Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Time-Varying Extraneous Variables Effects In Single-Case Studies, Ke Cheng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effect of time-varying extraneous variables has been studied in other statistical analyses such as using Kaplan–Meier or Cox regression analysis in survival analyses. Nonetheless, the effect of modeling versus not modeling individual specific time varying extraneous variables has not been explored in multiple-baseline single case designs through Monte Carlo simulation studies. Therefore, in my dissertation, I used simulation methods to explore for a variety of conditions (varying in the number of participants, number of observations per participant, type of extraneous variable effect, size of the true intervention effect) the impact of extraneous variables on bias and standard error of …

Beyond Statistical Significance: A Holistic View Of What Makes A Research Finding "Important", Jane E. Miller

Numeracy

Students often believe that statistical significance is the only determinant of whether a quantitative result is “important.” In this paper, I review traditional null hypothesis statistical testing to identify what questions inferential statistics can and cannot answer, including statistical significance, effect size and direction, causality, generalizability, and changeability of the independent variable. I illustrate these issues with examples from an empirical study of the association between how much time teenagers spent playing video games and time spent reading. I describe how study design and context determine each of those aspects of “importance,” and close by summarizing how to provide a …

Author’S Reflections On Making Sense Of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning For Social Research, Jane E. Miller

Numeracy

Miller, Jane E. 2021. Making Sense of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning for Social Research. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications) 608 pp. ISBN 978-1544355597.

This article introduces and provides an excerpt from Making Sense of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning for Social Research, published by Sage. The book explains and illustrates how making sense of numbers involves integrating concepts and skills from mathematics, statistics, study design, and communications, along with information about the specific topic and context under study. It teaches how to avoid making common errors of logic, calculation, and interpretation by introducing a systematic approach and a healthy dose of skepticism …

An Introduction To Calling Bullshit: Learning To Think Outside The Black Box, Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

Numeracy

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin D. West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. (New York: Random House) 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509202.

While statistical methods receive greater attention, the art of critically evaluating information in everyday life more commonly depends on thinking outside the black box of the algorithm. In this piece we introduce readers to our book and associated online teaching materials—for readers who want to more capably call “bullshit” or to teach their students to do the same.

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

Development And Validation Of A Scale To Measure Songwriting Self-Efficacy (Sses) With Secondary Music Students, Patrick K. Cooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social cognitive theory was developed to explain how individuals learn, in part, by witnessing the behavior of others. Self-efficacy is a construct within social cognitive theory which indicates the beliefs that an individual can be successful at a task under specific situational demands. The sources of self-efficacy include self-evaluating past experiences to predict future success, comparing our abilities to those around us, the verbal and social feedback we get from others, and the physiological feelings we experience when engaged in or thinking about the task. Measures of self-efficacy have been shown to be accurate predictors of successful learning outcomes, achievement, …

The General Psychopathology Factor (P) From Adolescence To Adulthood: Disentangling The Developmental Trajectories Of P Using A Multi-Method Approach, Alexandria M. Choate

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Considerable attention is directed towards studying co-occurring psychopathology through the lens of a general factor (p-factor). However, the developmental trajectories and stability of the p-factor have yet to be fully understood. Study 1 first examined the explanatory power of dynamic mutualism theory — an alternative framework positing the p-factor to be a product of lower-level symptom interactions rather than the inherent cause of them. Predictions of dynamic mutualism were tested using three distinct statistical approaches including: longitudinal bifactor models, random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), and network models. Next, given prior suggestions that borderline personality disorder (BPD) could be a marker …

Multimodal Data Fusion And Attack Detection In Recommender Systems, Mehmet Aktukmak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The commercial platforms that use recommender systems can collect relevant information to produce useful recommendations to the platform users. However, these sources usually contain missing values, imbalanced and heterogeneous data, and noisy observations. Such characteristics render the process of exploiting the information nontrivial, as one should carefully address them during the data fusion process. In addition to the degenerative characteristics, some entries can be fake, i.e., they can be the outcomes of malicious intents to manipulate the system. These entries should be eliminated before incorporation to any recommendation task. Detecting such malicious attacks quickly and accurately and then mitigating them …

Exploration Of Factors Associated With Perceptions Of Community Safety Among Youth In Hillsborough County, Florida: A Convergent Parallel Mixed-Methods Approach, Yingwei Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Youth perceived safety is not only linked to crime and violence in a neighborhood but is also associated with health risk behaviors and certain neighborhood characteristics. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to measure the co-occurring effects of individual and community risk factors by conducting a secondary data analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) and to explore reasons for youth feeling safe/unsafe in their community using photovoice methodology.

