We contrast, for the first time, two existing network methods for eliciting the causal understand... more We contrast, for the first time, two existing network methods for eliciting the causal understanding of a social psychological concept. Our exemplar was loneliness. In the diagram method individuals draw paths in a diagram to indicate their perceptions of how different presented causal factors interconnect both amongst themselves and to the target factor of loneliness. They then rate the causal
This study assessed the dimensionality of the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R), a measure of h... more This study assessed the dimensionality of the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R), a measure of how strong a person's interest is in systems, using two statistical approaches: Rasch modeling and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Participants included N = 675 with an autism spectrum condition (ASC), N = 1369 family members of people with ASC, and N = 2014 typical controls. Data were applied to the Rasch model (Rating Scale) using WINSTEPS. The data fit the Rasch model quite well lending support to the idea that systemizing could be seen as unidimensional. Reliability estimates were .99 for items and .92 for persons. A CFA parceling approach confirmed that a unidimensional model fit the data. There was, however, differential functioning by sex in some of these items. An abbreviated 44-item version of the scale, consisting of items without differential item functioning by sex was developed. This shorter scale also was tested from a Rasch perspective and confirmed through CFA. All...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2014
In this paper, we critically review the conceptualization and implementation of psychological mea... more In this paper, we critically review the conceptualization and implementation of psychological measures of life history strategy associated with Differential K theory. The High K Strategy Scale (HKSS: Giosan, 2006) was distributed to a large British sample (n = 809) with the aim of assessing its factor structure and construct validity in relation to theoretically relevant life history variables: age of puberty, age of first sexual encounter, and number of sexual partners. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the HKSS in its current form did not show an adequate statistical fit to the data. Modifications to improve fit indicated four correlated factors (personal capital, environmental stability, environmental security, and social capital). Later puberty in women was positively associated with measures of the environment and personal capital. Among men, contrary to Differential K predictions but in line with female mate preferences, earlier sexual debut and more ...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2014
Life-history theory (LHT) has drawn upon the concept of "time preference" as a psycholo... more Life-history theory (LHT) has drawn upon the concept of "time preference" as a psychological mechanism for the development of fast and slow strategies. However, the conceptual and empirical nature of this mechanism is ill-defined. This study compared four traits commonly used as measures of "time preference" (impulsivity, sensation seeking, future orientation and delay discounting) and evaluated their relationship to variables associated with life-history strategies (aggressive behavior and mating attitudes, biological sex, pubertal timing, victimization, and exposure to aggression in the environment). Results indicated that only sensation seeking consistently showed all the predicted associations, although impulsivity, future orientation, and delay discounting showed some significant associations. A unidimensional higher-order factor of "time preference" did not adequately fit the data and lacked structural invariance across age and sex, suggesting tha...
Beliefs regarding the cause of low back pain differ between individual sufferers and health care ... more Beliefs regarding the cause of low back pain differ between individual sufferers and health care professionals. One consequence of this is the potential acquisition of maladaptive attitudes and behaviour in relation to pain, and increases in the utilisation of primary care services (Health Expect.3(3) (2000) 161). Methods that have been used to elicit the causal interpretation of social phenomena are varied yet they are unable to categorically demonstrate the different weightings or levels of importance that individuals may assign. The diagram method of network analysis allows individuals to spontaneously consider pathways they believe to be critical to a target event and to determine the strength of those pathways. Seventy-one completed diagrams indicating the causes that sufferers perceived to be related to low back pain were analysed. The mean number of direct causal paths was 5.61 (SD=3.25) and mean number of indirect causal links was 1.16 (SD=2.34). A significant correlation be...
The increasing share of arrests for violent offences by young women in Britain has prompted the m... more The increasing share of arrests for violent offences by young women in Britain has prompted the media to brand such offenders as “ladettes.” Their behavior is argued to result from their adoption of “laddish” attitudes that in turn is derived from new, aggressive images of women in the media. These images explicitly portray female aggression as an instrumental act in
Abstract The Internet is now being used as a mechanism for the delivery of social support on a gl... more Abstract The Internet is now being used as a mechanism for the delivery of social support on a global scale, chiefly through the formation of self-help groups. Most of the research that has been undertaken on these groups has focussed on Usenet and the use of newsgroups for social support. This paper examines the use of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC)'room', by a self-help group composed of problem drinkers. The group had an international membership and advocated the use of social support, rather than intervention by professional services, ...
In the last 20 years meta-analysis has become increasingly important as a research tool both in t... more In the last 20 years meta-analysis has become increasingly important as a research tool both in the health and social sciences. Many medical interventions have been implemented based on the results of meta-analysis of randomized control trials. Meta-analysis has also ...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2012
There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various wo... more There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various word processing tasks. It has, however, been suggested that syllable effects may be caused by orthographic redundancy. In particular, it has been proposed that the presence of bigram troughs at syllable boundaries cause what are seen as syllable effects. We investigated the bigram trough hypothesis as an explanation of the number of syllables effect for lexical decision in five-letter words and nonwords from the British Lexicon Project. The number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times along with word frequency and orthographic similarity. The presence of a bigram trough did not. For nonwords, the number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times only for nonwords with relatively long decision times. The presence of a bigram trough made no contribution. The evidence presented suggests that the bigram trough cannot be an explanation of the syllable number effect in lexical decision. A comparison of the results from words and nonwords is interpreted as providing some support for dual-route models of reading.
