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Approaches to Handling Common Response Styles and Issues in Educational Surveys
Summary and Keywords
Survey has been a widely used data collection method for a variety of purposes in educational research. Although response styles have the potential to contaminate survey results, educational researchers often do little to control for such negative effects. Under discussion are five common response issues, their impact on survey data, and the methods that may be used to minimize the negative impact of these response issues on survey data. The five response issues in question are acquiescence (including disacquiescence), careless responding, extreme response, social desirability, and item-keying effect. Acquiescence (disacquiescence) refers to a respondent's general tendency to agree (or disagree) with an item regardless of its content. This response style can distort item and construct correlations, compromising the results of factor analytic and correlational findings. Careless responding refers to a respondent's tendency to pay insufficient attention to item content before responding, which can also lead to a biased estimation of relationships. Extreme response refers to the tendency of selecting extreme response options (e.g., strongly agree or strongly disagree) over middle options (e.g., neutral). Social desirability refers to a respondent's tendency to rate him- or herself in an overly positive light. Finally, item-keying effect refers to a respondent's differential responses to regular-keyed and reverse-keyed items. This effect often creates the illusion that items with opposite keying directions measure distinct constructs even when they may not.
A growing amount of research has been done on how to control for the negative impact of these response styles, although the research may be limited and uneven for different response issues. A variety of approaches and methods exist for handling these response issues in research practice. Different response issues may require considerations at different stages of research. For example, effective handling of acquiescence response may require steps in both survey construction (e.g., including a hidden measure of acquiescence) and survey data analytic treatment (partial correlation technique), while controlling for item-keying effect may require more sophisticated modeling techniques (e.g., multitrait-multimethod confirmatory factor analysis).
Keywords: survey data, response styles, acquiescence, careless responding, extreme response, social desirability, item-keying effect
Approaches to Handling Common Response Styles and Issues in Educational Surveys
Response styles—respondents' tendency to answer survey items in a systematic manner—are prevalent in educational research. They have the potential to contaminate the survey data, such as affecting the factor loading pattern of survey items (Rammstedt & Farmer, 2013), the means of comparison groups (Bolt, Lu, & Kim, 2014), and the magnitude of correlations between constructs (Kam & Meyer, 2015). Therefore, the negative impact of response styles cannot be ignored. Although response styles have been known to distort survey results, few educational researchers actually measure and control for them. This is unfortunate, because response styles could lead to incorrect research findings.
One reason for the lack of attention to response styles may be due to insufficient knowledge of them, of their consequences, and of the approaches for dealing with them. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to explain the common response styles. We focus on five major response styles: acquiescence, careless responding, extreme response, social desirability, and item-keying effect. For each response style, we explain what it is, how it can bias research results, and how it can be measured and controlled. Next, we summarize the common procedures to deal with the response styles and briefly introduce novel statistical techniques to control for multiple response styles simultaneously. Finally, we discuss unresolved issues in the response style literature.
Acquiescence (disacquiescence) may be defined as respondents' tendency to agree (disagree) with an item regardless of item content (Bentler, Jackson, & Messick, 1971). Acquiescence has a long history (Lorge, 1937). Jackson and Messick (Jackson & Messick, 1962; Messick & Jackson, 1961) studied acquiescence together with social desirability response style, and found that the two response styles together explain over one half of the variance in the measurement of a clinical scale. These researchers concluded that the effects of the response styles are massive. Response styles such as acquiescence thus need to be taken seriously.
Influence of Acquiescence
Because participants high in acquiescence may agree with both regular-keyed and reverse-keyed items, the negative correlations between items with opposite keying direction are thereby attenuated. As a result, a unidimensional construct may appear bidimensional. For example, previous research shows that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are distinct constructs (i.e., bidimensionality; Credé, Chernyshenko, Bagraim, & Sully, 2009), because the correlation between the two factors (satisfaction and dissatisfaction) was far from -1. However, after controlling for acquiescence, Kam and Meyer (2015) find job satisfaction and dissatisfaction items to be perfectly and negatively correlated (i.e., r = −1; they belong to opposite ends of the same construct). Similarly, as shown in some studies, acquiescence can mask the five-factor structure of Big Five personality traits; only after the influence of acquiescence was statistically partialled out of the data was the Big Five structure revealed (Rammstedt & Farmer, 2013; Rammstedt, Goldberg, & Borg, 2010). In general, as shown by Kam and Meyer (2015), acquiescence can bias construct correlations in the positive direction, thus inflating positive correlations between constructs (e.g., between job satisfaction and positive affect) and deflating negative correlations between constructs (e.g., between job satisfaction and negative affect).
The stability of acquiescence has also been investigated. In early research, acquiescence was considered a situational (unstable) phenomenon (Hui & Triandis, 1985; Rorer, 1965). More recently, researchers have consistently found it to be stable over time. Billiet and Davidov (2008) found acquiescence scores to be moderately correlated (r = .59) over a four-year period. Weijters, Geuens, and Schillewaert (2010) found that acquiescence scores loaded on the same latent factor over a one-year period, implying strong stability over time. These results thus challenge the previous assumption that the response style is unstable. Therefore, acquiescence response style influences item response across time—administering survey items for the same participants across two different occasions likely will not eliminate the problem.
Measuring and Minimizing Acquiescence
Researchers use three major methods to measure acquiescence. In the first, item scores across the entire survey are summed. This method is based on the assumption that the survey contains items measuring constructs with heterogeneous content. For example, Schimmack, Oishi, and Diener (2005) summed the scores of two cultural orientations (individualism and collectivism) to derive an acquiescence score; this score was then used to control for the correlation between the cultural orientations and other constructs. Similarly, Billiet and McClendon (2000) summed the scores of political distrust, threat, individualism, and collectivism to derive an index of acquiescence.
The second way to measure acquiescence is to sum scores from pairs of items that are opposite in meaning. For example, Rammstedt and Farmer (2013) summed 16 matched pairs of items with antithetical content (e.g., being talkative and being quiet) to capture acquiescence before conducting exploratory factor analysis on a personality survey. The predicted five-factor structure of the inventory was found, but only after controlling for acquiescence. In addition, congruence in factor loadings across cultures was found only after controlling for acquiescence. Winkler, Kanouse, and Ware (1982) also computed acquiescence by using matched pairs of logically opposite items; they found that inter-item correlations were affected by acquiescence. Winkler et al. thus recommended controlling for acquiescence before conducting factor analysis.
In the third method, researchers sum items that are heterogeneous in content (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 2001). This method differs from the first in that it does not use all the items in a survey. Based on the definition of acquiescence as endorsement regardless of content, these researchers suggest including only items with diverse content. With this set of items, a researcher can ensure the generalizability of the acquiescence scores across different content areas. De Beuckelaer, Weijters, & Rutten (2010; see also Weijters, Baumgartner, & Schillewaert, 2013) affirmed the utility of this operationalization relative to the method of summing scores across an entire survey. They recommended that researchers should make sure that the inter-item correlations are low so that the items are not capturing any substantive construct. De Beuckelaer et al. (2010) suggested using 15 items to compute a "valid and reliable" response style indicator (p. 766). Recent studies (Kam & Meyer, 2015) followed a similar method to create a measure of acquiescence.
Kam (2016a) endorsed the third method on the grounds that the approach—using items with heterogeneous content—makes it likely that the acquiescence score does not measure constructs with substantive content. However, he noted two cautions when researchers use this method. First, researchers should use items that are balanced with respect to positive and negative valence. Measurement items are seldom neutral in content. Some have favorable meanings (i.e., positive valence, such as "I like my friends") and others have unfavorable meanings (i.e., negative valence, such as "I seldom donate to charity"). Therefore, if researchers select items randomly, they may end up with a set predominantly positive or negative in valence. In other words, the researcher may measure participants' sensitivity toward positive valence items or negative valence items rather than acquiescence. Second, Kam (2016a) found that an acquiescence score made up of 15 items had inadequate reliability and validity. Convergent validity was only .40 with 16 items, but increased to.50 with 32 items and to .62 with 64 items. For the score to possess sufficient validity, 15 items are too few.
