Health outcomes research applies a wide range of methods to identify optimal approaches to determine optimal approaches to determine the effects of healthcare interventions and policies. Critical evaluation skills are necessary to navigate the evidence and identify studies that should influence clinical decision making and policy. A hierarchical “pyramid of evidence” that emphasizes randomized ...

It is often argued that experiments are strong on causal identification (internal validity) but weak on generalizability (external validity). One widely accepted way to limit threats to external validity is to incorporate as much variation in the background conditions and in the covariates as possible through replication. Another strategy is to make the theoretical foundations of the experiment...

Purpose There is an apparent convention within both consequential and attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) to assume a 1:1 substitution ratio between functionally equivalent product systems. However, this convention may not be compatible with the purpose of consequential LCA, which is to model the actual consequences of the decision at hand. This paper explores the implications of the conv...

This paper attempts to present the Taoist understanding of evil. In the Taoist tradition, especially in Tao Te Ching, evil is divided into two categories: causal evil and consequential evil. Causal evils are those evils that are said to be the causes of other evils; consequential evils are those that are said to be the consequences of the causal evils. Causal evils originate from human will, an...

Three studies were conducted to examine the validity of the four versions of BIATs that are supposed to measure the same construct but differ in shared focal category. Study 1 investigated the criterion validity of four BIATs measuring attitudes toward flower versus insect. Study 2 examined the experimental sensitivity of four BIATs by considering attitudes toward induced ingroup versus outgrou...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab)...

This paper discusses two conventions pertaining to the study of computer game addiction that are rarely discussed. Traditionally when addictions are assessed, it is not customary for the researcher to be concerned with whether or not the addiction causes harm; or in other words: whether the addiction adds more to the overall life quality than it subtracts. Similarly, it is not customary to ask ...