Jamie DeCoster

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Verified

Jamie verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Associate Research Professor at University of Virginia

Researchers presenting quantitative studies commonly justify their design and analytic choices. There is, however, a crucial part of the research method that is commonly overlooked: validating the data under analysis. Valid data is necessary to derive valid inferences from research and can only be guaranteed through data validation. Despite the imp...

In an era marked by rapid technological advancements, ChatGPT emerges as a revolutionary tool in educational research. This article delves into the operational mechanisms and practical applications of ChatGPT, highlighting its potential to enhance research efficiency and foster innovative thinking. A significant focus is placed on “prompt engineeri...

Researchers commonly explore their data in multiple ways before deciding which analyses they will include in the final versions of their papers. While this improves the chances of researchers finding publishable results, it introduces an “opportunistic bias,” such that the reported relations are stronger or otherwise more supportive of the research...

Psychological researchers create a large number of files as part of their work, including study stimuli, assessment forms, data sets, analytic output, and manuscripts. We argue that it is fundamentally important that psychologists develop systematic ways of archiving these files. A well-designed file archive can greatly improve the efficiency of lo...

Despite many articles reporting the problems of dichotomizing continuous measures, researchers still commonly use this practice. The authors' purpose in this article was to understand the reasons that people still dichotomize and to determine whether any of these reasons are valid. They contacted 66 researchers who had published articles using dich...

Addressing global concerns about youth mental health requires understanding longitudinal pathways to psychological maladjustment among diverse youth. Hostile attribution bias (HAB) and hostile rumination (HR) are cognitive vulnerabilities associated with multiple forms of psychological maladjustment among diverse youth. This study longitudinally ex...

Previous research has established the benefits of utility-value interventions in improving students’ motivation and achievement outcomes. However, further investigation is needed to understand the heterogeneity of intervention effects and identify the contexts within which these interventions are more effective. Accordingly, in the present study, w...

We measured expectancy, value, and cost 10 times over a 10-week introductory statistics course (N = 219) to examine their overall trajectory as well as individual (between-student) differences and situational (within-stu- dent) variability. First, our findings revealed an initial decline in expectancy and value and an initial increase in cost. Seco...

This study used a person-centered approach to identify school readiness profiles in a sample of kindergartners (n=1,826) from a large and diverse school district in the United States. Using latent profile analyses and multi-level modeling, we examined three aims: 1) whether patterns of readiness skills at kindergarten entry could be detected, 2) th...

This meta-analysis examines the relation of parental psychological control with youth emotion regulation and tests variables that moderate the strength of this relation. After systematic searches of PsycINFO, Medline, and Social Services Abstracts, cited references, and table of contents, our final sample included 25 articles with 23 unique samples...

Compared to continuing-generation students, first-generation college students face additional barriers to their sense of belonging in STEM disciplines and at selective institutions. We examined first-generation (N = 1293) and continuing-generation (N = 2150) students' perceptions of belonging uncertainty, math motivation, and math achievement at ei...

In theory, teacher knowledge predicts instructional practice, thus impacting student outcomes. When it comes to knowledge to teach elementary-grade reading, most previous surveys have focused on knowledge essential for word reading development; few surveys have provided a picture of educator knowledge to teach both word reading and language compreh...

This study prospectively predicted institutional misconduct over a 34-month period using pre-prison factors—intrinsic characteristics an individual brings into prison—stemming from importation theory and indigenous factors—prison environment factors that affect an incarcerated adult—stemming from deprivation theory. Participants were 114 male and f...

Emotions are linked to wide sets of action tendencies, and it can be difficult to predict which specific action tendency will be motivated or indulged in response to individual experiences of emotion. Building on a functional perspective of emotion, we investigate whether anger and shame connect to different behavioral intentions in dignity, face,...

Learning mindsets significantly impact the outcomes of all students. Interestingly, learning mindsets that incorporate perceptions of the learning environment (e.g., belonging uncertainty, perception of instructor growth mindset) are particularly impactful for students enrolled in corequisite courses. These findings suggest that shifting learning m...

This randomized controlled trial examined the efficacy of an elementary school service-learning program, Connect Science (CS), on classroom practices and students' science achievement, civic engagement, and social skills. Fourth grade teachers were enrolled into intervention versus control conditions resulting in 41 classrooms (20 intervention) wit...

