philosophy. Interesting psychological questions from well researched areas are then examined in detail, permitting a fuller discussion of the problems encountered in specific paradigms. It is in this fashion that the book offers both methods and content. Unique features of this text include: * a detailed discussion of the process of theorizing, coupled with a close examination of psychological constructs, offers the reader an opportunity to see how psychologists think about, develop, and modify their theories, and the part played by research in changing explanations of behavior. * Although it is common for psychologists to be self-conscious in their reasoning, it is uncommon to see an analysis of the logic that they use to draw conclusions. Presenting material that is rarely verbalized but readily acknowledged by experienced researchers, the text contains an overt analysis of the logic of drawing conclusions from research. * Instructors are given a choice among 15 chapters to focus on or combine to suit the course's concentration. For example, instructors have the option of focusing on experimental psychology or a broad-based course including material on research methods in experimental, social, clinical, and applied psychology. * Courses in experimental psychology or research methods are required for every psychology major. Statistical understanding is vital for this curriculum, and this text contains a comprehensive chapter on statistics making it ideal for courses that combine statistics and experimental methods. Other important coverage includes: * an all-inclusive summary of the material found in an introductory statistics class. Although courses in research methods and experimental psychology usually have a statistics prerequisite, the students rarely remember the material when entering the research course. This text provides the instructor with the option of simply assigning the statistics information as a review, rather than repeating the lectures. If the course requirements are such as to necessitate a joint statistics and research methods course -- with the instructor lecturing on both topics -- this text could serve as the single text for the course. A helpful discussion -- accompanied by a valuable table -- demonstrates how to choose an appropriate statistic. All necessary formulas and other familiar statistical procedures -- illustrating computational steps -- are also featured. * a detailed discussion of how to develop tests for use in research. Aside from the value of this information for any researcher, it can be particularly helpful to students who are required to develop original experiments. * an elaborate discussion of methodological issues in outcome research, using smoking cessation and weight reduction programs as examples. Test bank disks for Experimental Methods in Psychology, -- free to adopters -- consist of an average of six short-answer, 11 fill-in-the-blank, and 11 multiple-choice questions for each chapter. The files are in both ASCII and Word-for-Windows formats.

Practical Research with Children is designed to help the reader understand techniques for research with children, based on real world experience. The book describes a wide range of research methods, focusing equally on quantitative and qualitative approaches, and considers how different methods can be integrated. It highlights the benefits and challenges of each method and gives emphasis to best practice, with expert guidance on how to avoid potential pitfalls in order to obtain valuable insights into how children develop. The volume includes fifteen chapters arranged over three sections. Each chapter explores a particular method, or combination of methods, and discusses both theoretical and practical issues, using a diversity of domains, including different ages, cultures, populations and settings. Uniquely, the book includes newer methods (such as eye tracking and digital technologies) alongside well-established behavioural methods which are used for research with children. With contributions from internationally renowned researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines, the book will be indispensable reading for a wide audience, including for students in psychology, education and nursing undertaking research projects with children, and also for anyone looking to understand the research behind current theories in child development.

This book covers statistical consequences of breaches of research integrity such as fabrication and falsification of data, and researcher glitches summarized as questionable research practices. It is unique in that it discusses how unwarranted data manipulation harms research results and that questionable research practices are often caused by researchers' inadequate mastery of the statistical methods and procedures they use for their data analysis. The author's solution to prevent problems concerning the trustworthiness of research results, no matter how they originated, is to publish data in publicly available repositories and encourage researchers not trained as statisticians not to overestimate their statistical skills and resort to professional support from statisticians or methodologists. The author discusses some of his experiences concerning mutual trust, fear of repercussions, and the bystander effect as conditions limiting revelation of colleagues' possible integrity breaches. He explains why people are unable to mimic real data and why data fabrication using statistical models stills falls short of credibility. Confirmatory and exploratory research and the usefulness of preregistration, and the counter-intuitive nature of statistics are discussed. The author questions the usefulness of statistical advice concerning frequentist hypothesis testing, Bayes-factor use, alternative statistics education, and reduction of situational disturbances like performance pressure, as stand-alone means to reduce questionable research practices when researchers lack experience with statistics.

Presenting the proceedings of a conference held at Syracuse University in honor of S.S. Stevens, a pioneer in the scaling of sensory magnitudes and the originator of the method of magnitude estimation, this volume brings together the work of 20 authorities on the procedures of ratio scaling. These experts--psychophysicists, physiologists, and theoreticians--offer their views on whether or not psychological magnitudes can be measured and whether the judgments of psychological magnitudes constitute the basis for the construction of a ratio scale. Also discussed is the question of whether any single method could stand out as a potential standard technique for measuring psychological magnitudes.

The Trouble with Twin Studies questions popular genetic explanations of human behavioral differences based upon the existing body of twin research. Psychologist Jay Joseph outlines the fallacies of twin studies in the context of the ongoing decades-long failure to discover genes for human behavioral differences, including IQ, personality, and the major psychiatric disorders. This volume critically examines twin research, with a special emphasis on reared-apart twin studies, and incorporates new and updated perspectives, analyses, arguments, and evidence.