Search Results (13)

Teacher professional well-being (TPWB) is crucial in education, affecting educators and students. The Teacher Professional Well-Being Scale (TPWBS) measures five core dimensions—self-efficacy, job satisfaction, aspiration, recognition, and authority—initially developed in Turkey. This study aims to adapt, develop, and validate the Teacher Professional Well-Being Scale (TPWBS) in Ethiopia. Investigate the TPWBS factor structure and evaluate its measurement invariance (MI) across gender, university type, and teaching experience. By examining teachers’ perceptions of professional well-being, this study contributes to understanding Ethiopian higher education. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) use data from Ethiopian university instructors. Conduct initial EFA on a sample of 82 men and 222 women (sample 1), followed by CFA on a sample of 529 men and 179 women (sample 2). Assess factor loadings of TPWBS items across sub-dimensions. Use data from Ethiopian higher education institutions and involve 1012 instructors. The EFA reveals excellent factor loadings for all TPWBS items within each sub-dimension, indicating a robust factor structure. TPWBS exhibits acceptable construct validity, good reliability, and satisfactory convergent and divergent validity. The CFA demonstrates good model fit, supporting TPWBS validity: χ² (289) = 942.20, p < 0.001, χ²/df = 3.26, GFI = 0.912, TLI = 0.935, CFI = 0.943, RMSEA = 0.057, 95% CI [0.053, 0.061]. TPWBS is a valid and reliable tool for assessing the professional well-being of Ethiopian university teachers. Its adaptation and validation process highlight cultural and contextual factors in well-being evaluation. Findings offer insights for practitioners and researchers in well-being assessment. Full article

Assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) after pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been limited in children and adolescents due to a lack of disease-specific instruments. To fill this gap, the Quality of Life after Traumatic Brain Injury for Children and Adolescents (QOLIBRI-KID/ADO) Questionnaire was developed for the German-speaking population. Reference values from a comparable general population are essential for comprehending the impact of TBI on health and well-being. This study examines the validity of the German QOLIBRI-KID/ADO in a general pediatric population in Germany and provides reference values for use in clinical practice. Overall, 1997 children and adolescents aged 8–17 years from the general population and 300 from the TBI population participated in this study. The questionnaire was tested for reliability and validity. A measurement invariance (MI) approach was used to assess the comparability of the HRQoL construct between both samples. Reference values were determined by percentile-based stratification according to factors that significantly influenced HRQoL in regression analyses. The QOLIBRI-KID/ADO demonstrated strong psychometric properties. The HRQoL construct was measured largely equivalently in both samples, and reference values could be provided. The QOLIBRI-KID/ADO was considered reliable and valid for assessing HRQoL in a general German-speaking pediatric population, allowing for clinically meaningful comparisons between general and TBI populations. Full article

Intra-day transactions of stocks from competing firms in the financial markets are known to exhibit significant volatility and over-dispersion. This paper proposes some bivariate integer-valued auto-regressive models of order 1 (BINAR(1)) that are useful to analyze such financial series. These models were constructed under both time-variant and time-invariant conditions to capture features such as over-dispersion and non-stationarity in time series of counts. However, the quest for the most robust BINAR(1) models is still on. This paper considers specifically the family of BINAR(1)s with a non-diagonal cross-correlation structure and with unpaired innovation series. These assumptions relax the number of parameters to be estimated. Simulation experiments are performed to assess both the consistency of the estimators and the robust behavior of the BINAR(1)s under mis-specified innovation distribution specifications. The proposed BINAR(1)s are applied to analyze the intra-day transaction series of AstraZeneca and Ericsson. Diagnostic measures such as the root mean square errors (RMSEs) and Akaike information criteria (AICs) are also considered. The paper concludes that the BINAR(1)s with negative binomial and COM–Poisson innovations are among the most suitable models to analyze over-dispersed intra-day transaction series of stocks. Full article

The current research aimed to examine the similarities and differences in bullying prevalence across the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Level tests require measurement invariance to be met before they can be performed. In 2019, 45k people participated and provided data for the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS). When the exact measurement invariance (MI) protocols failed, the alignment methodology was used to analyze the data. After ensuring measurement invariance via the free alignment method, findings revealed statistically significant differences in bullying prevalence; specifically, bullying levels were significantly lower in Saudi Arabia compared to all other countries. The United Arab Emirates ranked second, with the second-lowest bullying rates, which were also significantly lower compared to the rates in all the other countries. As a whole, Saudi Arabia had the lowest levels, followed by the UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. Although the absolute difference between Saudi Arabia and the other countries was only modest, further research into the causes, consequences, and preventative measures of bullying is warranted. Full article