This randomized controlled trial examined effects of the MyTeachingPartner-Math/Science intervention on the quality and quantity of teachers’ mathematics and science instruction, and children’s mathematics and science outcomes in 140 pre-kindergarten classrooms. Teachers participated in the intervention for two years with consecutive cohorts of chi...

Children judge in-group members more favorably than out-group members. They also judge moral transgressions as more serious and more worthy of punishment than conventional transgressions. Here we asked whether children’s judgments of moral and conventional transgressions vary by the group membership of the transgressor (in-group, neutral, out-group...

The present study reports associations between features of directly observed classroom processes and school readiness skills across the academic year for 1498 children enrolled in publicly funded pre-K programs in a large and diverse county. In models adjusting for a range of child and family covariates, evidence was detected for the separate, and...

There is increasing interest in low-cost, scalable approaches that support parent engagement in their children’s learning at home. This study examined the impact of one such approach on pre-kindergarteners’ literacy development during an academic year in a suburban public school setting that prioritized enrollment for children living in poverty. Pa...

Research Findings: This study examined the association between interactive book reading quality and prekindergarten children’s gains in language and literacy skills over the course of an academic year for 96 teachers and 417 children across multiple locations in the United States. Two moderators were examined, namely, children’s initial skill level...

This study examined how overall quality and within-day consistency in fifth graders’ teacher-student interactions related to feelings about, engagement, and academic performance in school. Participants were 956 children in a national study. Students who experienced higher quality interactions reported more positive feelings about school, were more...

Adults who complete an advance directive (AD) are not consistently offered information about the risks, benefits, or alternatives (RBA) of the life-sustaining medical procedures addressed on standardized forms. The current article describes a new patient-centered nurse-supported advance care planning (NSACP) intervention focused on providing inform...

Children’s early school success is critical, and evidence suggests that when kindergarten teachers provide more transition practices as children prepare to enter kindergarten, they show improved outcomes in kindergarten. Positive teacher-child relationships may be a link between transition practices and children’s school success. Here we examine wh...

The purpose of this study was to develop and explore the feasibility of audio-based (ACBT) and computer-based (CCBT) cognitive behavioral therapies for older adults with depressive symptoms. The audio program consisted of 8 compact discs and a workbook while the computer program consisted of 11 modules of similar duration provided on a tablet PC. B...

The present study used a daily reporting design to examine the bidirectional spillover in conflict and conflict strategies between the interparental relationship and the parent-child relationship. Participants were 60 parents with a preadolescent child at risk for aggressive behavior. Parents reported on their experience of interparental and parent...

This study examined fidelity of implementation in a randomized trial of Banking Time, a classroom-based intervention intended to improve children's behavior, specifically for those at-risk for developing externalizing behavior problems, through improving the quality of teacher-child interactions. The study sample comes from a randomized control tri...

The present study explored the utility of a widely used performance-based assessment of children’s readiness skills as a kindergarten entry assessment. In a sample of 520 kindergarten students across 52 classrooms, we compared students’ school readiness skills as assessed by teachers using Teaching Strategies GOLD (TS GOLD) to direct assessments ad...

A randomized controlled trial was used to examine the impact of an attachment-based, teacher-child, dyadic intervention (Banking Time) to improve children's externalizing behavior. Participants included 183 teachers and 470 preschool children (3-4 years of age). Classrooms were randomly assigned to Banking Time, child time, or business as usual (BA...

This study examined the measurement equivalence of the K6 across diverse racial/ethnic and linguistic groups in the U.S. differential item functioning analyses using item response theory were conducted among 44,846 U.S. adults drawn from the California Health Interview Survey. Results show that four items (“nervous,” “restless,” “depressed,” and “e...

Preschool teachers were randomly assigned to participate in two professional development interventions over two phases, both designed to improve their interactions with children: the NCRECE college course (N = 169) and MyTeachingPartner video-based coaching (N = 202). Using Berkel et al.’s (2011) integrated model of intervention implementation, we...

This study investigates whether certain types of substances are differentially related to certain risky sexual behaviors (RSBs) within the same population and determines whether combination substance use (SU) has additive, redundant or antagonistic effects on RSBs. African-American youth aged 9-19 participated in a large, community-based survey ass...

The No Child Left Behind Act requires that 95% of students in all public elementary and secondary schools are assessed in mathematics. Unfortunately, direct assessments of young students can be timely, costly, and challenging to administer. Therefore, policy makers have looked to indirect forms of assessment, such as teachers' ratings of student sk...

