Scales of Observation

One of the particularities of applied anthropology is working on demand, and performing research on demand requires changing fields constantly. This diversity of fields has led to an awareness in applied anthropology that the focal point of observation varies from study to study, and that depending on the particular scope or decoupage, researchers do not see the same thing. This scales-of-observation method has four empirical principles: (a) What one observes at one scale vanishes at another scale. (b) The causes explaining actors’ behavior vary based on the scale of observation; they can stem from situational effects or meaning effects, or suggest statistical correlation. (c) Knowledge acquired at one scale is complementary and cumulative with that of other scales of observation. However, they cannot be fused into a single, global description. Indeed, although reality is continuous, observation between the “macro” and the “micro” is discontinuous. Discontinuity stems from the importance of the situational effects in anthropology and organizational sociology. These two approaches are most often centered on the interactions among actors operating under situational constraints. All generalizations are thus limited to scales pertaining to the same type of causality. (d) Part of the conflict among schools, disciplines, or professions regarding explanations for human behavior and changes within a community, an organization, a society, or an individual can most often be explained by different choices in the scale of observation. The scales-of-observation method is a mobile tool of knowledge founded on the anthropological practice of the cultural detour, in this case scientific cultures. It is an inductive epistemological theory on the variability of the explanatory causes of human behavior and falls under methodological relativism. Consequently, the scales-of-observation method is also a tool of negotiation among actors who are involved collectively in a project of social change, but with contradictory interests or objectives.

Situational effects of journalistic resources on gender imbalances in the coverage of Swiss news media: A longitudinal analysis from 2011 to 2019

Gender imbalances in news coverage have been traced back to overarching societal structures and the characteristics of media companies, newsrooms and journalists. However, studies have rarely considered if and how journalistic resources can act situationally as drivers of gender imbalances. We investigated how often and in which contexts women are represented in Swiss news media articles between 2011 and 2019 ( n = 77,427) by combining manual and automated content analysis on a large scale. We looked at representation in general and the dependence of topic and media type, in addition to the influence of two resource-related features of news content: the source and the format. The study showed clear gender imbalances, which were heavily dependent on the topics in the news coverage. We found that when journalists relied on original reporting instead of news agencies and used contextualizing formats women were more frequently mentioned in the news. Our results, therefore, suggest that resources can situationally determine the representation of women in the news.

Analyzing Stability and Change in Dyadic Attachment: The Multi-Rater Latent State-Trait Model With Autoregressive Effects

Previous research suggests that parental attachment is stable throughout emerging adulthood. However, the relationships between the mutual attachments in the dyads of emerging adults and their parents are still unclear. Our study examines the stability and change in dyadic attachment. We asked 574 emerging adults and 463 parents at four occasions over 1 year about their mutual attachments. We used a latent state-trait model with autoregressive effects to estimate the time consistency of the attachments. Attachment was very stable, and earlier measurement occasions could explain more than 60% of the reliable variance. Changes of attachment over time showed an accumulation of situational effects for emerging adults but not for their parents. We estimated the correlations of the mutual attachments over time using a novel multi-rater latent state-trait model with autoregressive effects. This model showed that the mutual attachments of parents and emerging adults were moderately to highly correlated. Our model allows to separate the stable attachment from the changing attachment. The correlations between the mutual attachments were higher for the stable elements of attachment than for the changing elements of attachment. Emerging adults and their parents share a stable mutual attachment, but they do not share the changes in their respective attachments.

Customer loyalty and value anticipation: does perceived competition matter?

PurposeDrawing on customer value theory and the demanding nature of today's customers, this paper examines the moderating effects of competition, as perceived by customers, on the nexus between customer value anticipation (CVA), satisfaction and loyalty.Design/methodology/approachUtilizing data from the Ghanaian banking sector, which has been going through some reforms that are changing the banking landscape, the study analyzes data from 587 customers. Respondents were drawn from a cluster of banks within an enclave with different types of customers and epitomize the competitive nature of Ghana's banking sector.FindingsCVA drives customer satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty among bank customers. However, between attitudinal and behavioral loyalty, customers will be more behaviorally loyal to banks that successfully anticipate their needs than they would be in attitude. The relationships between CVA and satisfaction and loyalty are such that the level of competition among sector players does not alter the effect; thus, when a bank is able to anticipate customer value, customers are going to stay loyal to such a bank irrespective of the competitive offers.Originality/valueAlthough the impact CVA has on satisfaction and loyalty is justified in the existing literature, extant research has not systematically examined the influence of external boundary and situational effects on the potency of anticipating customer value in detail. The current study shows the effect of competition on CVA and customer behavioral outcome. The study further concludes that irrespective of competition, banks that are perceived to be high on CVA will have their customers being loyal. This is very important in the development of bank marketing and product innovation strategies.