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 1998
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency http://jrc.sagepub.com/ Female-Female Criminal Assau... more Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency http://jrc.sagepub.com/ Female-Female Criminal Assault: An Evolutionary Perspective ANNE CAMPBELL, STEVEN MUNCER and DANIEL BIBEL Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 1998 35: 413 DOI: 10.1177/ ...
The use of medical experts in rating the content of health-related sites on the Internet has flou... more The use of medical experts in rating the content of health-related sites on the Internet has flourished in recent years. In this research, it has been common practice to use a single medical expert to rate the content of the Web sites. In many cases, the expert has rated the Internet health information as poor, and even potentially dangerous. However, one problem with this approach is that there is no guarantee that other medical experts will rate the sites in a similar manner. The aim was to assess the reliability of medical experts' judgments of threads in an Internet newsgroup related to a common disease. A secondary aim was to show the limitations of commonly-used statistics for measuring reliability (eg, kappa). The participants in this study were 5 medical doctors, who worked in a specialist unit dedicated to the treatment of the disease. They each rated the information contained in newsgroup threads using a 6-point scale designed by the experts themselves. Their ratings were analyzed for reliability using a number of statistics: Cohen's kappa, gamma, Kendall's W, and Cronbach's alpha. Reliability was absent for ratings of questions, and low for ratings of responses. The various measures of reliability used gave conflicting results. No measure produced high reliability. The medical experts showed a low agreement when rating the postings from the newsgroup. Hence, it is important to test inter-rater reliability in research assessing the accuracy and quality of health-related information on the Internet. A discussion of the different measures of agreement that could be used reveals that the choice of statistic can be problematic. It is therefore important to consider the assumptions underlying a measure of reliability before using it. Often, more than one measure will be needed for "triangulation" purposes.
2. Abstract The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of me... more 2. Abstract The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of medical and welfare issues and ostensibly devoted to the mutual social support of participating members, has raised the potential for the development of new forms of 'virtual'health care. This article critically analyses the use by people with diabetes of one such Usenet group. It seeks to establish, first, the extent to which such a site provides some demonstrable measure of social support to its participants. This is approached by ...
We contrast, for the first time, two existing network methods for eliciting the causal understand... more We contrast, for the first time, two existing network methods for eliciting the causal understanding of a social psychological concept. Our exemplar was loneliness. In the diagram method individuals draw paths in a diagram to indicate their perceptions of how different presented causal factors interconnect both amongst themselves and to the target factor of loneliness. They then rate the causal
This study assessed the dimensionality of the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R), a measure of h... more This study assessed the dimensionality of the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R), a measure of how strong a person's interest is in systems, using two statistical approaches: Rasch modeling and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Participants included N = 675 with an autism spectrum condition (ASC), N = 1369 family members of people with ASC, and N = 2014 typical controls. Data were applied to the Rasch model (Rating Scale) using WINSTEPS. The data fit the Rasch model quite well lending support to the idea that systemizing could be seen as unidimensional. Reliability estimates were .99 for items and .92 for persons. A CFA parceling approach confirmed that a unidimensional model fit the data. There was, however, differential functioning by sex in some of these items. An abbreviated 44-item version of the scale, consisting of items without differential item functioning by sex was developed. This shorter scale also was tested from a Rasch perspective and confirmed through CFA. All...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2014
In this paper, we critically review the conceptualization and implementation of psychological mea... more In this paper, we critically review the conceptualization and implementation of psychological measures of life history strategy associated with Differential K theory. The High K Strategy Scale (HKSS: Giosan, 2006) was distributed to a large British sample (n = 809) with the aim of assessing its factor structure and construct validity in relation to theoretically relevant life history variables: age of puberty, age of first sexual encounter, and number of sexual partners. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the HKSS in its current form did not show an adequate statistical fit to the data. Modifications to improve fit indicated four correlated factors (personal capital, environmental stability, environmental security, and social capital). Later puberty in women was positively associated with measures of the environment and personal capital. Among men, contrary to Differential K predictions but in line with female mate preferences, earlier sexual debut and more ...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2014
Life-history theory (LHT) has drawn upon the concept of "time preference" as a psycholo... more Life-history theory (LHT) has drawn upon the concept of "time preference" as a psychological mechanism for the development of fast and slow strategies. However, the conceptual and empirical nature of this mechanism is ill-defined. This study compared four traits commonly used as measures of "time preference" (impulsivity, sensation seeking, future orientation and delay discounting) and evaluated their relationship to variables associated with life-history strategies (aggressive behavior and mating attitudes, biological sex, pubertal timing, victimization, and exposure to aggression in the environment). Results indicated that only sensation seeking consistently showed all the predicted associations, although impulsivity, future orientation, and delay discounting showed some significant associations. A unidimensional higher-order factor of "time preference" did not adequately fit the data and lacked structural invariance across age and sex, suggesting tha...
