Brent Edward

• PhD
• Chair at University of Missouri

A housing assessment centered on issues of safety, function, and comfort was conducted in the homes of 90 older adults. Findings document the frequency of home-environment liabilities and the location of housing inadequacies. Housing inadequacies relating to gross motor safety are the greatest concern and occur most frequently in the bathroom and k...

The gap between gerontological design research and interior design practice that can apply this knowledge is addressed. A validation study was conducted of the Elderly Resident Housing Assessment Program (ERHAP) to test the hypothesis that a computerized artificial intelligence system is a comprehensive and reliable home evaluation tool for identif...

This study examines student responses to the question, “What circumstances, if any, could make cheating justified?” It then assesses how well those responses can be classified by existing theories and categories that emerge from a qualitative analysis of the data. Results show considerable support for techniques of neutralization, partial support f...

This article introduces a new theoretical concept for risk assessment using social indicators and suicide acceptability variables to determine the prevalence rate of suicidal ideation and behavior within a group. Our approach focuses on the interplay of individual, social, and structural levels as possible dimensions of risk assessment for suicidal...

The rise of a new class of collaboration tools should encourage us to examine parts of the collaborative process that may have been less valuable to examine in the past. Specifically, this research examines a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment that makes possible new modalities for student-instructor collaboration. In part...

The authors would like to thank both Martine van Selm and Jan Kleinnijenhuis for their thoughtful comments regarding our paper. They each raise a number of interesting points. The comments focus broadly on three areas, and we will structure our response around those three areas. We will first address comments on the literature review, then the Veyo...

The recent mass digitization of text data has led to a need to efficiently and effectively deal with the mountain of textual data that is generated. Digitized text is increasingly in the form of digitized data flows (Brent, 2008). Digitized data flows are non-static streams of generated content – including twitter, electronic news, etc. An oft-cite...

This chapter examines online collaboration in a distributed e-learning environment. The authors describe the emerging technology of Web-based automated essay grading that provides extensive real-time data for monitoring and enhancing e-learning activities. They examine data from student use of this software service in a large introductory social sc...

The goal of this special issue was to include high-quality articles covering the complete spectrum of computing in sociology. The result is nine creative articles from three continents addressing a wide range of issues, including inequality in the form of the so-called digital divide, the use of computers in qualitative research and in teaching soc...

There are few tasks in research more onerous than coding qualitative data. Ironically, the coded data in a qualitative research database themselves represent a great store of knowledge largely untapped by traditional qualitative analysis programs. By "feeling the beat" in data and by using the information that is implicit in coded cases (the metakn...

The capacity to explain important elements of social life is central both to the development of sociological theory and to teaching sociology. This research seeks to expand our understanding of sociological explanation through a computational approach. Explanations commonly encountered in introductory sociology texts are used to develop a typology...

Intelligent agents offer a promising new means for modeling social interaction. This article reviews the literature on intelligent agents, focusing on the development of agents to model various forms of social interaction. It provides a framework for understanding the variety of work on agents and how that work applies to social interaction. This f...

College administrators around the world are embracing the use of computer technology in the classroom; strongly encouraging faculty to incorporate these new technologies into their teaching; and redirecting institutional resources to provide digital classrooms, student computer labs, fiber-optic backbones, and Internet access. Yet, our understandin...

L'A. s'interesse aux nouveaux modes de communications. Il estime que ceux-ci vont apporter des changements considerables sur le plan social y compris dans la vie quotidienne. Il affirme que les structures sociales qui ne sont pas concernees par ces changements sont celles qui sont dans une situation de declin sur le plan economique et culturel. Il...

To develop a system for clinical performance improvement through rule-based analysis of medical practice patterns and individualized distribution of published scientific evidence. The Quality Feedback Expert System (QFES) was developed by applying a Level-5 expert system shell to generate clinical direct reports for performance improvement. The sys...

This paper describes a computer program for disambiguating the meaning of verbal acts in social interaction. The program was implemented using artificial intelligence techniques, representing utterances by frames, designing separate agents employing procedural rules to infer values of each coding dimension, and sharing information through a blackbo...

Sociologists have begun to explore the gains for theory and research that might be achieved by artificial intelligence technology: symbolic processors, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and classifier systems. The first major accomplishments of artificial social intelligence (ASI) have been in the realm of theory, where these tec...

Several studies documented substantial variation in medical practice patterns, but physicians often do not have adequate information on the cumulative clinical and financial effects of their decisions. The purpose of developing an expert system for the analysis of clinical practice patterns was to assist providers in analyzing and improving the pro...

This paper proposes a computational approach to sociology. I argue that computational sociology is not just another specialty within an already fragmented discipline but that it provides an opportunity to integrate traditionally disparate approaches within sociology and provides a foundation for transforming sociology in the 2Ist century. I discuss...

A sample of 253 children of alcoholics (COAs) and 237 children of nonalcoholics (non-COAs) were compared on alcohol and drug use, psychopathology, cognitive ability, and personality. COAs reported more alcohol and drug problems, stronger alcohol expectancies, higher levels of behavioral undercontrol and neuroticism, and more psychiatric distress in...

Rapid advances in sociological computing are changing virtually every aspect of scholarly sociological work. These changes offer an opportunity for sociologists to improve the quality of their work and bring new insights and approaches to bear on important sociological problems. Nevertheless, sociologists display a profound ambivalence toward compu...

The state of a social science discipline should be judged by the vitality of its computing subfield, which is reflected in the quality of its software. Computing progress in sociology is evident in new software for theory, data management, and instruction. Constraints including inadequate resources, problematic software, and inadequate rewards for...