Although acquiescent response style may be difficult to eliminate, its effects can be partialled out statistically. Researchers often measure acquiescence and then statistically partial out its effect at the construct level when examining the correlation between variables (e.g., De Beuckelaer et al., 2010; Schimmack et al., 2005). Other researchers (Kam & Meyer, 2015) have used structural equation modeling technique to partial out the effect of acquiescence at the item level before examining its effect on construct correlations. Either way, acquiescence response style is relatively easy to control for—compared to some styles examined later in this article.
Careless Responding
Careless responding is not so much a response style as it is the result of participants being distracted during survey completion (Barnette, 1999; Huang, Curran, Keeney, Poposki, & DeShon, 2012; Kam & Meyer, 2015; Maniaci & Rogge, 2014; Schmitt & Stults, 1985; Woods, 2006). Participants may not have enough cognitive resources or may be unmotivated when responding to a survey item (Weijters et al., 2013). Therefore, they do not fully process the item content before responding (Meade & Craig, 2012).
Influences of Careless Responding
When participants do not pay sufficient attention to an item, their responses are not likely to be valid. Oppenheimer, Meyvis, and Davidenko (2009) showed that statistical results are compromised when a data sample includes a substantial number of careless respondents. When factor analysis is conducted, inclusion of careless respondents may obscure the true factor structure of the data (Schmitt & Stults, 1985). In a simulation study, Schmitt and Stults (1985) showed how a unidimensional construct may appear bidimensional in a dataset with 10% or more careless respondents.
Although researchers may assume that careless responding attenuates the magnitude of a correlation, there are at least two recent studies showing that careless responding can also inflate construct correlations. Huang, Liu, and Bowling (2015) showed that careless responding and construct means interact to affect the magnitude of a correlation. They argued that the construct means of careless respondents tend to drift to the midpoint of a Likert scale (because they randomly choose a response), whereas the construct means of careful respondents do not cluster at the midpoint. If the scale means of careful respondents are different from the scale means of careless respondents, their simulation results showed that the correlations observed between constructs can be inflated consequently.
Similarly, Kam and Meyer (2015) showed that careless respondents can inflate construct correlations for another reason. Following Meade and Craig (2012) and Maniaci and Rogge (2014), Kam and Meyer (2015) discovered two types of careless respondents: the first type gives random responses to each item; the second type gives identical answers to consecutive items. Analyzing real data, Kam and Meyer (2015) discovered that the latter type can inflate construct correlations, because construct means may become identical given such response patterns.
Measuring and Minimizing Careless Responding
Researchers have proposed a priori and post-hoc methods to detect careless respondents. One a priori method is to include items that have a clear answer (e.g., "I am currently not working on a survey" [correct answer: Disagree or Strongly Disagree] and "I am currently answering survey questions" [correct answer: Agree or Strongly Agree]). Another a priori method is to include synonyms and antonyms (such as agreeing that one is "careful" in one item and "careless" in another). If participants give unlikely answers to items with clear answers, or inconsistent answers to synonyms and antonyms, it implies that they are careless respondents not paying attention to content.
Another method of identifying careless respondents was reported by Oppenheimer et al. (2009). They explicitly instructed participants to select (or not) a certain response in a survey—those who failed to follow the instruction were considered careless. Kam and Meyer (2015) revised their method to develop a four-item scale of careless responding, which had good convergent validity with other indicators (of careless responding). In fact, the four-item scale alone is as effective as a constellation of indicators in identifying careless respondents.
If researchers did not plan on including dedicated careless responding indicators, they may still use post-hoc measures. Meade and Craig (2012) investigated the efficacy of a comprehensive set of post-hoc measures, and found the best indicator to be Mahalanobis distance. Mahalanobis distance—originally designed to be a measure of statistical distance in multivariate space, and often used to detect multivariate outliers—can be used to detect abnormal response patterns. Kam and Meyer (2015) also found that Mahalanobis distance is particularly good at detecting participants who give random responses. To identify respondents giving identical rather than random responses to consecutive survey items, Kam and Meyer (2015) found that long-string (maximum number of identical responses in a survey) and repeated responses (number of times a response is identical to the two previous responses) did a better job than Mahalanobis distance. Interested readers may refer to Meade and Craig (2012) for the efficiency of other post-hoc indicators in identifying careless respondents.
After identifying careless respondents, previous researchers have chosen to statistically control (Huang et al., 2015) or exclude them (Kam & Meyer, 2015; Oppenheimer et al., 2009). If a priori measures of careless respondents are used, the best practice is to exclude them (Kam & Meyer, 2015), because researchers could identify them with high certainty. However, if post-hoc measures are used, it is difficult to determine the cutoff score between careful and careless respondents. Therefore, researchers may be better advised to use statistical control (usually partial correlation; Huang et al., 2015) with the post-hoc measures to recover parameter estimates.
Extreme Response Style
Extreme response style refers to participants' tendency to select extreme response options (e.g., Strongly Agree or Strongly Disagree), rather than moderate responses (e.g., Agree or Neutral). Whereas acquiescent (and disacquiescent) participants prefer responses in a particular direction (Strongly Agree only), people with extreme response style select responses in both directions—but they prefer extreme answers. The opposite of extreme response style is often considered to be midpoint response style, which refers to respondents' tendency to select middle responses (Neutral) as answers (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 2001). Extreme response style has been shown to correlate negatively with midpoint response style (Weijters et al., 2010).
Influence of Extreme Response Style
Extreme and midpoint response styles are seldom investigated. Previous research investigated the extreme response style in a cross-cultural context, in which one culture shows stronger extreme response style than another culture. Countries with high power distance and masculinity have been found to endorse extreme response style (Johnson, Kulesa, Cho, & Shavitt, 2005). Johnson et al. (2005) has also shown that the extreme response style elevates item intercepts. In contrast, the midpoint response style depresses them. When two cultures differ in the extreme response style (or the midpoint response style), it often results in measurement non-invariance between the two cultures. In any event, cross-cultural comparison can be seriously compromised by the response style.
Measuring and Minimizing Extreme Response Style
The most common method to measure extreme responding is to code respondents' extreme responses (Strongly Agree and Strongly Disagree) as 1 and other response options as 0. Respondents with the highest coded scores are strong in extreme response style. For midpoint response style, participants' responses were coded as 1 when they chose the Neutral option and 0 otherwise. Some researchers have used partial correlations to control for the effect of extreme response style on construct correlations (Weijers, Schillewaert, & Geuens, 2008), although the efficiency of this method to recover true population parameters is still unknown. Other researchers have used advanced statistical techniques such as latent class factor analysis to control for extreme response style (Morren, Gelissen, & Vermunt, 2012).
Item-Keying Effect
Item-keying effect is not a response style, but an issue related to item construction. The item-keying effect often has an operational definition rather than a semantic definition. It is usually assumed that responses to regular-keyed items (measuring the presence of a construct; e.g., "I have high self-esteem") are strictly negatively correlated (r = −1) with responses to reverse-keyed items (measuring the absence of a construct; e.g., "I have low self-esteem"). Therefore, participants who strongly agree with the former item should logically strongly disagree with the latter. When this happens, regular- and reverse-keyed items will load on a single common factor in factor analysis.