In developing countries, there are no laws to enforce child safety seat use, so there is still a very low rate of use. This study aimed to understand parents’ attitudes toward CRS use based on the health belief model (HBM) theory. To find realistic policies encouraging the use of CRSs, the model was split into two sub-models: a group of parents using a CRS (CRS user) and a group of parents not using a CRS (CRS non-user). Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modeling (SEM), and measurement invariance (MI) to test the differences between the two parent groups, the CFA results indicated that there were six constructs based on the HBM. According to the individual models of SEM, in the CRS non-user model, no significant latent construct was found to affect the use of CRSs, whereas in the CRS user model, the perceived severity and the cues to action were significant for using a CRS (p < 0.05). The MI results indicated that the attitudes of the two parent groups were different. The recommendations for policies obtained from the study results include promotion aimed toward increasing safety awareness, public relations regarding CRS usefulness, and pricing strategies from the government sector. Full article

The main goal of the research was to increase knowledge on the psychometric properties of the Prayer Importance Scale (PIS). The study analyzed the structure of test items using item response theory (IRT), Mokken scale analysis (MSA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish factorial structure of the method. Measurement invariance (MI) was calculated in groups differentiated by three criteria: religiosity, gender, and age. MI verifies whether test items measure the construct in the same way across different groups. The Structure and Level of Religiosity Test (SLRT) was used to examine the level of religiosity in participants. In a study conducted with a sample of n = 566 adults (M_age = 49.16 years; SD_age = 15.72), two religious groups were identified based on a median distribution: with low (n = 275) and high (n = 291) levels of religiosity. Two groups differentiated by gender, men (n = 284) and women (n = 282), were equivalent per age period: early (age 25–39; n = 192), middle (age 40–59; n = 187), and late adulthood (age 60+; n = 187). Results of the analyses show high homogeneity of items comprising PIS, as well as strict invariance for the three distinguished criteria. Results of the study provide extended knowledge about psychometric properties of PIS and the ability to compare results due to religiosity, gender, and age. Full article

Post-concussion symptoms often occur after TBI, persist and cause disabilities. The Rivermead Post-Concussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPQ) is widely used in this population, but little is known about the comparability of the symptoms over time, i.e., longitudinal measurement invariance (MI). The objectives of this study were to analyze the longitudinal MI of RPQ symptoms from three to twelve months after TBI and to find factors related to RPQ symptoms. The study involved 1023 individuals after TBI who took part in the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI (CENTER-TBI) study and completed the RPQ at three, six and twelve months post-injury. Longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis showed that the three-factor structure (somatic, emotional and cognitive) remains stable within one year after TBI. Linear mixed models revealed that sex, injury cause and prior psychiatric problems were related to the RPQ three-factor structure as well as to the RPQ total score. The study strengthens evidence for the RPQ’s factorial structure stability within one year after TBI and identifies sex, injury cause and prior psychiatric problems as important factors that may help clinicians to prevent future complications of symptomatology after TBI. Full article

In vivo cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) data were acquired in swine subjects six to ten weeks post-myocardial infarction (MI) to identify microstructural-based biomarkers of MI. Diffusion tensor invariants, diffusion tensor eigenvalues, and radial diffusivity (RD) are evaluated in the infarct, border, and remote myocardium, and compared with extracellular volume fraction (ECV) and native T1 values. Additionally, to aid the interpretation of the experimental results, the diffusion of water molecules was numerically simulated as a function of ECV. Finally, findings based on in vivo measures were confirmed using higher-resolution and higher signal-to-noise data acquired ex vivo in the same subjects. Mean diffusivity, diffusion tensor eigenvalues, and RD increased in the infarct and border regions compared to remote myocardium, while fractional anisotropy decreased. Secondary (e${}_2$) and tertiary (e${}_3$) eigenvalues increased more significantly than the primary eigenvalue in the infarct and border regions. These findings were confirmed by the diffusion simulations. Although ECV presented the largest increase in infarct and border regions, e${}_2$, e${}_3$, and RD increased the most among non-contrast-based biomarkers. RD is of special interest as it summarizes the changes occurring in the radial direction and may be more robust than e${}_2$ or e${}_3$ alone. Full article