Methods: Syndemic theory/model served as the theoretical framework to guide this mixed-methods study with a convergent parallel design. The quantitative strand (first manuscript) utilized an existing dataset collected from middle …

The Author’S Reflections On No B.S. (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe In Black People Enough Not To Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People, Ivory A. Toldson

Numeracy

Toldson, Ivory. A. 2019. No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People (Boston, MA: Brill-Sense) 194 pp. ISBN 978-9004397026.

This essay provides an introduction to No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People. In the essay, the author discusses how cynical views about the educational potential of Black children motivated him to write a book that challenges negative statistics. The essay also outlines the harmful …

Effects Of Quantitative Literacy On Healthcare Decision-Making: An Aural Context, Robert G. Root, Sonia Bhala

Numeracy

We propose a relationship between sensory modality, numerical formatting, and performance on a survey simulating healthcare decision-making. We examine the current literature on aural health literacy, and specifically aural literacy coupled with health numeracy. We then create a survey instrument called the Bhala test for this purpose and demonstrate that it is moderately internally consistent and provides results that correlate with the NUMi assessment, a widely accepted measure of health numeracy. The quantitative information provided in the Bhala test has two treatments, percentage and natural frequency formats, in an effort to determine which format is easier for subjects to use …

Probabilistic Modeling Of Democracy, Corruption, Hemophilia A And Prediabetes Data, A. K. M. Raquibul Bashar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parametric analysis of any real-world data is the most powerful tool to characterize the probabilistic behavior in social, economic, medical, epidemiological, and other areas of study. In the present study, we identify the theoretical Probability Distribution Function(PDF) for Democracy Index Scores (DIS) from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) database and estimate the maximum likelihood estimates of the theoretical PDFS. We also identify the individual PDFs for each of the clusters, Full Democracy, Flawed Democracy, Hybrid Regime, and Authoritarian Regime defined by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

A statistical model is a convenient instrument to predict the future value of any …

Taking Multiple Regression Analysis To Task: A Review Of Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking, By Richard Nisbett (2015), Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Richard Nisbett. 2015. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.(New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). 336 pp. ISBN: 9780374536244

Nisbett, a psychologist, may not achieve his stated goal of teaching readers to “effortlessly” extend their common sense when it comes to quantitative analysis applied to everyday issues, but his critique of multiple regression analysis (MRA) in the middle chapters of Mindware is worth attention from, and contemplation by, the QL/QR and Numeracy community. While in at least one other source, Nisbett’s critique has been called a “crusade” against MRA, what he really advocates is that it not be used as …

Using Meta-Analysis To Assess Affective Outcomes In A Multi-Course Qr Module Intervention, James Friedrich, Kelley D. Strawn

Numeracy

When quantitative reasoning(QR) interventions share a common hypothesis or goal, a promising approach for evaluation involves integrating separate analyses through the use of meta-analysis. This paper reports an assessment of a module-based QR intervention distributed across 20 courses at a single institution. Topics and participating courses were diverse, including arts & humanities, quantitative behavioral sciences, and natural sciences & mathematics groupings, but all addressed the shared affective goals of reducing student QR self-doubt and increasing appreciation for QR value and utility. With a local framework to guide module development, we assess these outcomes using reliable self-report measures in a pre-post …

Statistical Learning Of Biomedical Non-Stationary Signals And Quality Of Life Modeling, Mahdi Goudarzi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Statistical learning is a set of tools for modeling and understanding complex datasets. It is a recently developed area in statistics and blends with parallel developments in computer science and, in particular, machine learning.