Psychological and situational effects on social distancing and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: not a question of real risk

Keeping a large interpersonal space (IPS) is one of the most important measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. The IPS is automatically modulated according to primary affiliation and defence needs aimed at protecting our physical and psychological well-being. Through a multicentric online survey (1293 respondents) in six Italian regions during the lockdown (April-May 2020), we investigated the psychological and situational factors that influenced the regulation of IPS and psychological well-being. The results showed that the IPS was modulated according to perceived rather than actual risk of COVID-19 infection. This perception was influenced by institutional communication and citizen satisfaction in local Healthcare Systems. Higher levels of anxiety, stress and feeling of insecurity, exacerbated by situational factors linked to the context of life, led to an increase in IPS at the expense of psychological well-being. Instead, the possibility to go out and seeing other people wearing a face-mask reduced the IPS. The findings provide useful insights into pandemic management to bring human behaviour in line with the recommendations of public health experts.

Mobile health applications and health management behaviors: A cost/benefits approach (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Rising criticisms about the effectiveness and risks associated with the growing use of mobile health, applications necessitate a critical perspective regarding the effectiveness of the link between use of mobile health applications, health attitudes and health behaviors. OBJECTIVE we introduce a “costs/benefits” perspective to examine how health situational effects including health crises, health changes and hospitalization affect the likelihood to adopt lifestyle and health management behaviors. METHODS A sample of 1495 US adults (PEW, 2012) and a set of multiple regression models RESULTS while the use of mobile health applications empowers users to reconsider health concerns, reach health decisions and seek further consultation yet, the existence of situational effects moderates the empowering effect of applications and decreases the likelihood of adopting health management behaviors CONCLUSIONS a costs/benefits perspective captures the push/pull factors associated with the effectiveness of mobile applications use in-home care in order to properly address the costs and benefits of mobile applications use and support home care services.

Disentangling trait, occasion-specific, and accumulated situational effects of psychological distress in adulthood: evidence from the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts

Background The trajectories of psychological distress differ between individuals, but these differences can be difficult to understand because the measures contain both consistent and situational features; however, in longitudinal studies these sources of information can be disentangled. In addition to occasion-specific features, interindividual differences can be decomposed into two sources of information: trait and carry-over effects between neighboring occasions that are not related to the trait (i.e. accumulated situational effects). Methods To disentangle these three sources of variance throughout adulthood, the consistency (trait and accumulated situational effects) and occasion specificity of nine indicators of psychological distress from the Malaise Inventory were examined in two birth cohorts, the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS58), and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). Results The scale was administered at ages 23, 33, 42, and 50 in NCDS58 (n = 7147), and at ages 26, 30, 34, and 42 in BCS70 (n = 6859). For each psychological symptom, more variance was consistent than occasion-specific. The majority of the consistency was due to trait variance as opposed to accumulated situational effects, indicating that an individual predisposed to be distressed at the beginning of the study remained more likely to be distressed over the whole period. Symptoms of rage were notably more consistent among males than females in both cohorts (78.1% and 81.3% variance explained by trait in NCDS58 and BCS70, respectively), and among females in the NCDS58 (69%). Conclusions Symptoms of psychological distress exhibited high stability throughout adulthood, especially among men, due mostly to interindividual trait differences.

Important Issues in Statistical Testing and Recommended Improvements in Accounting Research

A great deal of the accounting research published in recent years has involved statistical tests. Our paper proposes improvements to both the quality and execution of such research. We address the following limitations in current research that appear to us to be ignored or used inappropriately: (1) unaddressed situational effects resulting from model limitations and what has been referred to as “data carpentry,” (2) limitations and alternatives to winsorizing, (3) necessary improvements to relying on a study’s calculated “p-values” instead of on the economic or behavioral importance of the results, and (4) the information loss incurred by under-valuing what can and cannot be learned from replications.