This study examined psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire for Chinese adult learners, learning strategy scale (MSLQ-CAL-LS). Data were collected from 2499 college students from 15 Chinese universities. Results from factor analysis suggested satisfactory psychometric properties of MSLQ-CAL-LS. We further identified strong evidence to support the configural, metric, scalar and strict invariance across the gender groups, confirming the appropriate use of MSLQ-CAL-LS that can accurately capture the construct of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies among both female and male Chinese adult learners. This study provides one step forward to measure SRL outside the Western context. Recommendations for future research are discussed. Full article

Axiomatically, symmetry is a fundamental property of mathematical functions defining similarity measures, where similarity measures are important tools in many areas of computer science, including machine learning and image processing. In this paper, we investigate a new technique to measure the similarity between two images, a fixed image and a moving image, in multi-modal image registration (MIR). MIR in medical image processing is essential and useful in diagnosis and therapy guidance, but still a very challenging task due to the lack of robustness against the rotational variance in the image transformation process. Our investigation leads to a novel, local self-similarity descriptor, called the modality-independent and rotation-invariant descriptor (miRID). By relying on the mean of the intensity values, an miRID is simply computable and can effectively handle the complicated intensity relationship between multi-modal images. Moreover, it can also overcome the problem of rotational variance by sorting the numerical values, each of which is the absolute difference between each pixel’s intensity and the mean of all pixel intensities within a patch of the image. The experimental result shows that our method outperforms others in both multi-modal rigid and non-rigid image registrations. Full article

The Quality of Life after Traumatic Brain Injury (QOLIBRI) instrument is an internationally validated patient-reported outcome measure for assessing disease-specific health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in individuals after traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, no reference values for general populations are available yet for use in clinical practice and research in the field of TBI. The aim of the present study was, therefore, to establish these reference values for the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands (NL). For this purpose, an online survey with a reworded version of the QOLIBRI for general populations was used to collect data on 4403 individuals in the UK and 3399 in the NL. This QOLIBRI version was validated by inspecting descriptive statistics, psychometric criteria, and comparability of the translations to the original version. In particular, measurement invariance (MI) was tested to examine whether the items of the instrument were understood in the same way by different individuals in the general population samples and in the TBI sample across the two countries, which is necessary in order to establish reference values. In the general population samples, the reworded QOLIBRI displayed good psychometric properties, including MI across countries and in the non-TBI and TBI samples. Therefore, differences in the QOLIBRI scores can be attributed to real differences in HRQoL. Individuals with and without a chronic health condition did differ significantly, with the latter reporting lower HRQoL. In conclusion, we provided reference values for healthy individuals and individuals with at least one chronic condition from general population samples in the UK and the NL. These can be used in the interpretation of disease-specific HRQoL assessments after TBI applying the QOLIBRI on the individual level in clinical as well as research contexts. Full article

In order to improve the angle measurement performance of a coprime linear array, this paper proposes a novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm for a coprime linear array based on the multiple invariance estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (MI-ESPRIT) and a lookup table method. The proposed algorithm does not require a spatial spectrum search and uses a lookup table to solve ambiguity, which reduces the computational complexity. To fully use the subarray elements, the DOA estimation precision is higher compared with existing algorithms. Moreover, the algorithm avoids the matching error when multiple signals exist by using the relationship between the signal subspace of two subarrays. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Full article

The prevalence of mobile phone use across the world has increased greatly over the past two decades. Problematic Mobile Phone Use (PMPU) has been studied in relation to public health and comprises various behaviours, including dangerous, prohibited, and dependent use. These types of problematic mobile phone behaviours are typically assessed with the short version of the Problematic Mobile Phone Use Questionnaire (PMPUQ–SV). However, to date, no study has ever examined the degree to which the PMPU scale assesses the same construct across different languages. The aims of the present study were to (i) determine an optimal factor structure for the PMPUQ–SV among university populations using eight versions of the scale (i.e., French, German, Hungarian, English, Finnish, Italian, Polish, and Spanish); and (ii) simultaneously examine the measurement invariance (MI) of the PMPUQ–SV across all languages. The whole study sample comprised 3038 participants. Descriptive statistics, correlations, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were extracted from the demographic and PMPUQ-SV items. Individual and multigroup confirmatory factor analyses alongside MI analyses were conducted. Results showed a similar pattern of PMPU across the translated scales. A three-factor model of the PMPUQ-SV fitted the data well and presented with good psychometric properties. Six languages were validated independently, and five were compared via measurement invariance for future cross-cultural comparisons. The present paper contributes to the assessment of problematic mobile phone use because it is the first study to provide a cross-cultural psychometric analysis of the PMPUQ-SV. Full article