This paper discusses issues in developing computerized expert systems to advise students and researchers in the design and conduct of social science research projects. The presentation briefly discusses expert systems and key knowledge representation and reasoning strategies from the field of artificial intelligence. Next it discusses some problems...

A rule-based expert system is used to implement a statistical program capable of helping users select and interpret statistical analyses appropriately. Advantages and problems of this approach are discussed.

This paper describes "ERVING", a computer program that uses artificial intelligence techniques to teach students to reason sociologically from Goffman's dramaturgical perspective. The "ERVING" program is one of the first applications of artificial intelligence in sociology and perhaps the first designed to teach sociological reasoning. This paper d...

This article discusses the role artificial intelligence techniques can play in developing sociological theories. First, artificial intelligence is briefly introduced, and key features that distinguish this from other computing approaches are identified. Then several recent attempts to employ artificial intelligence programming strategies to assist...

This clinical trial tested the efficacy of a psychosocial intervention in a panel of white adults with a high level of recent stressful life changes and weak social supports. One hundred seventy users of three family practices were randomly assigned to receive a six-month educational program provided by a nurse practitioner or to a control group. O...

Sixty-eight interviews of hospitalized patients by freshmen medical students were examined for common response patterns. Response profiles were constructed for each medical student and subjected to cluster analysis. Four common response patterns were identified: Questioning Facilitators, Declaring Facilitators, Elaborators, and Prompters. The four...

This paper examines knowledge-based systems (KBS''s) and considers how they may be applied in the social sciences. KBS''s are programs which use artificial intelligence techniques to solve complex problems. Characteristics of KBS''s are illustrated with an example knowledge-based program (N-ACT) written in PROLOG which uses Goffman''s dramaturgical...

The 63-item Duke UNC Health Profile assesses four dimensions of health status: presence of symptoms, physical function, social function, and emotional function. This instrument was developed for use in primary care research. We have tested its value in a primary care setting among individuals with suspected increased risk of health problems. In a g...

The incidence and pattern of self-reported illness were studied over a six-month period in panels of 292 women and 188 men categorized by their experience of stressful life changes and their perceived supportive relationships. Men and women with more than average stressful changes had a risk of illness 1.6 and 1.8 times that reported by those with...

This paper describes several techniques for using computers to assist with literature reviews. It identifies various literature review tasks, then discusses how existing programs can be used to address them. Programs discussed include word processors, qualitative analysis programs, content analysis programs, file management systems, database manage...

This paper reviews three approaches to using computers to perform qualitative analysis. These approaches are distinguished by the way they represent knowledge in the computer—as text, things, or concepts—and the operations they permit on that knowledge. These approaches are compared and the advantages and disadvantages of each are identified based...

Analyzes the relation between political preferences and expectations, using data from national surveys done before the past 8 US presidential elections by the Survey Research Center/Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan. In each year, people tended to expect their preferred candidate to win by a ratio of about 4 to 1. This rela...

Relational data base procedures developed in computer science for constructing more efficient data bases are described and shown to be useful for concept formation in the social sciences. These procedures take advantage of dependencies among concepts to develop a com prehensive conceptual framework reflecting the natural structure of those concepts...

For the past decade the Interact System Model (ISM) of Fisher and Hawes (1971) has been used in conjunction with traditional statistical tests of fit of discrete-time, discrete-state Markov models to examine small group processes of communication. The authors argue that the ISM is an inappropriate model of interpersonal and noninterpersonal communi...

Summarizes research on placement of candidates on issues and discusses methodological problems in the detection of assimilation and contrast effects. An agreement coefficient, weighted kappa, is offered as an alternative to the standard procedures. Data from 1976 and 1980 election studies (Center for Political Studies; 1979, 1981) are analyzed by c...

Analyzed the attribution of attitudes to groups based on the 1976 national survey of US adults by the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies, which included 2,248 respondents. The analysis attempted to integrate F. Heider's (1946, 1958) P-O-X model and concepts of unit and sentiment relations, M. Sherif and C. Hovland's (1961) concep...

Scholars agree that a preoccupation of police is the maintenance of their authority during encounters with civilians. There is little knowledge of how they seek to do this. Using a subset of process data from a large, quantitative, observational field study of police, the authors analyze it from the perspective of general systems theory. They find...

On June 30,1976, Missouri became the only state in the United States not having a certificate of need program to drop out of the 1122 Program for regulating capital expenditure and service changes in hospitals and nursing homes. This presented a unique opportunity for studying the impact of regulation and deregulation upon hospitals and nursing hom...

Smallest space analysis, a statistical technique for creating a spatial representation of data, is examined to assess its usefulness for analyzing use-of-space data. The assumptions and the logic of the technique are discussed. This technique is illustrated with an application to use-of-space data. Smallest space analysis is found to be a promising...

This article deals with information transmissions between police and suspects in channel and net subsystems which convey symbolic information among persons in a community, a system at the level of the organization. Social psychologists have assumed that the sequence of symbolic acts between persons is a process, i.e., a sequence in which some stabl...

Analyzed data obtained from a nationwide probability sample of 1,673 adults in a 1968 presidential election study by P. Converse et al to determine whether social judgment theory and balance theory could help to account for variations in the estimates of policy positions taken by candidates in the election. It was found that Ss tended to assimilate...

Thesis (M.A.)--Univ of Missouri, 1972. Includes bibliographical references. Microfilm.

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