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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Psychological methodology
Half a century after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Third
Reich, scholars from a range of fields continue to examine the
causes of Nazi Germany. An increasing number of young Americans are
attempting to understand the circumstances that led to the rise of
the Nazi party and the subsequent Holocaust, as well as the
implication such events may have for today as the world faces a
resurgence of neo-Nazism, ethnic warfare, and genocide.
Distribution-free statistical methods enable users to make statistical inferences with minimum assumptions about the population in question. They are widely used, especially in the areas of medical and psychological research.
During the past two or three decades, research in cognitive science
and psychology has yielded an improved understanding of the
fundamental psychological nature of knowledge and cognitive skills
that psychological testing attempts to measure. These theories have
reached sufficient maturity, making it reasonable to look upon them
to provide a sound theoretical foundation for assessment,
particulary for the content of assessments. This fact, combined
with much discontentedness over current testing practices, has
inspired efforts to bring testing and cognitive theory together to
create a new theoretical framework for psychological testing -- a
framework developed for diagnosing learners' differences rather
than for ranking learners based on their differences.
The systematic scientific investigation of human perception began over 130 years ago, yet relatively little is known about how we identify complex patterns. A major reason for this is that historically, most perceptual research focused on the more basic processes involved in the detection and discrimination of simple stimuli. This work progressed in a connectionist fashion, attempting to clarify fundamental mechanisms in depth before addressing the more complex problems of pattern recognition and classification. This extensive and impressive research effort built a firm basis from which to speculate about these issues. What seemed lacking, however, was an overall characterization of the recognition problem - a broad theoretical structure to direct future research in this area. Consequently, our primary objective in this volume, originally published in 1981, was not only to review existing contributions to our understanding of classification and recognition, but to project fruitful areas and directions for future research as well. The book covers four areas: complex visual patterns; complex auditory patterns; multi-dimensional perceptual spaces; theoretical pattern recognition.
Few applied disciplines are more sensitive to cross-cultural issues
than marketing and consumer psychology. The chapters prepared for
this volume reflect awareness of both similarities and differences
within and across cultures. They include analyses of methodological
issues, theoretical investigations of cultural and social values
and their implications for marketing specialists, studies of
gender- and sub-culture specific advertising, and investigations of
advertising efforts in several different international markets. The
scholars and advertising professionals who contributed these
chapters will have much to say to consumer psychologists and
marketing specialists alike.
Assessments by psychologists, educators, and other human-service professionals too often end with the client being reported in terms of scores, bell-shaped curves, traits, psychodynamic forces, or diagnostic labels. Individualizing Psychological Assessment uses these classification devices in ways that facilitate returning from them to the individual's life, both during the assessment session and in written reports. The book presents an approach and procedures through which a person's actual life becomes the subject matter of assessment. Thoroughly revised from the previous edition, the book presents a wide range of concrete examples and illustrative cases that will serve both students and practicing professionals alike in individualizing assessments.
This second edition presents the core fundamentals of the subject in 11 manageable chapters while maintaining the book's scientific integrity. The research methods students need to understand, interpret, and analyze social psychological research are emphasized throughout. The streamlined approach provides an economical textbook for students and a flexible format that allows instructors to cover the entire book in a single semester. A book specific Web site contains a free online study guide and a variety of teaching tools. An Instructor's Manual/Test Bank and a Computerized Test Bank are also available.
Do you want to spend less time studying but end up with better grades, and a deeper understanding of the subject? Studying psychology is a skill that can be learned. In this unique and practical 'how to' guide, Warren Davies offers some simple techniques that will enable students to retain information, organise their workload, and be more productive. By applying some simple and easy-to-make changes to your study habits, you will learn how to: Get more work done in less time Use memory techniques to help you breeze through exams Beat procrastination Develop a deep grasp of difficult topics Write excellent essays (including how to avoid the seven most common essay errors) Cut your study time in half Understand the 'results' section of research papers Write a dissertation to publishable standard. This book is written specifically with psychology undergraduate students in mind, and as such will enhance your learning and improve your grades with techniques that actually work.
The History of Educational Measurement collects essays on the most important topics in educational testing, measurement, and psychometrics. Authored by the field's top scholars, this book offers unique historical viewpoints, from origins to modern applications, of formal testing programs and mental measurement theories. Topics as varied as large-scale testing, validity, item-response theory, federal involvement, and notable assessment controversies complete a survey of the field's greatest challenges and most important achievements. Graduate students, researchers, industry professionals, and other stakeholders will find this volume relevant for years to come.
