Abstract
This issue of the BMS includes three research articles and three ongoing research notes, all in English. In the first research article, “A Semi-Empirical Determination of Perceived Liveability”, by Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad, Pascal Perez, Matthew Berryman and Rohan Wickramasuriya, a survey shows that individuals tend to shape their preferences according to six factors describing various aspects of living conditions: (1) home, (2) neighborhood, (3) transport, (4) entertainment, (5) services and (6) work. A linear mixed model is used to explore possible relationships between objective factors and perceived liveability.
The second research article, “Statrec - Performance, Validation and Preservability of a Static Risk Prediction Instrument”, by Nikolaj Tollenaar, B. S. J. Wartna, P. G. M. Van der Heijden and Stefan Bogaerts, updates this recidivism prediction instrument and evaluates its predictive performance over several dimensions – time, region and non-random subsamples – and compares it to the England and Wales’ OGRS-scales.
The third research article, “Multivariate Entropy Analysis of Network Data”, by Ove Frank and Termeh Shafie, uses data on the social relations among Renaissance Florentine families to show that with multivariate entropies it is possible to systematically check for tendencies that can be described as independencies or conditional independencies, or as dependencies allowing certain combinations of variables to predict other variables.
The first research note, “Is Verbal Interaction Coding a Reliable Pretesting Technique?”, by Marco Palmieri, shows that to diagnose the questions which make the interpretative problems more frequent in interviews, social researchers cannot be limited to only detecting and encoding verbal behaviors.
The second research note, “A Random-Effects Pattern-Mixture Model with Application to Comorbidity”, by Hui-Peng Liew, studies the contribution of potential non-ignorable non-response associated with attrition and wave-non-response in race/ethnicity disparities in health trajectories by using direct likelihood maximization and pattern mixture growth curve models and data from the 1992-2010 Health and Retirement Study.
The third research note, “Paul Felix Lazarsfeld’s Impact on Sociological Methodology”, by Leo A. Goodman and Tim F. Liao, focuses on the work of the winners of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for sociological methodology annually discerned by the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association, and with particularly attention to latent class analysis and latent structure analysis.