The classification of biomedical non-stationary signals such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) is always a challenging problem due to their complexity. The low spatial resolution on the scalp, curse of dimensionality, poor signal-to-noise ratio are disadvantages of working with biomedical signals. EEG signals are unstructured data which needs preprocessing steps to extract informative features which are measurable and predictive. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, EEG …

Numeracy And Social Justice: A Wide, Deep, And Longstanding Intersection, Kira Hamman, Victor Piercey, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

We discuss the connection between the numeracy and social justice movements both in historical context and in its modern incarnation. The intersection between numeracy and social justice encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and quantitative topics, but within that variety there are important commonalities. We examine the importance of sound quantitative measures for understanding social issues and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in this work. Particular reference is made to the papers in the first part of the Numeracy special collection on social justice, which appear in this issue.

Calculus Of The Impossible: Review Of The Improbability Principle (2014) By David Hand And The Logic Of Miracles (2018) By Lásló Mérő, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

David J. Hand. 2014. The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0374175344.

Lásló Mérő. 2018. The Logic of Miracles: Making Sense of Rare, Really Rare, and Impossibly Rare Events (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0300224153.

David Hand and Lásló Mérő both grapple with the occurrence of seemingly impossible events in these two popular science books. In this comparative review, I describe the two books, and explain why I prefer Hand's treatment of the impossible.

Models As Weapons: Review Of Weapons Of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy By Cathy O’Neil (2016), Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York, NY: Crown) 272 pp. ISBN 978-0553418811.

Accessible to a wide readership, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy provides a lucid yet alarming account of the extensive reach of mathematical models in influencing all of our lives. With a particular eye towards social justice, O’Neil not only warns modelers to be cognizant of the effects of their work on real people—especially vulnerable groups who have less power to fight back—but also encourages laypersons to take initiative …

Improving Service Level Of Free-Floating Bike Sharing Systems, Aritra Pal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bike Sharing is a sustainable mode of urban mobility, not only for regular commuters but also for casual users and tourists. Free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) is an innovative bike sharing model, which saves on start-up cost, prevents bike theft, and offers significant opportunities for smart management by tracking bikes in real-time with built-in GPS. Efficient management of a FFBS requires: 1) analyzing its mobility patterns and spatio-temporal imbalance of supply and demand of bikes, 2) developing strategies to mitigate such imbalances, and 3) understanding the causes of a bike getting damaged and developing strategies to minimize them. All of these …

The Effects Of Age And Gender On Pedestrian Traffic Injuries: A Random Parameters And Latent Class Analysis, Tatok Raharjo Raharjo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pedestrians are vulnerable road users because they do not have any protection while they walk. They are unlike cyclists and motorcyclists who often have at least helmet protection and sometimes additional body protection (in the case of motorcyclists with body-armored jackets and pants). In the US, pedestrian fatalities are increasing and becoming an ever larger proportion of overall roadway fatalities (NHTSA, 2016), thus underscoring the need to study factors that influence pedestrian-injury severity and potentially develop appropriate countermeasures. One of the critical elements in the study of pedestrian-injury severities is to understand how injuries vary across age and gender ‒ …

Infographics As Eye Candy: Review Of World War Ii In Numbers: An Infographic Guide To The Conflict, Its Conduct, And Its Casualties By Peter Doyle (2013), Joel Best

Numeracy

Peter Doyle. World War II in Numbers: An Infographic Guide to the Conflict, Its Conduct, and Its Casualties, illustrated by Lindsey Johns (Buffalo NY: Firefly Books, 2013). 224 pp. ISBN: 177085195X.

Doyle’s book contains dozens of graphs of statistical data dealing with World War II. Many of these graphs are visually striking. However, they often violate fundamental graphing principles, in that they distort quantitative relationships, use unidentified scales, and often make it difficult to compare quantities. Graphic software makes it easy to create imaginative images, but these can fail to communicate the very information that is the graph’s purpose.

Review Of Developing Quantitative Literacy Skills In History And The Social Sciences: A Web-Based Common Core Approach By Kathleen W. Craver, Victor J. Ricchezza, H L. Vacher

Numeracy

Kathleen W. Craver. Developing Quantitative Literacy Skills in History and Social Sciences: A Web-Based Common Core Standards Approach (Lantham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2014). 191 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4758-1050-9 (cloth); ISBN …-1051-6 (pbk); ISBN…-1052-3 (electronic).

