No abstract

The Rhode Island Department of Health has developed simple and convenient health risk appraisal (HRA) systems for adults, high-school students and college students. Using HRA data collected on 11,652 high-school students, this paper examines the discriminatory power of two mental health questions as predictors of high risk, unhealthy or dangerous behavior. Both questions, when examined separately, show that students who respond that "life is never worth living" and who report that "they never have emotional support available" take proportionally more and greater risks than their fellow students who have happier outlooks and long-term emotional support. By combining responses from both questions, a typology was developed that might identify a more vulnerable, higher risk-taking subgroup; that is, students who felt life was not worth living and who also had no available emotional support. Further refinement of this approach could produce a useful predictive tool to identify students who are at serious risk for premature disability and death and who could benefit from early therapeutic help.

{This study of the content of field instruction at one U.S. school of social work is focused on utilization of methods, selection of targets for change and exposure to social problem areas. Findings indicated that students used a range of methods in all placements. There was an underlying order to the range of methods and targets chosen and considerable agreement among field instructors on this range. Findings are discussed in relation to education for social work practice.]

Two models for the scaling of paired comparison data are compared to the Thurstone case III model. One model is based upon parameter estimates derived from the normal approximation of the binomial distribution, and the other from the beta density function defined over the unit interval. Procedures are given for estimating the parameters for each model, and arguments are presented in favor of a skewed characteristic distribution function in cases where the scale includes extreme stimuli.Two indices of goodness of fit are presented for each of five data sets. The results generally illustrate the inability of the Thurstone case III model to adequately account for the data when the scale includes one or more extreme stimuli. The beta model performed well for all five data sets but fit best under just those conditions where the Thurstone model performed poorly. The binomial approximation performed adequately on three of the five data sets and would seem to be a simpler alternative estimation procedure to the Thurstone procedures when the normality assumption is tenable.EDUCATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT 1976, 36, 657-670. IN recent years, several attempts have been made to revise and/or replace the earlier Thurstone models for the scaling of paired comparison judgments. Notable among these competing models are those proposed by Restle (1961 ), Luce (1959), andBradley andTerry (1952). Like the Thurstone model, each of these newer models posits the existence of an underlying real value scale and a corresponding distriat University of Manitoba Libraries on June 22, 2015 epm.sagepub.com Downloaded from

No abstract