Background: Despite growing efforts to facilitate advance care planning (ACP) to decrease health disparities in palliative care, low completion rates of advance directives (AD) have been consistently found among African Americans. Objective: The objective was to examine the feasibility of a multicomponent ACP intervention program that integrates...

Research Findings: This study explored the role Head Start teachers’ (n = 355) depressive symptoms play in their interactions with children and in children’s (n = 2,203) social-emotional development, specifically changes in children’s problem behaviors and social skills as reported by parents and teachers during the preschool year. Results of the m...

Research Findings: This study examined the impact of MyTeachingPartner–Math/Science, a system of math and science curricula and professional development, on the quality of teachers’ interactions with children in their classrooms. Schools were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 intervention conditions (Basic: curricula providing within-activity, embedded t...

Empirically analyzing empirical evidence One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...

The current practice of prescribing psychotropic medication for the management of dementia-related behavioral disturbances is under substantial debate. Using Pearlin's stress process model as theoretical underpinning, the aim of this investigation is to identify caregiver and care recipient characteristics as predictors of anxiolytic, antipsychotic...

The current study examines the associations between teachers' beliefs and knowledge and children's learning during the prekindergarten year. This study describes the degree to which 262 prekindergarten teachers' beliefs and knowledge regarding children's language and literacy skills are related to learning over the prekindergarten year. Teacher bel...

This study presents the results of a meta-analysis of the association between substance use and risky sexual behavior among adolescents. 87 studies fit the inclusion criteria, containing a total of 104 independent effect sizes that incorporated more than 120,000 participants. The overall effect size for the relationship between substance use and ri...

In highly multicultural societies, the economic status hierarchy may come to mimic the hierarchy of global wealth, reinforcing social inequality by tying pay scales to national wealth. We investigated how nationality influences expectations of payment in the UAE. Participants reported how much they expected people to be paid and how much skill they...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts of issue legitimacy and organizational legitimacy, providing a new measure of each construct. The scales were developed and tested using data collected through a statewide survey of Alabama residents. Assessments of issue legitimacy were based on perceptions of direct-to-consumer advertising, whe...

Few studies have examined the relationship between adolescents’ perceptions of parental and teacher pressure and habits conducive or aversive to improved academic performance, such as test anxiety. In the present investigation, 568 racially and socioeconomically diverse students in grades 9-12 preparing to take statewide examinations completed meas...

The present study examined the pattern of associations over time between the quality of observed interactions and exposure to features of an effective coaching model for 170 preschool teachers enrolled in a study investigating professional development impacts. Using a treatment-on-the-treated approach, teachers exposed to a greater number of cycles...

With research findings indicating positive associations between teacher-child interaction quality and children's development and learning, many professional development efforts now focus on improving the ways in which teachers interact with children. Previous work found that MyTeachingPartner (MTP), a web-mediated coaching intervention, improved te...

This study, undergirded by family systems theory, examined the extent to which parent and family‐level factors correlate with adolescent obesity and depressive symptoms. We also considered whether these variables predict unique variance in adolescent obesity and depressive symptoms. The participants were a convenience sample of 77 racially diverse,...

This study examined self-reliant classroom behaviors during middle childhood as a mechanism through which early language and sustained attention become associated with academic achievement in adolescence. Participants were enrolled in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1364). Path analyses revealed that preschool languag...

Context Palliative care patients and their family caregivers may have a foreshortened perspective of time left to live, or the expectation of the patient’s death in the near future. Patients and caregivers may report distress in physical, psychological, or existential/spiritual realms. Objectives To conduct a randomized controlled trial examining...

This randomized controlled field trial examined the efficacy of the Responsive Classroom (RC) approach on student achievement. Schools (n = 24) were randomized into intervention and control conditions; 2,904 children were studied from end of second to fifth grade. Students at schools assigned to the RC condition did not outperform students at schoo...

Adolescents’ sexual behavior has been a mainstay in the infectious diseases literature for over three decades due to their significantly high infection rates (CDC, 2006). The impact of rising STI rates has been especially devastating for impoverished African American youth (e.g., CDC, 2006). For the past 20 years, researchers have linked substance...

Teaching about HIV/AIDS presents special chal-lenges for the sociology curriculum. It would be hard to argue that a single disease has attracted greater stigma than HIV, despite the virus being neither especially contagious in the conventional sense of contagion (it cannot be caught by cough-ing or sneezing), nor even deadly if treated prop-erly wi...