Very often, however, the logical expectation above turned out to be incorrect. Instead, confirmatory factor analysis often identifies—in addition to a common factor for regular- and reverse-keyed items—a factor coming solely from reverse-keyed items. The common factor is often called the "trait" factor; the additional factor is often called a "method" factor. In the language of multitrait-multimethod analysis (at least within the framework of Eid, 2000), the trait factor captures common variance in regular- and reverse-keyed items, whereas the method factor captures unique variance shared only by reverse-keyed items but not by regular-keyed items. (There are multitrait-multimethod frameworks other than Eid's, but the basic interpretation of the method factor is similar.)
Researchers disagree about the nature of the item-keying effect. Some believe it is simply a methodological artifact (DiStefano & Motl, 2009a, 2009b; Rauch, Schweizer, & Moosbrugger, 2007) represented by constructs such as social desirability response style (or a related characteristic such as self-enhancement). Others argue that it represents traits rather than "method" (Lindwall, Ljung, Hadžibajramović, & Jonsdottir, 2012; Marshall, Wortman, Kusulas, Hervig, & Vickers, 1992). The latter group, therefore, believes that the so-called method factor is actually a misnomer, as it represents something more substantial. According to these researchers, regular- and reverse-keyed items measure two distinct factors, not one factor.
The debate has been ongoing for several decades, with no resolution in sight. Often, one group of researchers finds a method factor to be correlated with a response style (such as social desirability) in one scale (Rauch et al., 2007), but other researchers fail to find the same result in a different scale (DiStefano & Motl, 2009b). A recent study (Weijters et al., 2013) revealed that the item-keying factor is correlated with acquiescence response style, but the amount of variance explained by acquiescence was extremely small—less than 10% of the variance in the method factor. In short, we still do not fully understand the source of the item-keying effect.
Influence of Item-Keying Effect
When the method effect is not properly modeled, the trait factor may measure variances due to both traits and methods (Cole, Martin, & Steiger, 2005). Therefore, its relationships with external variables are likely to be biased (Castro-Schilo, Widaman, & Grimm, 2013; Cole et al., 2005). Castro-Schilo et al. (2013) investigated the consequences of neglecting the modeling of method factor. They found that such neglect can cause noticeable bias in its regression coefficients with external constructs. The percentage of bias (operationalized as the percentage of increase or decrease from the true parameter estimates in the population) reached over 50% in many cases. Therefore, neglecting the structure of the method effect has the potential to severely distort the research conclusion of a study.
Measuring and Minimizing Item-Keying Effect
Researchers have developed multiple methods to model the method factor (Jöreskog, 1971; Kenny, 1976). Early researchers suggested one trait factor that is common to all items and two method factors that are specific to regular- and reverse-keyed items, respectively (Widaman, 1985). Theoretically, the trait factor represents a pure trait effect, because the two method factors capture variance due to the use of regular- and reverse-keyed items. The method factors do not correlate with the trait factor for identification purposes, and the two method factors may or may not be correlated with each other. This model is advocated by many methodologists (e.g., Lance, Noble, & Scullen, 2002) as it is most faithful to the original theorization of the multitrait-multimethod model of Campbell and Fiske (1959).
More recently, however, researchers have pointed out that the model suffers from both identification problems and collapse of the method factor, such as unreasonably low factor loadings on the method factor (Geiser, Bishop, & Lockhart, 2015; Gu, Wen, & Fan, 2015). Researchers have therefore developed models to overcome its problems. One solution—pioneered by Kenny (1976, 1979; Kenny & Berman, 1980) and further developed by Marsh (1989)—is to allow the item residual variances of the same keying direction to covary with each other instead of modeling any method factor. Kenny's method has the disadvantage of not measuring the method factor, and thus researchers could not use this method to investigate the nature of the method effect. The second solution—due to Eid (2000), as mentioned previously—is to allow only one method factor (usually on reverse-keyed items) rather than two, and thus the method factor captures unique variance not shared by the regular-keyed items. The method factor is constrained to be orthogonal to the trait factor so that trait variance is unrelated to method variance. A common characteristic of all these methods is to assume that the item-keying effect is unwanted variance independent of the trait effect. Another novel line of research conceptualizes the item-keying effect as the latent mean difference between regular- and reverse-keyed items. Interested readers may refer to the sources for more information (Pohl & Steyer, 2010).
Given that we are still unclear about both its nature and its antecedents, it is difficult to minimize the item-keying effect. However, the effect is prevalent across measurement scales that have reverse-keyed items, including personality scales that are theoretically unidimensional (Kam & Meyer, 2015). Kam (2016b, 2017) showed that the nature of the item-keying effect differs across measurement scales, and thus a finding from one scale does not generalize to another. Kam correlated the item-keying method factor (extracted from reverse-keyed items) across a variety of measurement scales, and found that these method factors were not strongly correlated. In addition, some of the method factors correlated well with social desirability response style while others did not, suggesting that these factors are dissimilar in nature. Kam's results help to explain why the previous findings on the nature of the method effect largely failed to generalize. In addition, Kam's findings implied that causes of the method effect in one particular scale (e.g., optimism) may not always apply to another scale (e.g., self-esteem). Therefore, he suggested investigating scale-specific nature of the item-keying effect.
Finally, because we still know relatively little about the item-keying effect, we are unable to eliminate its influence on data. The best course of action is to minimize its influence by explicitly modeling the response style using multitrait-multimethod techniques (e.g., Eid, 2000).
Social Desirability Response Style
Social desirability response style refers to respondents' tendency to present themselves in an overly positive manner (Paulhus, 1991). Another definition states it is a stylistic tendency to answer survey items in a "culturally approved" manner as opposed to "honest self-evaluation" (Wiggins, 1973, p. 36). The latter definition thus considers the role of cultural values in influencing participants' choice of response.
Influence of Social Desirability Response Style
Social desirability is likely to distort both factor analytic and construct correlations. Items can be correlated more strongly because they are socially desirable. Previous researchers have shown that Big Five personality traits—which are theoretically orthogonal to one another—can all load on one higher-order factor due to social desirability response style (Bäckström, Björklund, & Larsson, 2014). Bäckström, Björklund, and Larsson (2009) showed that the inter-correlations among the five factors are substantially attenuated when items are reworded to be more neutral in meaning, and thus less susceptible to social desirability. Similarly, constructs may be correlated with each other because their measurement items are loaded with social desirability (Paunonen & Lebel, 2012). Therefore, positive correlations may be inflated when both constructs are measured by socially desirable items. Conversely, negative correlations—such as the relationship between job satisfaction and negative affect—may become stronger when participants endorse socially desirable items in the job satisfaction measure and reject socially undesirable items in the negative affect measure.
Measuring and Minimizing Social Desirability Response Style
Social desirability response style is often measured with a dedicated scale that asks participants to report their tendency to engage in socially approved (e.g., admitting one's mistakes) and disapproved (e.g., littering the street) behaviors. Common measures include the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960), the lie scale on Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Hathaway & McKinley, 1989), and Paulhus's Balanced Inventory of Desirability Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 1984).
The BIDR is popular because it divides social desirability into two components—impression management and self-deception—whereas other measures do not make a similar distinction. Initially, Paulhus conceptualized impression management as respondents' intentional effort to favorably present themselves, and self-deception as their unintentional effort to do so (1984). More recent research, however, has questioned this notion. Uziel (2010a, 2010b), for example, reframed impression management as interpersonally related self-control. Individuals high in impression management have a higher drive to succeed in public as opposed to private settings. Uziel (2010b) showed empirically that people high in impression management are more creative and have better self-control in social than in private settings.
