JAQM Volume 8, Issue 2 - June 30, 2013

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Contents

Analysis and Comparison of Under Five Child Mortality between Rural and Urban Area in Bangladesh (p )
Arfan Raheen AFZAL, Sabrina ALAM

Knowledge of factors that affect the under-five year child mortality is important because it pertains to policy and programs. Causes and differences of under-five mortality between rural and urban area help decision makers to assess programmatic needs and prioritize interventions. This paper investigates the causes and differences of under-five mortality between rural and urban area in Bangladesh using Kaplan-Meier, Cox Proportional Hazard (Cox-PH) and Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) Regression model. Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS)-2007 data are used for the study. The results show that for both the areas, survival probability for children whose mothers have higher education is very high and in urban area the failure rate is very high for children of poor economic status. The Cox-PH analysis reveals that risk of death was lower for children whose mothers were matured and higher educated than younger and no educated mother in rural area. In urban area, children from rich family and the 2nd or 3rd child have lower risk of death compared to poor and 1st child. The AFT analysis shows that for both the areas Weibull distribution better fits the data.

Analyzing Internal and External Distributed Application Interdependencies using MERICS (p )
Catalin Alexandru TANASIE

The usage stage of distributed IT&C applications – DIAs raises specific risks relating to the increased processing and usage strain related to live interactions. The incident categories and impact, as well as associated actors, are shown in order to serve as quantifying factors in the building of models aiming at quantifying their impact on distributed application reliability. A model aiming at extension impact assessment is built and details on the evaluation of the MERICS testing application are detailed. The component obsolescence is evaluated through an additional model and its impact on MERICS is shown alongside difficulties in identifying composing factors.

A Step-Wise Method for Evaluation of Differential Item Functioning (p )
Muhammad Naveed KHALID Cees A. W. GLAS

Item bias or differential item functioning (DIF) has an important impact on the fairness of psychological and educational testing. In this paper, DIF is seen as a lack of fit to an item response (IRT) model. Inferences about the presence and importance of DIF require a process of so-called test purification where items with DIF are identified using statistical tests and DIF is modeled using group-specific item parameters. In the present study, DIF is identified using item-oriented Lagrange multiplier statistics. The first problem addressed is that the dependence of these statistics might cause problems in the presence of a relatively large number DIF items. A stepwise procedure is proposed where DIF items are identified one or two at a time. Simulation studies are presented to illustrate the power and Type I error rate of the procedure. The second problem pertains to the importance of DIF, i.e., the effect size, and related problem of defining a stopping rule for the searching procedure for DIF. The estimate of the difference between the means and variances of the ability distributions of the studied groups of respondents is used as an effect size and the purification procedure is stopped when the change in this effect size becomes negligible.

Some Aspects of a Quantitative Market Research: "The Opinions and Attitudes of Renault & Automobile Dacia Car’s Buyer" (p )
Gheorghe SAVOIU, Gheorghe CRUCERU

The quantitative research on the stratified Romanian car market led to the conclusion that the famous law or Pareto optimal 20/80 can be recast in this area efficiently and with high sufficient coverage. The whole paper is nothing else but a quantitative market research and therefore firstly we select the main aspects to describe the specificity of Romanian car market as a specific and regional one. Introduction anticipates the importance of hypothesis in describing buyer’s opinions and attitudes. All the other sections, from the first to the last, are just a natural, detailed and selected story of a marketing research made methodologically correct to understand the traditional buyer.