Determining what influences mood is important for theories of emotion and research on subjective well-being. We consider three sets of factors: activities in which people are engaged; individual differences; and incidental variables that capture when mood is measured, e.g., time-of-day. These...

The importance of emotion in risk perception has been well documented in field and experimental studies. However, little is known about its role in everyday life. On thirty occasions over ten consecutive working days, ninety-four participants were prompted at random - via mobile telephones - to...

The experiential sampling method (ESM) was used to collect data from 74 part-time students who described and assessed the risks involved in their current activities when interrupted at random moments by text messages. The major categories of perceived risk were short-term in nature and involved...

Income, expenditure and similar variables in monetary units tend to have distributions similar to log-normal. Description of such variables after logarithmic transformation by the normal model is often not accurate enough, especially for multivariate data. Deviations of their empirical...

A method for medical screening is adapted to differential item functioning (DIF). Its essential elements are explicit declarations of the level of DIF that is acceptable and of the loss function that quantifies the consequences of the two kinds of inappropriate classification of an item. Instead...

Summary A class of composite estimators of small area quantities that exploit spatial (distance-related) similarity is derived. It is based on a distribution-free model for the areas, but the estimators are aimed to have optimal design-based properties. Composition is applied also to estimate...

What makes one school more effective than another - particularly which inputs and management practices most efficiently enhance student achievement - has become the center of lively debate in the literature. Which method to use to compare school effects particularly concerns analysts. The model...