This book could be a breakthrough for teachers in the trenches who are interested in or need to know about quantitative literacy (QL). It is a resource providing 85 topical pieces, averaging 1.5 pages, in which a featured Web site is presented, described, and accompanied by 2-4 critical-thinking questions purposefully drawing on data from the Web site. The featured Web sites range from …

Location And Capacity Modeling Of Network Interchanges, Aldo D. Fabregas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network design decisions, especially those pertaining to urban infrastructure, are made by a central authority or network leader, and taking into consideration the network users or followers. These network decision problems are formulated as non-linear bi-level programming problems. In this work, a continuous network design problem (CNDP) and discrete network design problem (DNDP) bi-level optimization programs are proposed and solved in the context of transportation planning. The solution strategy involved reformulation and linearization as a single-level program by introducing the optimality conditions of the lower level problem into the upper level problem. For the CNDP, an alternative linearization algorithm (modified …

The Positive Illusory Bias And Adhd Symptoms: A New Measurement Approach, Sarah A. Fefer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions of academic and social competence among adolescents with a continuum of inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. Past literature suggests that children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) display self-perceptions that are overly positive compared to external indicators of competence, a phenomenon that is referred to as the positive illusory bias (PIB; Owens, Goldfine, Evangelista, Hoza, & Kaiser, 2007). The PIB is well supported among children with ADHD, and recent research suggests that the PIB persists into adolescence. To date, research on the PIB has relied on difference scores (i.e., an indicator of competence is …

Bayesian Estimation Of Panel Data Fractional Response Models With Endogeneity: An Application To Standardized Test Rates, Lawrence Kessler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I propose Bayesian estimation of a nonlinear panel data model with a fractional dependent variable (bounded between 0 and 1). Specifically, I estimate a panel data fractional probit model which takes into account the bounded nature of the fractional response variable. I outline estimation under the assumption of strict exogeneity as well as when allowing for potential endogeneity. Furthermore, I illustrate how transitioning from the strictly exogenous case to the case of endogeneity only requires slight adjustments. For comparative purposes I also estimate linear specifications of these models and show how quantities of interest such as marginal …

Measuring Technical Efficiency Of The Japanese Professional Football (Soccer) League (J1 And J2), Dan Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is the first paper to measure the efficiency of the Japan Professional Football League clubs both the first and the second divisions. In Chapter 1, a non-parametric method Data Envelopment Development (DEA) is used and the data covers six seasons from 2005 to 2010. The input variables are payroll, cost besides payroll, and total assets. The output variables are attendance, revenue, and points awarded. I use different output combinations in order to check the sensitivity of the efficiency of the clubs after the original composition. This is also the first research to include more than one division of the …

Modeling Endogenous Treatment Eects With Heterogeneity: A Bayesian Nonparametric Approach, Xuequn Hu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the estimation of endogenous treatment effects in the presence of heterogeneous responses. A Bayesian Nonparametric approach is taken to model the heterogeneity in treatment effects. Specifically, I adopt the Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) model to capture the heterogeneity and show that DPM often outperforms Finite Mixture Model (FMM) in providing more flexible function forms and thus better model fit. Rather than fixing the number of components in a mixture model, DPM allows the data and prior knowledge to determine the number of components in the data, thus providing an automatic mechanism for model selection.

Two DPM models …

The Role Of Rater Motivation In Personnel Selection Validation Studies, Dan Ispas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Personnel selection validation studies are routinely conducted in contemporary organizations for selecting and placing employees. Although numerous studies have been conducted with the goal of identifying new predictors, less research was focused on the criterion side. In the current paper, across three studies and five samples, I examined the role played by rater motivation in validation studies. I proposed that rater motivation would impact criterion-related validity of various predictors, the reliability, and the variance of performance ratings. In Study 1, these hypotheses were tested in two samples with varied operationalizations of predictors and of rater motivation. In Study 2, I …