The findings suggest a need to encourage regular screening through effective communication from a health care provider. Intervention messages should be designed to increase the pros of mammography, decrease the cons, and highlight these differentially according to the woman's stage of adoption.

Abstract Both research and practice of value-added models (VAM) have been growing in recent years due to the widespread effort to quantify teacher effectiveness. The existing VAM literature has not yet tested the sensitivity of value-added estimates to the rules that define which students...

This article devises a Bayesian multivariate formulation for analysis of ordinal data that records teacher classroom performance along multiple dimensions to assess aspects characterizing good instruction. Study designs for scoring teachers seek to measure instructional performance over multiple...

We consider the challenges and implications of controlling for school contextual bias when modeling teacher preparation program effects. Because teachers are not randomly distributed across schools, failing to account for contextual factors in achievement models could bias preparation program...

We consider situations in which externally observable characteristics allow experts to quickly categorize individual households as likely or unlikely to contain a member of a rare target population. This classification can form the basis of disproportionate stratified sampling such that...

In this study we reconsider the relationship between heavy and persistent marijuana use and high school dropout status using a unique prospective panel study of over 4500 7th grade students from South Dakota who are followed up through high school. Propensity score weighting is used to adjust...

In this paper we consider the challenges and implications of controlling for school contextual bias when modeling teacher preparation program effects. Because teachers from any one preparation program are hired in more than one school and teachers are not randomly distributed across schools,...

An important class of applications of measurement error or constrained factor analytic models consists of comparing models for several populations. In such cases it is appropriate to make explicit statistical tests of model similarity across groups and to constrain some model parameters to be...

Newspaper endorsements played an important and measurable role in determining the outcome of the 1964 Illinois at-large election for state representatives. In this election, it was possible to vote for 177 candidates. To help the electorate cope with this major voting task, newspapers throughout...