Objectives: The purpose of this pilot study was to conduct limited-efficacy testing of the newly developed Preserving Identity and Planning for Advance Care (PIPAC) intervention on self-reported and proxy-reported emotional and health-related outcomes of individuals in the early stages of dementia. Method: A two-group comparison design was imple...

The importance of supportive parent–child interactions and the development of regulatory abilities with regard to growth in children's cognitive abilities has been established. This study investigated the longitudinal relations among parental supportiveness, child task-oriented regulation, and cognitive development for low-income children facing de...

This exploratory study examined the extent to which the effectiveness of instructional interactions varies among classroom social settings (i.e., large group, free choice, meals, and routines), learning activities (i.e., shared reading, literacy, math, science, social studies, and esthetics), or their combination. Participants were 314 preschool te...

Despite advances in the scientific methodology of witness testimony research, no sound measure currently exists to evaluate perceptions of testimony skills. Drawing on self-efficacy and witness preparation research, the present study describes development of the Observed Witness Efficacy Scale (OWES). Factor analyses of a mock jury sample yielded a...

The Video Assessment of Interactions and Learning (VAIL), a video-based assessment of teacher understanding of effective teaching strategies and behaviors, was administered to preservice teachers. Descriptive and regression analyzes were conducted to examine trends among participants and identify predictors at the individual level and program level...

Validating frameworks for understanding classroom processes that contribute to student learning and development is important to advance the scientific study of teaching. This article presents one such framework, Teaching through Interactions, which posits that teacher-student interactions are a central driver for student learning and organizes teac...

Objectives: To examine racial and ethnic differences in the relation between body mass index (BMI) and self-rated mental health (SRMH) among community-dwelling older adults. Design: Cross-sectional analyses of nationally representative data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys. Setting: In-person household interviews. Participant...

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, direct replication is rarely practiced or published. The Reproducibility Project is an open, large-scale, collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychologi...

Background: Given the lack of consensus on the factor structure of the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), as well as the fact that the GDS factor structure appears to vary across diverse cultural and/or language groups, the present meta-analysis examined whether the factor structure of the GDS varies by language. Methods: A total of 26 published...

Purpose: Given the paucity of research on the role of geography in mental health care, this study examined whether racial differences in mental health service use varied across geographic regions among older adults. Design and methods: Drawn from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), blacks (n = 1,008) and whites (n = 1,870)...

Research on video games has yielded consistent findings that violent video games increase aggression and decrease prosocial behavior. However, these studies typically examined single-player games. Of interest is the effect of cooperative play in a violent video game on subsequent cooperative or competitive behavior. Participants played Halo II (a f...

Purpose of the study: The present study examined the characteristics of health disparities grants funded by National Institute on Aging (NIA) from 2000 to 2010. Objectives were (a) to examine longitudinal trends in health disparities-related grants funded by NIA and (b) to identify moderators of these trends. Design and methods: Our primary data...

Guidelines published by the American College of Gastroenterologists suggest that African Americans (AA) begin preventive screening at the age of 45 years due to increased risk of colorectal cancer. This study examines characteristics associated with having fecal occult blood tests (FOBT), sigmoidoscopy, and colonoscopy among adults aged 45-75 years...

Objectives: A cross-sectional study examined how race and sex affect associations among osteoarthritis (OA) pain, disability, and depression in 363 older adults with diagnosed knee OA. Method: African American (Black; N = 94) and non-Hispanic White (White; N = 269) men and women self-reported pain, disability, depressive symptoms, arthritis history...

ABSTRACT This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working m...

Primary care physicians play a significant role in depression care, suicide assessment, and suicide prevention. However, little is known about what factors relate to and predict quality of depression care (assessment, diagnosis, and treatment), including suicide assessment. The authors explored the extent to which select patient and physician facto...

The objective of this study was to explore 3 research questions: (1) What are the perceived benefits of screening for prostate cancer (PC)? (2) What are the perceived barriers to screening for PC? and (3) Is there an association with perceived benefits or perceived barriers and participants' reported source of influence related to prostate cancer s...

To establish and validate a new system to define the severity of onychomycosis. The Onychomycosis Severity Index (OSI) score is obtained by multiplying the score for the area of involvement (range, 0-5) by the score for the proximity of disease to the matrix (range, 1-5). Ten points are added for the presence of a longitudinal streak or a patch (de...