Bayesian statistical analyses have become increasingly common over the last two decades. The rapid increase in computing power that facilitated their implementation coincided with major changes in the research interests of, and data availability for, social scientists. Specifically, the last two decades have seen an increase in the availability of panel data sets, other hierarchically structured data sets including spatially organized data, along with interests in life course processes and the influence of context on individual behavior and outcomes. The Bayesian approach to statistics is well-suited for these types of data and research questions. Applied Bayesian Statistics is an introduction to these methods that is geared toward social scientists. Author Scott M. Lynch makes the material accessible by emphasizing application more than theory, explaining the math in a step-by-step fashion, and demonstrating the Bayesian approach in analyses of U.S. political trends drawing on data from the General Social Survey.
Linked from the days of their origins, psychology and advertising
developed as independent disciplines at almost the same time in the
late nineteenth century. Providing an important arena in which
psychologists have tested methods and theories, advertising has
been a stimulus for research and development in such diverse
specialties as learning and behavioral decision theory,
psychometrics, perception, and social and mathematical psychology.
Psychology, in turn, has contributed a wide assortment of tools,
theories, and techniques to the practice of advertising. These
contributions have found their place in virtually all areas of
advertising practice -- stimulating creativity, evaluating the
creative product, and informing the scheduling of media.
First published in 1993. This book is intended for managers and occupational psychologists involved in the selection and assessment of the workforce. It details the history and development of the use of biographical data for both recruitment and promotion of employees. Grounded in relevant research literature, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of biodata in different contexts. It also includes examples of applications and recommendations for use, as well as examples of questionnaires. Written by experts, it represents a wide-ranging review of the contemporary research in the field. This work will be of interest to students of business and psychology.
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.
George and Louise Spindler are widely regarded as significant founders of the field of educational anthropology. This book brings together their best, most seminal work from the last 50 years--a time frame representing the developmental epoch of the field--and binds them together with a master commentary by George Spindler. Previously scattered over a wide range of publications, the articles collected here allow for a unified view of the Spindlers' work and of the development of the field. The book opens with an insightful Foreword by Henry T. Trueba, a fascinating piece titled "A Life With Anthropology and Education: Interviews With George and Louise Spindler by Ray McDermott and Frederick Erickson," and George Spindler's "Previews" essay which gives the reader a grasp of the whole to which the parts of the book contribute. These pieces frame and contextualize the work that follows. In Part I, Character Defining, many of the major themes of this volume are first encountered; this section sets the stage for what follows. Part II, Comparisons, focuses on comparison, which the Spindlers view as essential to an anthropological approach. Part III, Ethnography in Action, is devoted to the explicit exposition of ethnographic methods (though actually every piece in the book is a demonstration of method). Part IV, American Culture, moves from a traditional representation of American Culture to a processual analysis of how the culture is transmitted in real situations, and finally to an interpretation of right-wing actions that seem to constitute a reactive movement; the implications for education are pursued. Part V, Cultural Therapy , explains what cultural therapy is and how it may be applied to teachers and students. The volume concludes with Part VI, Orientation, Susan Parman's overview of the works of the Spindlers that spans their whole career.
This book presents the reader with a set of diverse, carefully developed and clearly specified systems of transcription and coding, arising from contrasting theoretical perspectives, and presented as alternative choices, situated within the theoretical domain most natural to each. The perspectives represented include first and second language acquisition, interethnic and crosscultural interaction, information structure, and the study of discourse influences on linguistic expression. In the contributed chapters, the designers of these systems provide a distillation of collective experiences from the past quarter century, telling in their own words their perspectives on language processes, how these perspectives have shaped their choice of methodology in transcription and coding of natural language, and describing their systems in detail. Overview chapters by the editors then provide design principles and guidelines concerning issues pertinent to all systems, including such things as reliability, validity, ease of learning, computational tractability, and robustness against error. The final chapter is a compendium of existing computerized archives of language data and information sources together with details concerning data access and use.
Test fairness is a moral imperative for both the makers and the
users of tests. This book focuses on methods for detecting test
items that function differently for different groups of examinees
and on using this information to improve tests. Of interest to all
testing and measurement specialists, it examines modern techniques
used routinely to insure test fairness. Three of these relevant to
the book's contents are:
These two companion volumes provide a comprehensive review and
critical evaluation of the major DSM-III and DSM-III-R child
disorders. Their major goal is to provide diagnostic and assessment
guidelines that are based on scientific literature in specific
clinical domains. Each chapter contains a discussion of the
historical background of a particular diagnosis, definitional
issues, a critical but selective review of the literature
addressing the diagnosis in question, proposed changes in the
diagnostic criteria based on the available literature, and proposed
assessment models and methods based on the designated criteria.
