Developing ethnic identity questions for Understanding Society

Ethnic identity, its formation, expression and consequences are sources of extensive discussion and debate within multicultural societies. Analysis of identity is increasingly finding its way into survey based analysis and is being explored by disciplines beyond psychology, and qualitative and theoretical sociology. However, effective and appropriate survey measures of ethnic identity that are suitable for inclusion in a general purpose sample survey and which allow estimation of change and development across the age range are in short supply. Here, we describe the process of development of a series of new ethnic identity questions, designed specifically for inclusion in Understanding Society but with applicability for longitudinal studies further afield. We detail the rationale for the development and the process by which the final set of questions was arrived at, and outline the implications for future research agendas

Effect of interview modes on measurement of identity

In this paper, we investigate the effect of interview mode on responses to attitudinal and autobiographical questions: a 13-item multidimensional identity module. We find small but significant mode effects of three to seven percentage points on the response pattern for the domains of national identity, religion, racial or ethnic background, political beliefs and sexual orientation. We also find very small but significant mode effects of one to two percentage points on item non-response for occupational identity and identification with father’s ethnic background. We conclude that mode effects on these questions can convincingly be interpreted as stemming from social desirability bias

Hybrid stars in the light of GW170817

We have studied the effect of tidal deformability constraint given by the binary neutron star merger event GW170817 on the equations of state (EOS) of hybrid stars. The EOS are constructed by matching the hadronic EOS described by relativistic mean field (RMF) model and parameter sets NL3, TM1 and NL3$\omega\rho$ with the quark matter EOS described by modified MIT bag model, via Gibbs' construction. It is found that the tidal deformability constraints along with the lower bound on maximum mass ($M_{\rm max}=2.01\pm0.04M_\odot$) significantly limit the bag model parameter space ($B_{\rm eff}^{1/4}$, $a_4$). We also obtain upper limits on the radius of $1.4M_\odot$ and $1.6M_\odot$ stars as $R_{1.4}\leq13.2-13.5$ km and $R_{1.6}\leq13.2-13.4$ km, respectively for different hadronic EOS considered here.Comment: version accepted by Ap

Noise resistant generalized parametric validity index of clustering for gene expression data

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Validity indices have been investigated for decades. However, since there is no study of noise-resistance performance of these indices in the literature, there is no guideline for determining the best clustering in noisy data sets, especially microarray data sets. In this paper, we propose a generalized parametric validity (GPV) index which employs two tunable parameters α and β to control the proportions of objects being considered to calculate the dissimilarities. The greatest advantage of the proposed GPV index is its noise-resistance ability, which results from the flexibility of tuning the parameters. Several rules are set to guide the selection of parameter values. To illustrate the noise-resistance performance of the proposed index, we evaluate the GPV index for assessing five clustering algorithms in two gene expression data simulation models with different noise levels and compare the ability of determining the number of clusters with eight existing indices. We also test the GPV in three groups of real gene expression data sets. The experimental results suggest that the proposed GPV index has superior noise-resistance ability and provides fairly accurate judgements

Shaking during Ion-Atom Collisions

Shaking (shakeup + shakeoff) probabilities accompanying ion-atom collisions are studied using hydrogenic wavefunctions for K-, L-, M- shell electrons in the sudden approximation limit. The role of recoil velocity in the shaking processes is discussed. Further, it is found that the suddenness of collision between projectile and target nuclei plays a major factor in shaking of respective atomic system than the recoil of nuclei.Comment: 10 page