Jerald R. Herting

NEGLECTED CONSIDERATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF AGREEMENT AMONG JOURNAL REFEREES

Studies of representative samples of submissions to scientific journals show statistically significant associations between referees recommendations. These associations are moderately large given the multidimensional and unstable character of scientists evaluations of papers, and composites of referees recommendations can significantly aid editors in selecting manuscripts for publication, especially when there is great variability in the quality of submissions and acceptance rates are low. Assessments of the value of peer-review procedures in journal manuscript evaluation should take into account features of the entire scholarly communications system present in a field.

A new approach to referees' assessments of manuscripts

Abstract Studies of referees assessments of manuscripts submitted to scientific journals assume that a “merit” or “publishability” dimension underlies referees assessments. To measure the level of agreement between referees recommendations, researchers have used coefficients that require the assignment of arbitrary scores to recommendation categories (“accept”, ”revise and resubmit”, “reject”, etc.) or to distances between categories. Using data on referee evaluations of manuscripts submitted to five journals, we show how an extension of recently developed methods for analyzing crosstabulations with ordered categories allows researchers (1) to test the assumption that a single dimension underlies referees assessments and (2) to derive scale values for the recommendation categories. For four of the five journals, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that a latent publishability dimension underlies referees assessments. The results also show that the greatest distance between adjacent recommendation categories is between the lowest and second lowest categories, suggesting that recommendations that a paper be rejected are more reliable than more favorable recommendations. We show how these results can be used in attempts to measure the level of agreement between referees assessments for a given scientific journal. Our results also point to analytic difficulties that confront researchers who wish to compare levels of referee agreement exhibited by different journals.

Prevention Research Program: Reconnecting At-Risk Youth

This research program focuses on some of societys most profound problems: adolescent drug involvement, school failure, and suicide behaviors. The program goals address several interdisciplinary research challenges: (a) testing theory-driven preventive interventions focusing on the multifaceted etiology of adolescent drug involvement and suicide potential; (b) targeting potential school dropouts from a distinctly underserved high-risk population; and (c) integrating preventive interventions into school-based programs that utilize a multidisciplinary team of clinicians and researchers. Three sets of studies are described; they illustrate how ethnographic, experimental, and causal modeling designs and methods were intricately woven in successive theory construction and testing steps. Ethnographic and etiologic studies revealed a profile of vulnerabilities in personal, peer, family, and school contexts. Instrumentation studies led to reliable and valid process and outcome measures of key constructs. Tests of the preventive intervention demonstrated its efficacy for decreasing school deviance, drug involvement, and suicide potential among high-risk youth.

The drug involvement scale for adolescents (DISA).

This article specifically addressed the need for a multidimensional approach to measuring adolescents drug involvement. The Drug Involvement Scale for Adolescents (DISA) was theoretically specified and its measurement properties were tested using Confirmatory Factor Analyses and traditional procedures with 705 high-risk and typical high school students. Five first-order dimensions, Drug Access, Alcohol Use, Other Drug Use, Drug Use Control Problems and Adverse Drug Use Consequences, and a hierarchical model of Drug Involvement demonstrated a good fit between model and data. Further, the DISA demonstrated good internal consistency (α = .91); correlated as expected with known correlates of adolescent drug use; discriminated drug involvement between high-risk and typical high school students; and predicted later drug involvement and known drug-related consequences among adolescents. The results suggest the DISA should be useful for capturing a multidimensional view of adolescent drug involvement in both etiologic and prevention studies. A major advantage of the DISA is its brevity: twentytwo indicators constructed from twenty-nine items.

Drug involvement among potential dropouts and "typical" youth.

Drug involvement, conceptualized as drug use frequency, drug access, drug use control, and adverse use consequences, is described and compared among two randomly selected groups of students aged fourteen to nineteen years: 203 low-risk typical high-school students and 160 youths at high-risk of school problems and dropout. High-risk youth, compared to low-risk youth and national statistics, endorsed a much greater breadth and depth of drug use, greater access to drugs, less drug use control, and greater adverse consequences due to use. A secondary analysis showed low-risk users (experimenters) were similar to high-risk youth in their access to drugs and eroding drug use control, but showed low frequencies of drug use and negligible adverse use consequences. Measuring and exploring these four facets of drug involvement provided a robust picture of the adolescents drug milieu and revealed differences in patterns of drug involvement that would not have been evident by looking purely at drug use frequency. Implications for prevention programming are suggested.

Measuring Change and Continuity in Parity Distributions

Procedures are developed to allocate the change in mean fertility to the change in specific parities or groups of parities. One procedure uses the proportion at each parity and another uses parity progression ratios. Both are based on the delta method for approximating change in a function of several variables. Drawing on an analogy to survival in a life table, the relational logit model is applied to parity progression. This method allows several parity distributions to be synthesized and to have differences summarized with two parameters. The three procedures are applied to successive cohorts of white U.S. women who completed their childbearing between 1920 and 1980.

Book Reviews : E. Grebenik, C. Hohn and R. Mackensen (editors), Later Phases of the Family Cycle: Demographic Aspects. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, ix + 249 pages

the religious year. There were, of course, challenges to be faced, such as hard times, poverty, illness, old age, and the ultimate challenge to be faced in any society-death. These challenges are treated at length (pp. 45-186). One gets a good view of how medieval men and women in Islamicate Jewish society reacted to adversity from their words since in this section, as everywhere throughout the book, Goitein intersperses his own observations with extensive quotations from personal letters and other documents, as for example deathbed wills and declarations. The Geniza documents show that the people who wrote them had a highly refined awareness of personality, both of others and their own. According to Goitein, this preoccupation with the character of individuals was due to &dquo;the intense competition in social and communal life, requiring constant rubbing shoulders with (real or imaginary) friends and enemies&dquo; (p. 189). In the section on personality (pp. 187-323), one gets a detailed conspectus of attitudes toward ideal personality traits, rank and

Book Reviews : Ronald R. Rindfuss, S. Philip Morgan, and Gray Swicegood, First Births in America: Changes in the Timing of Parenthood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, xi + 291 pages,

The strength of More Than A Game is to be found in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which represent engaging and well-written treatments of how Eastern European governments control their athletes and their athletic systems in remarkably rigid ways. However, this attribute is more than overshadowed by a series of shortcomings elsewhere in the book. For example, Vinokur begins by commenting that &dquo;In researching this hitherto lightly regarded topic, I encountered a number of problems that limited the scope of the work&dquo; (p. xiii). Two such &dquo;problems&dquo; are noted as language barriers and the relative lack of concrete statistical data in this area. These are issues I can