Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper looks into the question of whether alliances become less reliable over time. Due to changing circumstances and declining efficiency, it expects that an old ally will become less reliable. By using a hazard model, it tests the argument.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Rather than categorize organizations as high reliability or not, we focus on the communicative enactment of high reliability practices. Highly reliable organizing processes can be enacted intermittently, in a portion of an organization, or in other processes. We synthesize different criteria for high reliability and propose a more streamlined model for analyzing high reliability based on communication principles and apply it to two non-HRO disaster organizations that enact high reliability in divergent ways.

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: This paper will present a new statistical index for computing intercoder reliability for behavioral and content analytic data. Sufficiency analyses will employ both actual field data and results of simulations. The paper also will comparatively address current theory and methodologies in this area with the intention of refocusing some of the more controversial issues on heuristics with the promise of providing broadly applicable solutions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Panel studies are of crucial importance to our understanding of the complex, interacting nature of causal processes in the social world. A limitation to valid and reliable inference from panel studies, however, derives from the reflexive nature of humans as research subjects; the act of observation often serves to transform the behaviour of those being observed (Kalton and Citro 2000). In panel studies this source of error falls under the general heading of ‘panel conditioning’ bias and relates to the fact that responses to questions in later rounds of the panel may be influenced by those given in earlier waves. Factors such as ‘satisficing’, cognitive consistency and self-presentation are likely to play important roles in influencing responses between waves. However, while conditioning effects are widely believed to be pervasive in panel survey research, the general consensus appears to be that their impact on marginal distributions is, at most, negligible (Holt 1989).
In this paper, we take a somewhat different approach and examine the effect of panel membership on the internal consistency or reliability of attitude items. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, we evaluate the hypothesis that simply administering political attitude questions serves to increase the apparent consistency or ‘constraint’ of respondents’ Political Belief Systems (Sturgis 2001). Such an effect is argued to arise because the interview prompts respondents to reflect on the subject matter of the questions and to think more deeply about how the issues covered may be inter-related (Jagodzinski et al 1987). Our results show that estimates of internal reliability increase between the first two administrations of the attitude items examined but not between subsequent waves. These increases in scale reliability are, furthermore, predominantly concentrated amongst the least politically engaged respondents in the sample.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed