Mind the parent-adolescent gap: A comparison of parents’ and adolescents’ assessments of their relationship and discussions about sex

Purpose: To compare parent and child reports on their relationship and communication about sex; quantify agreement; and find characteristics associated with higher agreement.Methods: Data is baseline data from an evaluation of Talking Parents, Healthy Teens, a multi-session worksite-based parenting program. Participants are 569 parents of 6-10th grades who responded to an advertisement posted in their workplace, and their 6-10th grade children (n=683): 683 parent-child dyads. Self-administered survey data were collected in Southern California from 2002-2004. We compare parent and child responses to 68 items about their relationships and communication about sex, and computed polychoric correlation (PCC), an agreement measure that corrects for possible parent-child differences in response threshholds, across dyads and across items. Factors associated with higher agreement were found through bivariate comparison of PCC; linear regression on intra-dyad PCC; and linear regression on raw bias.Results: After adjusting for possible parent-child differences in response threshholds, PCC for items were low, with median 0.34 (inter-quartile range (IQR) (0.22, 0.41)). Agreement was higher for sexual discussion topics (median 0.41 (IQR (0.37, 0.46))) than other items (Wilcoxon p<0.001); in general, agreement was higher for factual than emotionally negative or hypothetical items. PCC for dyads was very high, with median 0.87 (IQR (0.84, 0.91)), but left-skewed (skewness = -3.1). Factors associated with greater parent-child agreement include younger child age, better parenting skills, parent married or living as married, and parent recollection of good communication with their own parents. Agreement was not associated with socioeconomic factors.Conclusions: Survey-response discordance appears not to be solely attributable to response bias. Items about concrete events yield better agreement than hypothetical items. Response discordance may be partially attributable to different parent and child perceptions of their relationship because less discordance is evidence among parents with good parenting skills or who recall good communication with their own parents.

The Sounding Waters. Performing World Harmony at Aquisgranum

This paper explores the issue of performative spaces in the medieval Latin Church, examining the mindsets of the time and the ways practitioners adopted the Platonic notion of world harmony. We then look at the Palatine Chapel of Aachen (Latin Aquisgranum) in the light of the Plato’s doctrine. At the heart of this analysis will be the cosmological drama at the creation of the world, described by Ambrose as a chorus of the constitutive elements. It is from this image that the proto-model of the Christian Church as ‘moving waters’ was derived, a vision shared by both the Eastern and the Western world. To this day, the Palatine chapel of Aquisgranum conveys the appearance of the Ambrosian vision of the primordial waters, with its renewed marble revetments imitating the cosmic waters. The church is designed according to propria dispositione, i. e. modularity. Augustine’s concept of modularity and his psychology of sound, space, movement, and time will be explored in the hypothetical inquiry into the dramatization of space at Aachen. Here, we find that the Chapel has two choreographies (one physical, one incorporeal) which unfold in the space like-stage set up as a synthesis of the arts shaped according to numbers. Relevant concepts to our topic will emerge in the analysis, such as concord, consonance and agreement, measure and movement – metaphors of the idea of a ‘dance’ that exceeds the character of a mere performance.

Using the Data Agreement Criterion to Rank Experts’ Beliefs

Experts’ beliefs embody a present state of knowledge. It is desirable to take this knowledge into account when making decisions. However, ranking experts based on the merit of their beliefs is a difficult task. In this paper, we show how experts can be ranked based on their knowledge and their level of (un)certainty. By letting experts specify their knowledge in the form of a probability distribution, we can assess how accurately they can predict new data, and how appropriate their level of (un)certainty is. The expert’s specified probability distribution can be seen as a prior in a Bayesian statistical setting. We evaluate these priors by extending an existing prior-data (dis)agreement measure, the Data Agreement Criterion, and compare this approach to using Bayes factors to assess prior specification. We compare experts with each other and the data to evaluate their appropriateness. Using this method, new research questions can be asked and answered, for instance: Which expert predicts the new data best? Is there agreement between my experts and the data? Which experts’ representation is more valid or useful? Can we reach convergence between expert judgement and data? We provided an empirical example ranking (regional) directors of a large financial institution based on their predictions of turnover.

Sequential rank agreement methods for comparison of ranked lists

Summary The comparison of alternative rankings of a set of items is a general and common task in applied statistics. Predictor variables are ranked according to magnitude of association with an outcome, prediction models rank subjects according to the personalized risk of an event, and genetic studies rank genes according to their difference in gene expression levels. We propose a sequential rank agreement measure to quantify the rank agreement among two or more ordered lists. This measure has an intuitive interpretation, it can be applied to any number of lists even if some are partially incomplete, and it provides information about the agreement along the lists. The sequential rank agreement can be evaluated analytically or be compared graphically to a permutation based reference set in order to identify changes in the list agreements. The usefulness of this measure is illustrated using gene rankings, and using data from two Danish ovarian cancer studies where we assess the within and between agreement of different statistical classification methods.

The Agreement Measure γcat a Complement to γ Focused on Categorization of a Continuum

Agreement on unitizing, where several annotators freely put units of various sizes and categories on a continuum, is difficult to assess because of the simultaneaous discrepancies in positioning and categorizing. The recent agreement measure γ offers an overall solution that simultaneously takes into account positions and categories. In this article, I propose the additional coefficient γ cat, which complements γ by assessing the agreement on categorization of a continuum, putting aside positional discrepancies. When applied to pure categorization (with predefined units), γ cat behaves the same way as the famous dedicated Krippendorff's α, even with missing values, which proves its consistency. A variation of γ cat is also proposed that provides an in-depth assessment of categorizing for each individual category. The entire family of γ coefficients is implemented in free software.

The Unified and Holistic Method Gamma (γ) for Inter-Annotator Agreement Measure and Alignment

Agreement measures have been widely used in computational linguistics for more than 15 years to check the reliability of annotation processes. Although considerable effort has been made concerning categorization, fewer studies address unitizing, and when both paradigms are combined even fewer methods are available and discussed. The aim of this article is threefold. First, we advocate that to deal with unitizing, alignment and agreement measures should be considered as a unified process, because a relevant measure should rely on an alignment of the units from different annotators, and this alignment should be computed according to the principles of the measure. Second, we propose the new versatile measure γ, which fulfills this requirement and copes with both paradigms, and we introduce its implementation. Third, we show that this new method performs as well as, or even better than, other more specialized methods devoted to categorization or segmentation, while combining the two paradigms at the same time.