In an attempt to examine the validity of the two components of social desirability, Kam (2013) had external judges rate the desirability of personality items and then examined if those highly desirable items would correlate strongly with impression management and self-deception. If impression management and self-deception are valid, they should be able to help identifying items that are considered desirable or undesirable by external judges. Kam found very strong match between decisions based on the self-deception scale and raters' judgment (convergent validity r = .90), and weaker match between decisions based on the impression management scale and raters' judgment (convergent validity r = .71). This result suggested higher validity in the self-deception scale than the impression management scale. Rather surprisingly, Zettler, Hilbig, Moshagen, and de Vries (2015) found that those high in impression management, relative to those low in the trait, are more likely to be honest in a task in which participants can choose to cheat. Therefore, although traditionally impression management is regarded as a socially desirable trait and individuals with this trait are considered more likely to behave dishonestly, Zettler et al.'s (2015) finding contradicts these assumptions—participants who endorse impression management items (e.g., never taking possessions not belonging to oneself, never saying swear words) may indeed be more honest than other people. Taking all these results together, it appears that self-deception is a better measure of social desirability than is impression management (Kam, 2013).
After measuring social desirability response style, researchers often statistically control for its influence using partial correlation or multiple regression (with social desirability as a covariate). However, two caveats should be mentioned. First, Paunonen and LeBel (2012) caution that the relationship between social desirability and construct scores may not be a simple linear one. Respondents high in social desirability may have a stronger tendency to reject possession of negative traits than to accept ownership of positive traits. For example, high social desirability respondents may more strongly disagree with negative items (e.g., I am worthless) than to agree with positive items (I am a worthwhile individual). Therefore, if a construct is measured by both positive and negative items (such as Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Measure), the net effect of social desirability on the final score is complex, involving the interaction of the response styles with keying direction of the items.
The second caveat is that the relationship between social desirability and item scores may depend on assessment context. Dunlop, Telford, and Morrison (2012) showed that, although the extreme response (e.g., Strongly Agree in an extraversion item) may be assumed to be most desirable, the penultimate option (e.g., Moderately Agree) can be equally desirable. Furthermore, the socially desirable response also depends on the context. Extraversion, for example, may be regarded as desirable for a sales job but less desirable for a job in nursing. Therefore, the best way to minimize social desirability may be to create neutral items—ones perceived as not particularly desirable or undesirable—rather than measuring social desirability and then controlling for it statistically (Dunlop et al., 2012).
There have indeed been efforts to create scale items neutral in meaning. In a noteworthy study, Bäckström, Björklund, and Larsson (2014) attempted to attenuate item social desirability by rephrasing items so that they were more neutral. Bäckström et al. (2014) called this process "evaluative neutralization." They claimed that the process is "so simple that even untrained undergraduate students can apply it successfully, when provided with basic instructions" (p. 28). Bäckström et al. neutralized items from a popular personality inventory (International Personality Item Pool; Goldberg et al., 2006) and compared the criterion validity between the original scale and the new, neutralized scale. Two findings stood out. First, there were no substantial differences in scale reliability between original and new inventories. Second, criterion validity for the original and new inventory was comparable on all scales except social desirability: for social desirability, the old scale correlated substantially stronger than the new one. Bäckström et al. concluded that evaluative neutralization can reduce social desirability content without sacrificing validity.
Summary of General Approaches
As is apparent in the preceding discussion, researchers can measure and control for response styles in multiple stages of their research.
Survey Construction Stage
Some researchers advocate the use of dedicated items to measure response style. For example, careless responding can be easily controlled if items are included to measure participants' attentiveness to content (Kam & Meyer, 2015). Acquiescence can be measured by including a large number of heterogeneous items to measure respondents' tendency to endorse them (Weijters et al., 2010). Doing so has the advantage that these external items are uncorrelated with the other items, thus making a clear separation between measurement of content and measurement of styles. Researchers, however, do not necessarily favor this approach because including dedicated items undoubtedly lengthens the survey. In addition, this approach is obviously applicable only when researchers plan ahead of time. A common practice is to measure response styles using post-hoc methods (e.g., measuring acquiescence by counting the number of times a respondent strongly agrees with survey items). However, such scores they may correlate with construct scores, making the separation between content and style difficult.
Data Analytic Stage
Some methods control for the impact of response styles after the fact. A researcher may employ partial correlation and regression to control for the effect of a response style on the relationship between two substantive constructs. However, the efficacy of this approach remains to be demonstrated. In an empirical study, controlling for social desirability using partial correlations did not significantly alter the apparent correlation between a predictor and a criterion variable (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996). The same finding was obtained in a simulation study (Paunonen & Lebel, 2012). Because convenient statistical techniques (partial correlation) may fail to recover parameter estimates of a population, researchers have proposed more advanced techniques to model and control for response styles.
Böckenholt (2012) demonstrated how an item response theory (IRT) model may be used to capture a response style process. This IRT model combined multinomial process tree models (Batchelder, 2010) and diagnostic measurement models (Rupp, Templin, & Henson, 2010) to measure both construct content and response styles. The procedure first requires a researcher to theorize the sequence a respondent uses to decide a response option, and then empirically test for the fit of the hypothesized sequence with real data. Later researchers used Böckenholt's original approach to assess the dimensionality of a multidimensional construct (Khorramdel & von Davier, 2014; von Davier & Khorramdel, 2013). In general, the advanced statistical procedures introduced by Böckenholt (2012) do not absolutely require a researcher to have dedicated measures to capture each response style in the survey construction stage. Nevertheless, the use of the advanced IRT model requires very large sample size (e.g., more than 1,000 respondents) to be stable.
Finally, Bolt et al. (2014) proposed the use of anchoring vignettes to correct the data for response style. In this procedure, respondents read a number of vignettes. Each vignette is a detailed description and thus all respondents are assumed to perceive it in the same way. For example, a vignette may describe an employee who always plans ahead so that they will complete all their work on time; they think carefully before promising anything. Based on this vignette, the employee should be rated as extremely conscientious, but a respondent with midpoint response style may select Neutral as response. With a large number of vignettes, participant differences in how response options are interpreted will be recorded, and this information can be used to control for multiple response styles simultaneously.
Future Directions
Despite the abundance of techniques to measure and control for response styles, there are still unanswered questions and more research work needs to be done. First, more effort is required to simplify the application of statistical control techniques. Advanced IRT models (Böckenholt, 2012; Bolt et al., 2014) are not used as commonly as they should be because they often require researchers to understand complex statistical models. With the advent of modern statistical software such as the Mplus program, implementation of these techniques is easier, but they still require substantial effort to understand the statistics. Therefore, development of user-friendly tools to implement these statistical procedures will help make their use more widespread.
Second, researchers seem to be more interested in developing new modeling techniques to control for a response style than validating such techniques. This is problematic, as an applied researcher may trust an advanced technique in recovering parameter estimates at the population level even when the technique has questionable validity. Therefore, in addition to developing novel statistical procedures, researchers need to examine the validity of different techniques with both simulated (Maydeu-Olivares & Coffman, 2006) and empirical data (Kam & Zhou, 2015) to find out which works best in which situation. A more sophisticated technique is better than a simpler one (e.g., partial correlations) only when the former yields results with greater validity.
Finally, future research needs to investigate the nature of response styles. There has been an uneven amount of research across different response styles. We know much more about the potential causes of acquiescence and extreme response styles (Johnson et al., 2005) than careless response style (Huang et al., 2015; Kam & Meyer, 2015). For example, we know that acquiescence is related to agreeableness (Couch & Keniston, 1960, 1961) and that extreme response style is related to power distance and masculinity (Johnson et al., 2005). However, issues related to careless responding are still severely under-researched. Knowing who is more likely to exhibit each particular response style will help researchers minimize their negative impact at the data collection stage.