Given the scientific bases for many of these discussions of
diagnostic criteria, these two volumes will serve professionals and
graduate students in a wide variety of fields: clinical child
psychology, child psychiatry, pediatrics, pediatric and school
psychology, special education, social work, and other child mental
health specialties.
The editors of this volume suggest that there are missing elements
in the conceptualization upon which standard test theory is based.
Those elements are models for just how people know what they know
and do what they can do, and the ways in which they increase these
capacities. Different models are useful for different purposes;
therefore, broader or alternative student models may be
appropriate. The chapters in this volume consider a variety of
directions in which standard test theory might be extended. Topics
covered include: the role of test theory in light of recent work in
cognitive and educational psychology, test design, student
modeling, test analysis, and the integration of assessment and
instruction.
"This is a great overview of the field of model-based clustering and classification by one of its leading developers. McNicholas provides a resource that I am certain will be used by researchers in statistics and related disciplines for quite some time. The discussion of mixtures with heavy tails and asymmetric distributions will place this text as the authoritative, modern reference in the mixture modeling literature." (Douglas Steinley, University of Missouri) Mixture Model-Based Classification is the first monograph devoted to mixture model-based approaches to clustering and classification. This is both a book for established researchers and newcomers to the field. A history of mixture models as a tool for classification is provided and Gaussian mixtures are considered extensively, including mixtures of factor analyzers and other approaches for high-dimensional data. Non-Gaussian mixtures are considered, from mixtures with components that parameterize skewness and/or concentration, right up to mixtures of multiple scaled distributions. Several other important topics are considered, including mixture approaches for clustering and classification of longitudinal data as well as discussion about how to define a cluster Paul D. McNicholas is the Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics at McMaster University, where he is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His research focuses on the use of mixture model-based approaches for classification, with particular attention to clustering applications, and he has published extensively within the field. He is an associate editor for several journals and has served as a guest editor for a number of special issues on mixture models.
Originally published in 1983 and written in the tradition of the British School of Psychology, Spearman, Burt, Eysenck, Cattell, this book from a well-known author was exceptional at the time in its attempt to wed quantification and psychological theory in the study of personality. The student is presented with a discussion of the different methods of measuring personality and the various findings which have been made. The results are then discussed in the light of psychological theories of personality and here the author stresses the need for a theory with a properly quantified bias. However, the emphasis on findings from measurement and not the measurement itself makes the book psychological, truly about personality and not simply another text on psychological measurement.
A friendly, straightforward guide that does not assume knowledge of programming, this book helps new R users hit the ground running. Eric L. Einspruch provides an overview of the software and shows how to download and install R, RStudio, and R packages. Featuring example code, screenshots, tips, learning exercises, and worked-through examples of statistical techniques, the book demonstrates the capabilities and nuances of these powerful free statistical analysis and data visualization tools. Fundamental aspects of data wrangling, analysis, visualization, and reporting are introduced, using both Base R and Tidyverse approaches. Einspruch emphasizes processes that support research reproducibility, such as use of comments to document R code and use of R Markdown capabilities. The book also helps readers navigate the vast array of R resources available to further develop their skills.
The traditional production measure of moral judgment has been the Moral Judgment Interview (MJI), which uses hypothetical moral dilemmas to elicit moral judgment. However, the MJI dilemmas have been criticized as artificial and may not be entirely appropriate for children, certain cultures, and practical moral situations. This unique volume utilizes and evaluates a new production measure of moral judgment, the Sociomoral Reflection Measure -- Short Form (SRM-SF), which substitutes brief stimulus materials and evaluative questions for the moral dilemma technique. The authors report that the SRM-SF exhibits an impressive degree of reliability and validity and is quicker to administer and score than other available measures. To illustrate these findings, this book offers the resources needed for the assessment of the Kohlbergian stage of moral judgment using the SRM-SF. These resources include: an up-to-date review of research and theory, a group-administrable questionnaire, an efficient scoring manual, and self-training exercises in assessment. Psychometrically sound and practical, the SRM-SF has the potential to become the leading moral judgment measure of the 90s. |
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