Beliefs regarding the cause of low back pain differ between individual sufferers and health care ... more Beliefs regarding the cause of low back pain differ between individual sufferers and health care professionals. One consequence of this is the potential acquisition of maladaptive attitudes and behaviour in relation to pain, and increases in the utilisation of primary care services (Health Expect.3(3) (2000) 161). Methods that have been used to elicit the causal interpretation of social phenomena are varied yet they are unable to categorically demonstrate the different weightings or levels of importance that individuals may assign. The diagram method of network analysis allows individuals to spontaneously consider pathways they believe to be critical to a target event and to determine the strength of those pathways. Seventy-one completed diagrams indicating the causes that sufferers perceived to be related to low back pain were analysed. The mean number of direct causal paths was 5.61 (SD=3.25) and mean number of indirect causal links was 1.16 (SD=2.34). A significant correlation be...
The increasing share of arrests for violent offences by young women in Britain has prompted the m... more The increasing share of arrests for violent offences by young women in Britain has prompted the media to brand such offenders as “ladettes.” Their behavior is argued to result from their adoption of “laddish” attitudes that in turn is derived from new, aggressive images of women in the media. These images explicitly portray female aggression as an instrumental act in
Abstract The Internet is now being used as a mechanism for the delivery of social support on a gl... more Abstract The Internet is now being used as a mechanism for the delivery of social support on a global scale, chiefly through the formation of self-help groups. Most of the research that has been undertaken on these groups has focussed on Usenet and the use of newsgroups for social support. This paper examines the use of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC)'room', by a self-help group composed of problem drinkers. The group had an international membership and advocated the use of social support, rather than intervention by professional services, ...
In the last 20 years meta-analysis has become increasingly important as a research tool both in t... more In the last 20 years meta-analysis has become increasingly important as a research tool both in the health and social sciences. Many medical interventions have been implemented based on the results of meta-analysis of randomized control trials. Meta-analysis has also ...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2012
There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various wo... more There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various word processing tasks. It has, however, been suggested that syllable effects may be caused by orthographic redundancy. In particular, it has been proposed that the presence of bigram troughs at syllable boundaries cause what are seen as syllable effects. We investigated the bigram trough hypothesis as an explanation of the number of syllables effect for lexical decision in five-letter words and nonwords from the British Lexicon Project. The number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times along with word frequency and orthographic similarity. The presence of a bigram trough did not. For nonwords, the number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times only for nonwords with relatively long decision times. The presence of a bigram trough made no contribution. The evidence presented suggests that the bigram trough cannot be an explanation of the syllable number effect in lexical decision. A comparison of the results from words and nonwords is interpreted as providing some support for dual-route models of reading.
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 1998
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency http://jrc.sagepub.com/ Female-Female Criminal Assau... more Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency http://jrc.sagepub.com/ Female-Female Criminal Assault: An Evolutionary Perspective ANNE CAMPBELL, STEVEN MUNCER and DANIEL BIBEL Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 1998 35: 413 DOI: 10.1177/ ...
The use of medical experts in rating the content of health-related sites on the Internet has flou... more The use of medical experts in rating the content of health-related sites on the Internet has flourished in recent years. In this research, it has been common practice to use a single medical expert to rate the content of the Web sites. In many cases, the expert has rated the Internet health information as poor, and even potentially dangerous. However, one problem with this approach is that there is no guarantee that other medical experts will rate the sites in a similar manner. The aim was to assess the reliability of medical experts' judgments of threads in an Internet newsgroup related to a common disease. A secondary aim was to show the limitations of commonly-used statistics for measuring reliability (eg, kappa). The participants in this study were 5 medical doctors, who worked in a specialist unit dedicated to the treatment of the disease. They each rated the information contained in newsgroup threads using a 6-point scale designed by the experts themselves. Their ratings were analyzed for reliability using a number of statistics: Cohen's kappa, gamma, Kendall's W, and Cronbach's alpha. Reliability was absent for ratings of questions, and low for ratings of responses. The various measures of reliability used gave conflicting results. No measure produced high reliability. The medical experts showed a low agreement when rating the postings from the newsgroup. Hence, it is important to test inter-rater reliability in research assessing the accuracy and quality of health-related information on the Internet. A discussion of the different measures of agreement that could be used reveals that the choice of statistic can be problematic. It is therefore important to consider the assumptions underlying a measure of reliability before using it. Often, more than one measure will be needed for "triangulation" purposes.
2. Abstract The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of me... more 2. Abstract The advent of thousands of Usenet groups on the Internet, covering a vast range of medical and welfare issues and ostensibly devoted to the mutual social support of participating members, has raised the potential for the development of new forms of 'virtual'health care. This article critically analyses the use by people with diabetes of one such Usenet group. It seeks to establish, first, the extent to which such a site provides some demonstrable measure of social support to its participants. This is approached by ...
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