Several decades of research have shown that people who experience parentification in childhood are at an increased risk of experiencing psychopathology in adulthood. A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the magnitude of the relation between self-reported parentification experienced in childhood and psychopathology evidenced in adulthood. Result...

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine racial/ethnic differences in the factor structure of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The total number of participants (N) in the assessed studies (k) varied according to whether the original study had used either Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA; N = 19,206, k = 13) or...

Context processing has significant empirical support as an explanation of age- and psychopathology-related deficiencies in cognitive control. We examined whether context processing generalizes to younger individuals who are in trouble with the law. We tested whether age and delinquency might have unique relations to context processing skills in fou...

Trial consultation is a quickly growing domain of professional practice for psychologists. Preparing expert witnesses to testify is just one prime example of practice options for consultants. A wealth of evidence shows that developing expert confidence and credibility are important goals for witness training. However, research has yet to articulate...

With the rapid growth in the older inmate population and the economic impact of end-of-life treatments within the cash-strapped prison system, consideration should be given to inmate treatment preferences. We examined end-of-life treatment preferences and days of desired life for several health scenarios among male inmates incarcerated primarily fo...

Methodologists have long discussed the costs and benefits of using medians or other cut points to artificially turn continuous variables into categorical variables. The current paper attempts to provide a perspective on this literature that will be of practical use to experimental psychopathologists. After discussing the reasons that clinical resea...

OBECTIVE: This study examined racial/ethnic differences in the association between self-rated mental health (SRMH) and psychiatric disorders among community-dwelling older adults in the United States. Cross-sectional analyses of nationally representative data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (2001-2003). In-person household i...

The Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task was used in 2 experiments to determine if the specific sequence used by the task influences implicit learning. In Experiment 1, participants performed the SRT task with the locations of the stimuli determined by a commonly used fixed sequence (taken from P. J. Reber & L. R. Squire, 1998), by a fixed sequence that...

Dermatologists see many patients interested in improving their physical appearance through cosmetic procedures or medical means. Dermatologists frequently counsel patients on sun protection as well, particularly those with a personal or family history of skin cancer, sun-sensitive dermatoses or those with obvious sun damage. Our objective in this s...

This study's purpose was to provide information regarding differences in AA and White men's attitude about not fathering a child, receipt and type of infertility services, and diagnosed infertility problem. A descriptive study using Cycle 6 National Survey of Family Growth male interview data with Chi Square analysis was conducted. There was a stat...

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess the dimensionality and reliability of a frequently used scale for predicting the desire to institutionalize among White, African American, and Hispanic caregivers of persons with dementia. Method: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability analyses were performed on a slightly modified...

Exemplary care (EC) is a new construct encompassing care behaviors that warrants further study within stress process models of dementia caregiving. Previous research has examined EC within the context of cognitively intact older adult care recipients (CRs) and their caregivers (CGs). This study sought to expand our knowledge of quality of care by i...

Due to its ability to disinhibit and compromise an individual's decision-making capacity, the influence of substance use on sexual behavior has been the focus of research for at least two decades. While substance use and risky sexual behavior are among the top predictors of HIV infection in adults, less is known about the moderators of the relation...

Despite the application of Self-Efficacy Theory (Bandura, 1977, 2000) to many areas of psychology, there is a lack of research on self-efficacy in the ability to testify in court. The present study fills this gap by incrementally developing the construct of Witness Self-Efficacy and establishing its psychometric properties. Study I features explora...

Previous research suggests that ethnic groups differ in the prevalence and severity of disordered sleep symptoms. This study used meta-analysis to determine the magnitude of ethnic differences between African Americans (AAs) and Caucasian Americans (CAs) in insomnia symptoms and sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). It also used moderator analyses to e...

Background: Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer morbidity and mortality in the United States. It is estimated that approximately 142,570 new cases of colorectal cancer will be diagnosed and over 51,000 will die in 2010. Further, African Americans are diagnosed at later stages and suffer disproportionately higher mortality rates from colo...

We examined race/ethnicity and cultural context within hypothetical end-of-life medical decision scenarios and its influence on patient-proxy agreement. Family dyads consisting of an older adult and 1 family member, typically an adult child, responded to questions regarding the older adult's preferences for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, artificial...

In 2 experiments, implicit evaluation of novel and familiar concepts was assessed using a sequential priming procedure that enabled estimates of evaluative priming effects at low levels of detectability. In Experiment 1, the novel concepts referenced common names, and in Experiment 2 they referenced nonsense words. Whereas familiar concepts yielded...