Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Two direct elicitation of utility (D.E.U.) techniques were used to estimate risk attitudes of a group of agricultural producers. The two elicitation techniques used in the study were 1) an error-in-response model using a modified Ramsey method, and 2) stochastic dominance with respect to a function (SDF). The primary objective of the study was to determine whether the two elicitation techniques yield consistent estimates of risk attitudes. A second major objective of the study was to provide additional information about the distribution of risk attitudes among agricultural producers. The study confirmed the results of other research efforts that the majority of risk attitude parameters of agricultural producers lie within the range -.0001 and .001 with income measured in dollars [King and Robison, 1980]. The study also supports previous research results which indicate that a significant portion of decision makers exhibit risk preferring behavior, at least over some ranges of incomes. The error-in-response model classified 38.1% of the respondents as risk preferring, 47.6% as risk neutral, and 14.3% as risk averse. With only one exception, the SDF technique elicited risk preferring attitudes for every respondent over some range of income values. Individual and aggregate tests for decreasing (increasing) absolute risk aversion were conducted. No respondents were found to exhibit increasing or decreasing absolute risk aversion. The statistical comparison of the two elicitation techniques was inconclusive. A paired t-test failed to reject the null hypothesis of no difference in the estimated risk attitudes. However, the correlation between the two measures was virtually zero (-.046) suggesting that the two measures of risk attitudes are not closely related. The two elicitation techniques were also compared on other grounds. Both elicitation techniques are designed to prevent certainty bias that has plagued other D.E.U. methods. The SDF technique is found to be superior in overcoming possible interviewer bias. Neither technique is superior in coping with probability bias. The SDF technique is easier to implement but the error-in- response questionnaire is easier to formulate. The error-in- response model results in a specific estimate of the respondent's risk attitude when the negative exponential utility function is used. Based on the comparisons made in the study, the SDF procedure is considered to be superior to the error-in-response model for eliciting risk attitudes. / Graduation date: 1986

INTRODUCTION: Basic to the judging process is the relating of a given item to a group of items* The simpler case of judging is one in which an item is compared with another which is simultaneously present while the more complex case consists in comparing an item with previously experienced items* Analysis of the latter process was given impetus by Wever and Zener (8) who introduced a method of investigation applicable to this problem of judgment in time* Positing that even simple comparisons draw heavily upon an extended context of experiences, these investigators demonstrated that their method of presenting for judgment single members of a stimulus series gives data comparable to that obtained with the traditional method of constant stimuli. Wever and Zener and investigators who subsequently utilized the method of single stimuli have demonstrated that subjects are able to make consistent judgments which are sensitive to small increments of change in the stimulus series* Additional studies have investigated some of the influences that modify judgments such as changes in end stimuli or stimulus density, and aspects of the stimulus distribution to which judgments are anchored. Several reviews of the research in this area are available (5,6,7). In addition to laboratory findings everyday life offers many examples of the utilization of judgments which reflect previous experiences with the stimulus dimension involved. The basis for such characterizations as “a tall man”, “a fascinating lecture”, “ a good meal” is admittedly more involved than the basis for usual laboratory judgments but the same general principles may be assumed to underlie both. In both the laboratory and the social situation the process of relating one item to a non-present set of items is dependent upon a temporal integration of the effects of previous contacts with items of that set. It is meaningful, therefore, to examine the functional dependence of distributions of judgments upon previous experience with items of the same set as the ones being judged. This problem is implicit in several different lines of research such as investigations of shifts in judgments, where the underlying assumption is that changes in judgment reflect changes in the fundamental character of the stimulus distributions, and empirical studies of anchoring, which in general follow the pattern of modifying essentially rectangular stimulus distributions. Both types of investigation represent efforts to discover the aspects of a stimulus distribution to which judgments are related. The present study is composed of several experiments which 4 were designed to investigate systematically general relationships obtaining between different distributions of stimulus items and distributions of judgments elicited by these items with attention to such factors as differences in the instructions, the number of judgment categories and the step-interval between items. In all experiments the subjects were required to judge the length of singly presented horizontal lines. The first group of four experiments represents an effort to discover the form of the basic functional relationship in relatively unstructured situations which are representative of most judging tasks. The initial experiment consisted of separate groups of subjects judging one of five different distributions of stimulus items. All the distributions (rectangular, symmetrical unimodal, bimodal, positively skewed, negatively skewed) had the same range and density of items and two categories of judgment (longer or shorter) were available to the subjects. The second experiment was designed to investigate the influence of the factor of stimulus distribution on judgments rendered by subjects who experience successively more than a single stimulus distribution, since in life situations individuals do not typically experience one clearly defined distribution of similar stimulus items. Rather they have a variety of contacts with items whose distribution may vary over a period of time. The aspect of the judging situation which was altered in the third experiment was the number of judgment categories. In order to determine the effect of the distributional properties of the stimulus items on judgments in multiple category situations the number of categories available to the subjects was increased from two to three (longer, medium, shorter). In the fourth experiment the step interval between stimulus Items was increased from a barely supraliminal to a clearly discriminable one. This was done in order not to restrict the findings of the study to situations such as those of the traditional psychophysical experiments where the step-interval is in the region of the Ilmen. In the first four experiments the instructions to the subjects were very general, and thus the question is raised whether the relationships obtained under these conditions depend upon varying individual interpretations of the task. The last two experiments in this study were designed to investigate the effect of more explicit instructions with the aim of obtaining results which could be compared with the relationships found between distributions of stimuli and distributions of judgments in the more representative unstructured situations. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

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The Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) is a self-report instrument designed to measure defensive functioning and coping styles. Originally developed by Bond and colleagues (1983), the questionnaire has been researched extensively. The present investigation sought to determine the factor validity of the newly developed DSQ-60 (Trijsburg, Bond & Drapeau, 2003) in a sample of English-speaking university students (n = 305) and French-speaking university students (n = 212). Using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, three factors, or defense styles were revealed: image distorting, affect regulating, and adaptive. Cronbach's alpha for the three styles was .64, .72, and .61, respectively. Results are compared with prior research on the DSQ.

This study was undertaken to evaluate the part which nascent skeptical doubt plays in shaping the course of adolescent social-cognitive development. Past attempts to relate the achievement of formal operations to the tasks of identity formation and other signature concerns of adolescence have yielded equivocal results. This failure is seen to be due in part to the "all or none" character often ascribed to formal operational thought. If formal reasoning is seen to be achieved in one piece, then there is little hope of accounting for the variability within adolescent development by pointing to such a monolith. It is argued in this thesis that the intellectual changes which accompany the acquisition of formal operational competence set in motion a series of developments which seriously undermine the typical adolescent's previous sense of epistemic certainty. The epistemic model proposed in the thesis leads to the hypothesis that, in response to such doubts, young persons adopt one or another of three contrasting interpretive levels or strategies each of which then dictates much about their subsequent solutions to the problems of identity formation and commitment. To test these predictions, 110 high school aged young people were prescreened using a battery of Piagetian measures and classified as being either concrete or formal operational. Those subjects who were clearly classifiable (N = 70) were individually administered: (1) Adams' Objective Measure of Ego identity Status (OM-EIS) which permits classification of respondents into diffused, foreclosed, moratorium, and achieved identity statuses; and (2) The Epistemic Doubt Interview, which is comprised of 2 story problems and a semi-structured interview procedure, based on the work of Piaget, Perry, and Kitchener and King, and designed to indicate both the presence of generic doubt and the respondent's characteristic coping strategy for dealing with such uncertainties. These include realistic, dogmatic, skeptical, and rational epistemic stances. The results indicate that the young people selected on the basis of the cognitive developmental screening procedures could be reliably and exhaustively assigned to a single epistemic level or to a modal and a single developmentally adjacent level. Only formal operational subjects appreciated the generic nature of the doubt undermining their epistemic certainty while the concrete operational subjects were largely confined to the ranks of the epistemic realists. Predictions regarding the anticipated relation between epistemic stance and ego identity status were supported. Virtually all of the subjects scored as epistemic realists were found in the diffusion and foreclosure statuses. Of those subjects who evidenced an appreciation of the generic nature of doubt, only epistemic dogmatists were scored as foreclosed. Only subjects scored as epistemic skeptics or rationalists were routinely found to be in the moratorium or achieved statuses. The results are taken as strong support for the claim that epistemic doubt plays a central role in shaping the course of adolescent social-cognitive development. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

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