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text:
Richard Dent talks about life after football, concussions
"The Sackman's comin', I'm your man Dent. If the quarterback's slow, he's gonna get bent." -- Richard Dent's introduction in "Super Bowl Shuffle" video by 1985 Chicago Bears.
With his team record 137½ sacks, Richard "The Sackman" Dent has "bent" more opposing team quarterbacks than any other Chicago Bear in the franchise's 93-year history.
Dent book signingsRichard Dent will be appearing at suburban stores to sign copies of his book "Blood, Sweat & Bears: Putting a 'Dent' in the Game I Love," written with Fred Mitchell and published by Ascend Books.
Friday, Dec. 7: 10:30 a.m. until noon at Costco, 2900 Patriot Blvd., Glenview.
Saturday, Dec. 8: 2 to 3 p.m. at Anderson's Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.
The lightning-quick 6-foot-5, 265-pound defensive end badgered, battered, bruised and brutalized a bevy of quarterbacks during a 15-year NFL career that earned him a Super Bowl Most Valuable Player trophy and a bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"Be careful. It's broken. I'm sorry," Dents says as he hands over his MVP award.
The silver football atop the trophy came loose a while ago, but Dent cradles it easily in the same massive hands that blocked a pass, forced two fumbles and were part of a couple of sacks during the Bears 46-10 Super Bowl XX victory over the New England Patriots.
That award, his Hall of Fame bust and dozens of photographs, trophies and other trophies fill a dark, wood-paneled room off the foyer of the grand home in a gated community in Long Grove where Dent lives with his longtime girlfriend DeEtta Jones and sons, R.J., 7, and Shiloh, 4.
The accommodating Dent talks about his glory years, football, his new book "Blood, Sweat & Bears: Putting a 'Dent' in the Game I Love," the devastating hits he delivered, his many issues with coach Mike Ditka, his fellow Monsters of the Midway, football-related injuries and the recent attention paid to concussions that have knocked the Bears' Devin Hester, Jay Cutler and Shea McClellin out of games this season.
But if you didn't know what he used to do for a living, you might think Dent ran an art gallery.
"I was a commercial art major in college," says Dent, who still expresses a strong fondness for Tennessee State University, the small historically black school in Nashville where he became a college football legend. Dent's home is filled with paintings and pieces of sculpture, many of them created by African-American artists. Some depict life in the South, where Dent grew up with three older brothers, three younger brothers and a sister.
"This is by Ernie Barnes," says Dent, standing before a painting titled "He Ain't Heavy" that depicts an arm reaching down to lift up another man. An animated Dent thumbs through a nearby coffee-table book about the life of Barnes as he talks about how the former NFL player remains better known for his stylized paintings of football scenes, black jazz clubs and the works of art featured on the TV show "Good Times."
"I like to paint," adds Dent, who notes his paintings aren't good enough to hang with the collection he boasts.
On another wall hangs a signed Nelson Mandela lithograph titled "The Window," which shows prison bars partially obscuring a grassy field and mountain. "That's what he saw," Dent says of the famed anti-apartheid activist who spent 27 years in prison before becoming president of South Africa.
Dent knows the quiet grace of his art collection wouldn't have been possible without his career of administering violent hits that no doubt delivered a few concussions to his opponents.
"I wasn't out to hurt guys and hurt them for the rest of their lives," Dent says. But the health of the quarterback was the other team's "responsibility," not his.
Dent remembers a game when New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms was talking trash to the Bears defense. The next play, Dent delivered a rejoinder.
"I hit him right in the earhole," says Dent, who often launched himself at quarterbacks. "He went down and they had to walk him off the field. I said, 'Hey, Phil, shake out those cobwebs and get back out here.'"
The NFL doles out fines for illegal hits, but the only penalty levied against Dent came after his playing days when he was a coach in street clothes on the sidelines. A Denver player was about to collide with him and Dent instinctively responded with a forearm shiver that dropped the running back to the ground and earned Dent a $7,500 fine.
Concussions are part of the game, says Dent, who delivered a number of them.
"I actually received them, too," he notes. "It's not something that I kept track of. I had them in practice. I had them in games. It was a common thing."
When Dent, who turns 52 on Dec. 13 (the same day his dad, Horace, turns 80), struggles to come up with the name of a former Bears tight end, he admits that he worries if his memory lapse is just a quirk, a natural part of aging or a symptom of brain damage caused by football collisions.
Long after their careers had ended, Kansas City Chiefs running back Christian Okoye, whose 260-pounds and punishing running style earned him the nickname "The Nigerian Nightmare," had his own nightmares of one tackle by Dent.
"That was the hardest hit I ever had," Okoye told him.
"Let me tell you something," Dent replied. "That was the hardest hit I ever had."
Barely able to stand up after that collision, Dent's body instinctively made the trip back to the Bears huddle the way a tired person behind a wheel might not remember the route he drove to get home, Dent says. He figures that had to be one of his undiagnosed concussions.
"They asked you three questions. If you got two right, you were back in the game," Dent says.
He recently agreed to donate his brain to the medical staff studying the brains of former football players, such as Dent's friend and former teammate Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011.
"We used to play cards at Dave's house in Mundelein," recalls Dent, who was a pallbearer at Duerson's funeral.
The NFL should provide health insurance and care for players as long as they live, Dent argues. As founder and president of RLD Resources, a company that specializes in energy products as well as voice and data solutions, Dent says he can't stay on the computer or read a book for more than an hour without getting headaches.
"I'm sure it's football related," he says.
The former athlete works with a doctor to control his blood pressure and weight, which he describes as "a biscuit or two" under 300 pounds.
In 1997, after playing at least 18 holes of golf alongside Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan in Libertyville, Dent says the trio and one of Jordan's buddies went to Jordan's house and played a pickup basketball game. Dent says he was sore and tired before that game began, while Jordan finished their game and then scored 55 points in a Bulls playoff game that night.
Dent no longer attempts basketball and says he needs days to recover from the pains caused by golf. Having weaned himself off the narcotic painkillers used when he was playing, Dent says he takes over-the-counter painkillers for his lingering aches, including the big toe that popped out of joint during a 1990 game and was treated with a painkilling shot.
"My foot bothers me, circulation, shoulders, elbow, back, hip, head trauma and memory loss," Dent says in listing his ills. He tolerates pain.
In college, after he broke a bone in his left arm and looked as if he'd miss the first game his mother, Mary, would see in person, Dent convinced the coach to play him at the other end of the line where he recorded three sacks with his right arm.
"I don't have any regrets about it," Dent says of his career in a violent sport. "The game gave me many opportunities. I'd play the game again the same way. I'd have played it for free, but they were giving us checks."
His late mother, whose portrait hangs on one wall, worked as a nanny, maid and cook for white families in their home near Atlanta. "If you saw the movie 'The Help,' that's her," says Dent, a self-described "momma's boy" who put pressure on himself to please her. Drugs and violence were a much bigger threat than concussions in his neighborhood. One of Dent's brothers has been in and out of prison.
Dent has two daughters in college from his first marriage, and his 7-year-old son has just started begging to play football. Dent, who didn't start playing football until his junior year of high school, says his boy is too young for football now. Coaches, young players and parents need to know the symptoms of concussions, Dent stresses.
While he'd like to see the NFL take care of players' health during and after their careers, Dent says he doesn't think concussions and traumatic injuries can be eliminated from the game.
"You propel your body in ways that put you in harm's way, but that's the glory part of the game," he says. Car manufacturers constantly make safety improvements and yet people still get injured and killed in crashes, he notes.
"Athletes want to do what they do," Dent says of football players. "It's a collision sport and it's impossible to make it safe."
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text:
State Superintendent Baesler gives UND lecture at the Empire Arts Center and online
Posted on 10/29/2013
The College of Education & Human Development at the University of North Dakota invites the general public to participate in the newly created "Educate Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere (AAA) Lecture Series." The first speaker is Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota superintendent of schools, and she will be joined by a fourth-grade class from Lake Agassiz Elementary School in Grand Forks. The lecture will be on TUESDAY, Oct. 29, 1:30 p.m., at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks.
To action the live stream of the lecture go to http://education.und.edu/baesler.cfm
A mission of the AAA Lecture Series is to learn about providing access across the rural state of North Dakota, and across the country. These lectures will be live streamed to other universities and colleges and even some schools in the state. A viewing party will be held on the UND campus to give students an opportunity to hear Superintendent Baesler speak without having to leave campus.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to combine teaching moments' for lecture attendees and the fourth grade students who will be joining me," Baesler said. "I always enjoy time spent with students and look forward to sharing this material with both audiences."
With today's innovative technologies and advanced learning platforms, anyone, anywhere, anytime in North Dakota and around the world, can get an education no matter their circumstance.
"We are living in the 21st century," said Bob Hill, dean of the UND College of Education and Human Development. "We are surrounded by opportunities for education simply by the technology that exists in our everyday world. The College of Education and Human Development is dedicated to extending the benefits of education to everyone in the state of North Dakota who desires to learn. The AAA Lecture Series is one way of looking at what opportunities exist."
Baesler was elected to the Mandan Public School Board in 2004 and served as its president from 2006 until stepping down after she was elected state superintendent. She served as southwest regional director for the North Dakota School Boards Association, was a governor-appointed member of the North Dakota Educational Technology Council, and has more than 10 years of experience working with North Dakota's state legislators and congressional delegation on public education policy.
A native of Flasher, N.D., Superintendent Baesler, earned two Associate degrees from Bismarck State College, her bachelor's degree in Education from Minot State University and her master's degree in Education and Library Information Technology from Valley City State University.
Superintendent Baesler makes her home in Mandan, where she serves her community as a board member for several local nonprofit organizations.
The historic Empire Arts Center is located in downtown Grand Forks on the corner of DeMers Avenue and N. Fifth Street. Information of the lecture location can be found at http://www.empireartscenter.com/ or by calling 701.746.5500.
For more information on this lecture series, contact Jena Pierce with the College of Education and Human Development at 701.777.0844 or 701.777.2674, or email to firstname.lastname@example.com.
About the College of Education & Human Development
The UND College of Education and Human Development has over 1,400 undergraduate and graduate students in five departments including Counseling Psychology and Community Services; Educational Foundations and Research; Educational Leadership; Kinesiology and Public Health Education, Exercise Science and Wellness; and Teaching and Learning. The mission is fostering healthy human development and learning across the lifespan.
David L. Dodds
Media Relations/Writer & Editor
Office of University Relations
264 Centennial Drive Stop 7144
Grand Forks, ND 58202-7144
701.777.5529 | 701.777.4616 fax
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text:
2013 State of the University Address
State of the University
April 18, 2013
Almost exactly a year ago I was immensely fortunate to be offered the chance to return to Saint John's as president. I was deeply honored to have an opportunity that I had not even dreamed possible. Over the past year the pleasures of returning to this exceptional community have exceeded even my high expectations.
One of the obvious questions that came up during the search process and often subsequently is, "What is my vision for Saint John's University?" In a world of higher education that often feels like it is undergoing fundamental change and sometimes feels like it is under siege, it is obviously important for us to have a vision for the future and a plan for how to achieve it, but it is equally important to be sober and thoughtful as we craft that vision and not be swayed by the passions of the moment.
Of course we need to anticipate the future and understand what the next generation of students will want and need, but we must start with our values, remember our history and understand our strengths.
When I applied for this job, an important attraction was what I had experienced here as a student: Saint John's showed me what I was capable of and opened up opportunities that I never knew possible. Saint John's was a transformative experience for me. This was the vision of undergraduate education that I both experienced here and brought back to Saint John's when I returned.
But of course, any vision requires the work and support of the whole community, so one of my first jobs was to see how my vision aligned with that of the rest of the community. Toward this end:
•1. I have had the opportunity to meet with many of you on campus-students, staff and faculty.
•2. I reviewed our strategic plan and our campaign documents.
•3. I have talked to many students, prospective students and parents.
•4. I have met with alumni from around the country and world.
What I have discovered is a powerful consistency in the understanding of the mission of Saint John's. The community here and beyond Collegeville believes that the undergraduate experience at Saint John's is about transforming our students to help them lead lives filled with success and meaning, however they define those terms. And that this transformative outcome is based on four essential characteristics: we are a residential, liberal arts college, in the Catholic and Benedictine tradition.
My experiences over the past nine months have provided powerful evidence of the importance of each of these characteristics in that transformative education--both for our alumni and for our future students. Let me turn briefly to each of these parts of the Saint John's experience.
Residential community
Among the most active conversations in higher education today is what role technology in general and online education in particular will play in the future, but these conversations all too often ignore how much education takes place by bringing students together into a residential community. Place matters, as a review of some of the recent successes of our students reveals. Among the many extracurricular successes our students have had this year:
•1. A case study team placed third in a national competition in Washington D.C.
•2. Earlier this year The Record won several awards for college newspapers.
•3. The ROTC Fighting Saints coed marathon teams took 1st and 2nd in the recent Army Baatan Marathon in New Mexico.
•4. The Saint John's hockey team won the conference title and advanced to the NCAA tournament.
I could go on, but the point is that the learning that was part of all these activities took place because we brought students together into a residential community.
As impressive as these achievements were, the most powerful evidence of the essential role of a residential education came as a result of John Gagliardi's retirement, which prompted many conversations with alumni about John. To a man, what alumni talked about was not their on-field success, as impressive at it was, but about what playing for John taught them about life and about the deep friendships they formed on John's teams.
Collectively these experiences provide powerful evidence that a residential community is at the core of the transformative educational experience we provide.
Liberal Arts
A second important thread in conversations about higher education, especially in the midst of our economic slowdown, concerns the future of the liberal arts. Many educators and policymakers are suggesting that students need vocationally focused education to train them for specific jobs and careers and, by implication, that a broad-based liberal arts education does not serve students well. Again, my experiences over the past year argue strongly against this notion.
•1. This fall CSB and SJU were honored with the Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Globalization, which recognized the importance of helping students explore the wider world that they will be working and living in. Off-campus study does not focus on specific skills but many students and alumni have talked movingly about their experiences abroad that changed the direction of their professional lives and, more importantly, how they viewed the world.
•2. A Florida alum told of working on a governor's education policy panel that was narrowly focused on vocational training, yet he related how at his engineering and construction company the top four positions are held by liberal arts graduates.
•3. Another alum, a professor at MIT, stated that what his liberal arts education at Saint John's taught him was how to move across disciplines, adapt to changes in his profession and straddle the fields of engineering, media and literature.
•4. Finally, the biggest news story this year with a Saint John's connection offers further evidence of the value of the liberal arts. The appointment of Denis McDonough as President Obama's chief of staff garnered over 800 media stories, topping John Gagliardi's mere 600+. Denis was a history and Spanish double major at Saint John's, not exactly a vocational degree, yet his liberal arts experience has helped prepare him for success at the highest levels of government.
The irony of critiques of the liberal arts is that the very changes in the world that might seem to argue for more specialized training--new technologies, previously unknown industries, competition from abroad--actually remind us that the ability to adapt to change in an unpredictable future and to learn new things are among the most important skills we can impart to students, and that is exactly what a great liberal arts education does.
The third pillar of the Saint John's experience is our Catholic identity. At first glance, the political issues in MN this fall might suggest that this has been a challenging year to be a Catholic institution, but I think there were important ways in which that experience helped strengthen our identity. I was immensely proud of how we as a community handled the hard and often emotional marriage amendment conversation. We did well the three things that I think are incumbent upon us as a Catholic educational institution:
•1. We faithfully and respectfully presented Catholic teaching on this issue.
•2. We allowed all members of the community the freedom to express their views.
•3. Possibly most importantly, we used the opportunity to educate our students with the goal of developing, in Aquinas's words, "a well-formed conscience," capable of examining and responding to the many moral challenges life will present.
I know that our position did not make every one of our alumni and friends happy, but the fact that we made individuals on both sides of this particular debate unhappy was a nice reminder of the healthy diversity in our community. This diversity reflects the broader world and is not seen on all college campuses where orthodoxy can be enforced from the right or the left. The way in which we lived out our Catholic identity during these conversations should make our whole community proud.
Finally, the last pillar of the transformative Saint John's experience is the Benedictine tradition that formed us and informs our experiences daily. There are multiple facets of that tradition but the two that I want to focus on today are community and hospitality. Again, conversations with student, staff, faculty and alumni speak to the importance of our Benedictiness in the transformative education we provide.
•1. I have been meeting with faculty and staff throughout the year and many of you tell of knowing little of monks or the Benedictine tradition when arriving on campus with plans on staying 2 or 3 years, and now you are past 25, having found this community a very welcoming place to live out your professional lives.
•2. I had the opportunity to meet alumni in Hong Kong and Bahamas who movingly described how monks like Fr. Tom Thole transformed their lives and futures.
•3. I had dinner with students from South Central LA and Newark NJ who describe their experiences here in glowing terms.
•4. At an alumni event in Boston, I recently met an alum of Turkish descent from Pakistan who described himself as the first "Benedictine Muslim."
We have been welcoming people into this community for over 150 years - people from Little Falls and Okinawa and Ripon and Nassau. This hospitality is what makes everything else we aspire to possible.
Residential, liberal arts, Catholic and Benedictine-these traits define who we are in the past and the future.
We will obviously talk more about exactly how we will fulfill our residential, liberal arts, Catholic, and Benedictine mission in the months and years to come, but let me just make note of several important commitments we have already made in support of this vision. We recently authorized a capital campaign for the University in which the priorities are linked directly to the vision I have described. Briefly:
•1. We will make significant commitments to student development in a residential setting by significantly by upgrading our athletic facilities.
•2. We are committed to the Learning Commons project to enhance the pedagogies that are at the core of a great liberal arts education.
•3. When we restructured the legal relationship between the Abbey and the University the wise drafters of that agreement included a Sustaining Agreement, beyond the legal agreements, that binds us closely to the Abbey and our history. The Sustaining Agreement commits both sides to a number of important things including the establishment of a Task Force on the Abbey-University Relationship that will explicitly strengthen ties between the University and Abbey.
•4. We have made a number of other decisions in recent years, such as the four year residency requirement for students, establishing the Benedictine Institute, funding monks to explore roles in the University and a Benedictine preference policy in hiring that will assure that the Benedictine nature of this community stays strong.
So as we look to the future, the mission of Saint John's that has sustained us for over 150 years continues to be our vision going forward. We are a residential, liberal arts, Catholic, and Benedictine institution whose mission is to transform the lives of young men, and with our partner the College of Saint Benedict, young women.
This does not mean resting on our laurels, as we certainly have real challenges ahead (demographics, the engagement of young men, the higher education financial model) and the world around us changes constantly, but it means that we have a clear sense of who we are and what our mission is, which is a tremendous strength. We have creatively adapted throughout our long history even as we have maintained a consistent vision, and we will continue to do so.
As I look back over the past year, the single most powerful experience has been to be reminded of the consistency of our vision across students, staff, faculty, parents and alumni. I look forward to continuing to fulfill that mission for the 21st century with all of you and the many others in the Saint John's community. Thank you.
Michael Hemesath
Saint John's University


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Medical school expands Imi Ho'ola programUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Posted: May 7, 2010
The University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) announced today that the Imi Ho'ola Post-Baccalaurate Program, a 35 year-old project to bring disadvantaged students into medical school, is expanding to provide greater opportunities to recruit and retain Hawai'i physicians.
Imi Ho'ola, "Those Who Seek to Heal," is one of JABSOM's proudest achievements, a program that promotes diversity with solid, proven results. Imi Ho'ola annually recruits college graduates from socially, educationally or economically disadvantaged backgrounds into an intensive, 12-month course of study which strengthens their knowledge in science and the humanities and allows them to overcome challenges which may have prevented them from being accepted into medical school.
Students who successfully complete the year-long program are, in fact, admitted into the next JABSOM medical school class. Since it began, 204 students have become physicians through Imi Ho'ola, with amazing results:
- 40 percent are Native Hawaiians;
- 61 percent are practicing medicine in Hawai'i and the Pacific;
- 73 percent are in the critical shortage field of primary care medicine.
Imi Ho'ola has provided this opportunity annually to 10 students. "Expanding the Imi Ho'ola class of 2010-11 from 10 to 12 students is a great opportunity for our students and our community," announced Dr. Jerris Hedges, dean of JABSOM. "It sends a strong message that despite the economic downturn and necessary cuts to the UH Mānoa budget, JABSOM remains steadfast to its mission of promoting a diverse physician workforce for Hawai'i and the Pacific."
Dr. Hedges announced the Imi Ho'ola expansion today in welcoming remarks at He Huliau (A Turning Point), a conference of health professionals gathering to improve health equity among Native and Pacific Peoples. He Huliau is sponsored by the medical school's Department of Native Hawaiian Health, the Center for Native and Pacific Health Disparities Research and the Native Hawaiian Center of Excellence.
UH Mānoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw will address the conference on May 8. This year's conference is focused on Metabolic Syndrome and Health Equity. "Imi Ho'ola and He Huliau are important examples of the priority given to support diversity in education at UH Mānoa and in the state's work force," said Hinshaw.
Dr. Nanette Judd, Director of the Imi Ho'ola Post-Baccalaureate Program, noted the important role The Queen's Health System played in helping to generously support the program."My greatest reward is witnessing the success of Imi Ho'ola graduates who are now in practice in rural and underserved communities of Hawai'i," said Dr. Judd. Imi Ho'ola graduates include public servants like Dr. Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawai'i State Department of Health.
For additional information about Imi Ho'ola, visit: http://jabsom.hawaii.edu/jabsom/admissions/special.php.


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The leather used for Birkenstock is very high-quality, thick yet very supple with smooth leather having a uniform and very fine grain surface.
Apply a water and stain protector before wearing and after each clean. For cleaning regularly, use a soft dry cloth or if dampened allow to air-dry naturally away from direct heat.
The cork footbeds come with a light coating of sealant to prevent them from drying out. When the cork no longer looks shiny apply a thin coat of cork sealant to prolong their life. For regular cleaning wipe with a dampened cloth or soft bristle brush. Allow to air-dry away from direct heat. Wearing these on most days will retain a lot of moisture so remove regularly for airing.
Birkenstocks are designed to be roomy this is needed to perform the natural rolling motion of the foot without restrictions - just as if you were barefoot.
Your toes and heel should not touch the rim of your shoes while standing in them. Most people are fine with a regular fitting, but if your foot moves side to side when you walk and adjusting any straps does not help, a narrow fitting may be more suitable.
Please use the charts as a general guideline to determine your size. Your exact size will ultimately depend on the structure of your individual foot and the style of the shoe.


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Sun readers share their views on Benghazi, the election, taxes and GRU.
Benghazi wasn't a foreign policy scandal
Republican partisans portray the Benghazi killings as a foreign-policy scandal. Let me remind these partisans what a real foreign-policy scandal looks like.
During Reagan's second term, a rogue White House group broke a solemn promise never to negotiate with terrorists when it secretly traded arms for hostages with Iran. Besides arming Iran, it also violated several laws by funneling the profits to a misbegotten Central American war.
This secret plan went on for years. Nevertheless, the quick-to-forgive American people gave free passes to a president and vice president who claimed total ignorance about these shenanigans.
Given that Gen. Petraeus (a Republican) has testified that the White House did not mislead the public for political purposes, Benghazi is a tragedy, but certainly not a scandal like Iran-Contra.
Further, I would remind those who desperately wish otherwise that, lacking access to classified information, they have no clue about how events actually unfolded.
Bob Palmer,
Things are looking pretty good here
Sounds as if my friend Wilbur Holloway (Voice, 11-18) has drank the bitter loser poison, too. This potent brew not only heightens the tendency to be ungracious about being defeated, but seems to wildly distort one's internal fact checker.
Businesses will flee and prospective ones will stay away? Guess he hasn't heard about Butler Plaza and Fractures expanding, Prioria Robotics, Trader Joe's and Mindtree locating here, and any number of innovative local start-ups sprouting everywhere one looks.
Our unemployment rate is the lowest in the state, home sales are increasing and our livability rating continues to rise.
Holloway also cites our "well-documented over-regulation," while typically failing to cite a single instance of it.
We're staying right here, but if Holloway is this scared he might want to flee to one of those places where others of like mind live: Arkansas, Tennessee, or perhaps Mississippi.
Greg McGann,
It's not the taxes, it's excessive taxes
In response to Alan Miller's letter to The Sun (11-18) about taxes:
It's true, we have to pay taxes. But there's a difference between paying taxes you're supposed to pay and paying excessive taxes from tax-and-spend liberals, which is what we're stuck with at all levels of government.
Miller's attitude is the perfect example of why Alachua County is in the mess it is in, with the highest property taxes in the state, unfriendly business climate, and soon to have one of the highest utility bills in the state when the nice biomass plant goes online.
Indeed, this is the type of attitude that has resulted in this nation being in the same type of mess, and it's about to get a lot worse with the re-election of Obama.
Brian Taylor,
Where do I sign the 'free GRU' petition?
In the boiler room of the original city power plant there is a bronze plaque with my grandfather's name on it. Apparently he was a longtime member of the city's utilities board back in the '20s and '30s.
Not hard to figure what he would think today of recent disastrous GRU management decisions. I hear up in heaven they call him "Spinning Stringfellow."
Say, where is that petition?
Jim Stringfellow,
It's time to tone down political extremism
I am amazed when I read some of the extreme letters that have been printed in The Gainesville Sun of late. Some going so far as to state how much our president "hates" America.
It made me realize the national election results did expose one thing: That these extremists on both sides, who are afforded so much exposure to espouse their hateful message by the print media, are in the minority.
It's comforting to know that no matter how extreme both ends of the political spectrum can be in an election year, there are still enough citizens, who comprise the moderate silent majority and vote, to quiet these hate mongers at the polls.
Mike Hoctor,
Seriously folks, the election is over now
Okay folks, the election is over and the best candidates won or lost, (depending on which side of the fence you stand on), so stop gloating or sniveling and get on with your lives.
Terry Martin-Back,


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Humsafar Episode 14 – HUM Tv Drama
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kale crisps
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Author Notes: Kale is such a super versatile veggie. You can stir fry, eat it raw or bake to create kale chips--which is my sure-fire way to get my son to eat kale. It's so simple that not only will my son eat it, he can make it himself too. Sometimes I top pizzas with this for an added crunch and greens. —edamame2003
Serves: 2
bunch kale (lacinato works well)
teaspoon salt
tablespoon olive oil
lemon juice
- separate the kale leaves from the rib and tear into 'chip'-sized pieces
- after washing and drying the kale, add salt and massage the kale for about a minute, evenly distributing the salt.
- let the kale sit for about 10 minutes.
- mix in the olive oil and lemon juice to coat the leaves.
- place on a baking tray (I line mine with parchment paper) and bake at 350 for 10 minutes or until crisp.
- This recipe was entered in the contest for Your Best Greens
More Great Recipes:
Vegetable|5 Ingredients or Fewer|Gluten-Free|Vegan|Side|Snack


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MMK collection Fashion Handbag (14-7042)~Gold-Tone Satchel Handbag for Women` Signature fashion Designer Purse~ Perfect Beautiful Designer Purse & Women Satchel Purse14-7042-br 14-7042-br -
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~This is a such beautiful Satchel Handbag for your Daily Use Highly Fashionable and Great Quality you will make great use out of this 4 season Women ~Limited EDTION - Macro M.Kerry Handbag Collaborative Design (It's not the MichaelKors handbag)
Designer Handbag feature is Double Zip Front Wall pocket and Gold Tone Logo. Carry this roomy satchel by the handles to the office, or use the shoulder strap which is impress A signature design Logo.Get carried away with this signature Faux leather satchel, a forever favorite inspired by a vintage silhouette. It features sophisticated accents for errand running and nights on the town!
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Mattie Shoemaker and Mildred Shoemaker Edmonds, March 23, 1979. Interview H-0046.
Sisters and Mill Workers in Burlington, North Carolina: Sisters Mattie Shoemaker and Mildred Shoemaker Edmonds discuss their experiences at a textile mill in Burlington, North Carolina.
Interviewee: Mattie Shoemaker, Mildred Shoemaker Edmonds Interviewer: Mary Murphy
Duration: 01:39:10 Annotated Excerpts: Listen to and read all 8 excerpts.


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Meaning "submerged crocodile" in Yucatan Mayan, Lamanai is perhaps the most fascinating of all of Mayan sites in Belize if only because it is not yet completely uncovered. See history in the ... Read more
Caracol is the single largest archeological site in Belize, and one of the biggest Mayan structures in the world. Discovered in 1938 by loggers, the Classic Period complex covers over 30mi (48km) ... Read more
Overlooking the beautiful Mopan River from a stunning hilltop, the ruins at Xunantunich are some of the most visited Mayan sites in the world. Located in the Cayo region, Xunantunich, which means ... Read more
Altun Ha
Altun Ha is the site of the ruins of an ancient Mayan city, and covers about 5mi (8km) squared. The central area of the site has over 500 historic structures to visit, mostly built during Maya ... Read more
Belize City Cruise Port
With more than its fair share of natural delights, Belize is paradise for outdoor-adventure enthusiasts, and Belize City is the gateway to its spoils. Shore excursions include river kayaking, ... Read more
Belize Zoo
In 1983 Richard Foster came to Belize to film a wildlife documentary. Over a dozen animals used in filming became partly tame by the time shooting wrapped, so Sharon Matola, the American biologist ... Read more
Community Baboon Sanctuary
Through the combined efforts of eight different villages, the Community Baboon Sanctuary is dedicated to protecting and preserving Belize's population of the Black Howler Monkey. The 18mi (29km) ... Read more
Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary
Established in 1984, Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary is widely recognized to be one of the finest havens for bird-watching in all of Central America. Built on a network of lagoons, swamps, and ... Read more
Government House
Government House, also known as the House of Culture, is often called the most beautiful colonial building in Belize City. The stately mansion was built in 1812 for the purpose of housing the ... Read more
Lighthouse Reef
Lighthouse Reef is an incredible atoll, a coral island encircling a lagoon, in the Caribbean Sea, and was made famous by legendary sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, who ... Read more
St. John's Cathedral
St. John's Cathedral dates back to the early 1800s and is the oldest Anglican church in Central America. The cathedral, located in Belize City, is not only a place where the congregation still ... Read more


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