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This book provides an overview of scale and test development. From conceptualization through design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation, critical concerns are identified and grounded in the increasingly sophisticated psychometric literature. Measurement within the health, social, and behavioral sciences is addressed, and technical and practical guidance is provided. Acknowledging the increasingly sophisticated contributions in social work, psychology, education, nursing, and medicine, the book balances condensation of complex conceptual challenges with focused recommendations for conceiving, planning, and implementing psychometric study. Primary points are carefully referenced and consistently illustrated to illuminate complicated or abstract principles. Basics of construct conceptualization and establishing evidence of validity are complimented with introductions to concept mapping and cross-cultural translation. In-depth discussion of cutting edge topics like bias and invariance in item responses is provided. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic strategies are illustrated and critiqued, and step-by-step guidance is offered for anticipating elements of a complete data collection instrument, determining sampling frame and size, and interpreting resulting coefficients. Much good work has been done by RAI developers to date. Too often, practitioners or researchers either underestimate the skills and effort required, or become overwhelmed by the complexities involved.

This book provides a concise modern introduction to the science of complex networks. The book is based on lectures for university students and non-specialists. The aim is to introduce the world of networks to the subject without need for a serious background in mathematics or physics. The introductory chapters fill the existing gap between popular science books and comprehensive reference volumes on complex networks (including the Internet, World Wide Web, etc.). The book provides the shortest path to the world of networks and discusses the main directions of modern research in this active field as well as the history of network studies. The book describes the current state of the art in complex networks and includes recent results.

This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.

A new era of global banking and insurance is emerging, with leading banks eager to serve international markets. This book explores the issues that arise for banks in their strategic choices as they move into these new international markets. This book challenges conventional assumptions from the international management literature on topics such as the limits of globalization, the importance of cultural and institutional distance, the nature of economies of scale and scope, the existence of first mover advantages, the logic behind the global value chain configuration, the speed and timing of market entry, as well as organizational architecture. It focuses on fundamental strategic decisions such as when, where, and how to enter foreign markets and how to design the organizational architecture of the multinational financial services firm. Using simple theoretical frameworks illustrated by case examples, this book provides a guide to the challenges of the international market for financial services firms.

The psychology of terrorism, in its most basic form, is about fear. While academics continue to debate the meaning of terrorism, the end result for many people affected is fear and terror. However, many studying the effects of terrorism have focused more exclusively on discrete psychopathological constructs, most of which are clinically based. Ironically, these paradigms fail to acknowledge the primacy of basic fear in the context of terrorism, as well as how fear affects people in both positive and negative ways—above and beyond whether one meets criteria for a clinical disorder. The purpose of this book is to unpack the complexity of terrorism fears, and to present a new paradigm for understanding the psychology of terrorism. As such, this book will present empirical and theoretical frameworks for understanding fear as a dynamic process that motivates and affects people on a myriad of levels, from the individual to society at large. The book will also highlight the paradox of how fear can negatively affect people and societies and can also be a central force underlying resilience and post-traumatic growth in the context of terrorism and political violence. Finally, this volume will discuss how society has changed as a function of terrorism, and specifically how our own systems for managing terrorism may in fact contribute to fear.

Phase transitions and critical phenomena have consistently been among the principal subjects of active studies in statistical physics. The simple act of transforming one state of matter or phase into another, for instance by changing the temperature, has always captivated the curious mind. This book provides an introductory account on the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena, a subject now recognized to be indispensable for students and researchers from many fields of physics and related disciplines. The first five chapters are very basic and quintessential, and cover standard topics such as mean-field theories, the renormalization group and scaling, universality, and statistical field theory methods. The remaining chapters develop more advanced concepts, including conformal field theory, the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, the effects of randomness, percolation, exactly solvable models, series expansions, duality transformations, and numerical techniques. Moreover, a comprehensive series of appendices expand and clarify several issues not developed in the main text. The important role played by symmetry and topology in understanding the competition between phases and the resulting emergent collective behaviour, giving rise to rigidity and soft elementary excitations, is stressed throughout the book. Serious attempts have been directed toward a self-contained modular approach so that the reader does not have to refer to other sources for supplementary information. Accordingly, most of the concepts and calculations are described in detail, sometimes with additional/auxiliary descriptions given in appendices and exercises. The latter are presented as the topics develop with solutions found at the end of the book, thus giving the text a self-learning character.

In this work, the author applies the conceptual framework developed in Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the varied repertoire of the 20th century. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four canonical composers—Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III; Webern's Op. 10, No. 4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice—the author brings forth structures which he calls “transformational networks” to reveal interesting and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work, the author stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring.