Systematically and quantitatively determining patterns in consumer flow is an important question in marketing research. Identifying these patterns can facilitate understanding of where and when consumers purchase products and services at physical retail shops. Collecting data on real consumers who shop at retail stores is one of the most challenging and expensive aspects of these studies. This ...

Disease surveillance makes use of information technology at almost every stage of the process, from data collection and collation, through to analysis and dissemination. Automated data collection systems enable near-real time analysis of incoming data. This context places a heavy burden on software used for space-time surveillance. In this paper, we review software programs capable of space-tim...

The validity of health information obtained through participants' reports of current medications (e.g., the brown bag method) is an important, but under-studied, area. In the current study, we examined the congruence of medication reports from a brown bag data collection with the pharmacy prescription records for 1430 participants (ages 23 to 97 years) of the seventh wave of the Seattle Longitu...

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0.8 and 3.0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the pro...

Survey research is sometimes regarded as an easy research approach. However, as with any other research approach and method, it is easy to conduct a survey of poor quality rather than one of high quality and real value. This paper provides a checklist of good practice in the conduct and reporting of survey research. Its purpose is to assist the novice researcher to produce survey work to a high...

Parts I through III of this series of articles gave an introduction to some of the issues requiring attention when performing clinical studies and summarizing the results statistically as well as clinically. Statistical methods have been described for the identification of statistically significant differences and associations between an experimental group and a control group or over the course...

Limitations in data collection have long been an obstacle in research on friendship networks. Most earlier studies use either a sample of ego-networks, or complete network data on a relatively small group (e.g., a single organization). The rise of online social networking services such as Friendster and Facebook, however, provides researchers with opportunities to study friendship networks on a...

Urban road congestions change both temporally and spatially. They are essentially caused by network bottlenecks. Therefore, understanding bottleneck dynamics is critical in the goal of reasonably allocating transportation resources. In general, a typical bottleneck experiences the stages of formation, propagation and dispersion. In order to understand the three stages of a bottle neck and how t...

Funding for data collection and analysis of these data has been supported by the 1 International Fund for Agricultural Development (TA Grant No. 301-IFPRI). We gratefully acknowledge this funding, but stress that ideas and opinions presented here are our responsibility and should, in no way, be attributed to IFAD.