Ohio State University

About: Ohio State University is a education organization based out in Columbus, Ohio, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 102421 authors who have published 222715 publications receiving 8373403 citations. The organization is also known as: Ohio State & The Ohio State University.

Mediation Analysis in Social Psychology: Current Practices and New Recommendations

Abstract: A key aim of social psychology is to understand the psychological processes through which independent variables affect dependent variables in the social domain. This objective has given rise to statistical methods for mediation analysis. In mediation analysis, the significance of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables has been integral in theory testing, being used as a basis to determine (1) whether to proceed with analyses of mediation and (2) whether one or several proposed mediator(s) fully or partially accounts for an effect. Synthesizing past research and offering new arguments, we suggest that the collective evidence raises considerable concern that the focus on the significance between the independent and dependent variables, both before and after mediation tests, is unjustified and can impair theory development and testing. To expand theory involving social psychological processes, we argue that attention in mediation analysis should be shifted towards assessing the magnitude and significance of indirect effects.

Response strategies for coping with the cognitive demands of attitude measures in surveys

Abstract: This paper proposes that when optimally answering a survey question would require substantial cognitive effort, some repondents simply provide a satisfactory answer instead. This behaviour, called satisficing, can take the form of either (1) incomplete or biased information retrieval and/or information integration, or (2) no information retrieval or integration at all. Satisficing may lead respondents to employ a variety of response strategies, including choosing the first response alternative that seems to constitute a reasonable answer, agreeing with an assertion made by a question, endorsing the status quo instead of endorsing social change, failing to differentiate among a set of diverse objects in ratings, saying ‘don't know’ instead of reporting an opinion, and randomly choosing among the response alternatives offered. This paper specifies a wide range of factors that are likely to encourage satisficing, and reviews relevant evidence evaluating these speculations. Many useful directions for future research are suggested.

Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy

Abstract: We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the community, including support for domain-specific file formats such as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions. Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function (PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.

The baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey of sdss-iii

Abstract: The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg2 to measure BAO to redshifts z < 0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyα forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g < 22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15 < z < 3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyα forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance dA to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z = 0.3 and z = 0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyα forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate DA (z) and H –1(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z ~ 2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.