Summary For decades, there has been a heated debate about whether or not nuclear power plants contribute to childhood cancer in their respective neighbourhoods, with statisticians testifying on both sides. The present paper points to some flaws in the pro-arguments, taking a recent study...

Models of finite mixtures of normal densities conditional on regressor variables are specified and estimated. The authors consider mixtures of multivariate normals where the expected value for each component depends on nonnormal regressor variables. The expected values and covariance matrices of...

This issue of Sociological Methods & Research contains four excellent illustrations of current methods for analyzing dichotomous data: dichotomous factor analysis (Muthén, 1989), latent trait analysis (Eaton et al., 1989), and grade of membership analysis (Woodbury and Manton, 1989). These...

Bielby (1986) argues that conventional practices for normalizing latent variable models can lead the applied researcher astray. He presents two examples to show how this may occur. In the first example, he considers the regression of income on education. In the second, he considers a panel model...

When using panel data important problems are often conveniently overlooked. These include model misspecification, asymptotic stability, unequally spaced panel waves, and the use of ordinal rather than metric data. While panel data may be useful to eliminate specification error, if the process...

For decades, there has been a heated debate about whether or not nuclear power plants contribute to childhood cancer in their respective neighbourhoods, with statisticians testifying on both sides. The present paper points to some flaws in the pro-arguments, taking a recent study prepared for...