In the early years of the Social Security program, public support for old-age pensions was high but knowledge and understanding about benefits and taxes were low. Understanding has greatly increased, even though the program has expanded, and support for Social Security has remained high. Data from the surveys and polls examined in this article indicate that support for Social Security was stron...

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is undoubtedly the most common inferential technique used to justify claims in the social sciences. However, even staunch defenders of NHST agree that its outcomes are often misinterpreted. Confidence intervals (CIs) have frequently been proposed as a more useful alternative to NHST, and their use is strongly encouraged in the APA Manual. Nevertheless...

The solution of most commercial rule-based expert systems consists of two components –the conclusion(s) reached and a calculated measure of belief in the conclusion(s), expressed as a single number. In non-deterministic domains, this number is often the most critical factor in analyzing the solution. However, as this paper reviews, a robust calculus for this number has yet to be documented, ind...

BACKGROUND Paranoia may build directly upon negative thoughts about the self. There have been few direct experimental tests of this hypothesis. AIMS The aim of the study was to test the immediate effects of manipulating self-esteem in individuals vulnerable to paranoia. METHOD A two condition cross-over experimental test was conducted. The participants were 26 males reporting paranoid ideat...

Consider an unknown distribution with a symmetric unimodal density and the induced location-scale family. We study confidence intervals for the location parameter based on Student’s t-statistic, and we conjecture that the uniform distribution is least favorable in that it leads to confidence intervals that are largest given their coverage probability, provided the nominal confidence level is la...

Although traditional social network analysis operates on the assumption that the observed relationships represents the true social network, this assumption is dangerous, especially in noisy environments. This assumption is especially problematic given the lack of robustness with respect to missing or erroneous information that has been found for node-level network indices such as degree central...

abstract: background and objectives: social health as third dimension of health, along with physical and mental health, has drawn more attention in recent years among policy makers and health system managers. no other study, to our knowledge, has documented measuring individual-level social health in iran. in response to this need, our study tends to assess iranians self-rated social health thr...