Search results

To examine gender and racial differences in known wrongful conviction cases.

Cases were identified for inclusion in this study through the use of established databases available electronically. Supplemental information was gathered through newspapers, magazines, and direct correspondence with individuals associated with the cases.

Of special significance was the role of witness error in wrongful convictions. Although more prominent in cases involving African American men, witness error was also problematic in murder and manslaughter cases involving African American women. Whereas white women were more likely to be included in wrongful convictions for murder and child abuse, African American women were more likely to be found in wrongful convictions for drugs and property and other offenses. Wrongfully convicted white women were 2.7 times more likely than their African American counterparts to be sentenced to life. Victim race appeared to play a role in a number of the wrongful convictions for both African American men and women.

This study expands our knowledge of known wrongful convictions among African Americans, a group that is disproportionately found in the criminal justice data.

Elements of national and organizational cultures can contribute much to the success of error management in organizations. Accordingly, this study aims to consider how errors were approached in two state university departments in Turkey in relation to their specific organizational and national cultures.

The study follows a qualitative case study design, and the data were collected through five focus groups. The cases under consideration were two state university departments of different organizational sizes.

The results showed that organizational and national culture elements (collectivism, high power distance and relatively low future orientation) significantly interacted with error management practices. In both of the organizations studied, there were found to be limited attempts to prevent the errors unless there was an emergent situation. Error detection was shown to be slow and hindered because of indirect communication among staff. Ultimately, effective error management in these organizations was identified as being unattainable because of negative emotional reactions to errors, lower reporting, restricted communication, potential face loss considerations and lack of feedback.

The findings of the current work extend earlier error management research with empirical data drawn from two cases in the higher education domain. Thus, the study offers preliminary research into the error process in education, and contributes to future research relating organizational culture to error processes.

As eyewitnesses provide the most valuable information for criminal investigations, it is important to further develop and test techniques for collecting eyewitness testimony so that they meet the major objective of a police interview: obtaining details pertaining to criminal actions. The purpose of this paper is to test a new instruction – the re-enactment investigative instruction – formulated to collect the most fine-grained details of a criminal event as accurately as possible. It leads the interviewee to decompose all directly recollected actions into the most minimal actions so that the event can be accurately re-enacted.

In all, 40 participants individually viewed a video depicting a robbery, were randomly assigned to a re-enactment or structured interview (SI) group and then interviewed face-to-face. Each interview was comprised of two free recall phases and a questioning phase. Manipulation of the re-enactment instruction took place in the second free recall phase of the re-enactment interviews (RIs).

The RI elicited more correct information compared to the SI (d=1.14), and slightly but not significantly less incorrect information (d=0.09). Participants in the RI condition reported significantly more details pertaining to general and specific actions.

The re-enactment instruction shows the potential to increase witness recall in a way that promotes recall of both additional correct information and investigative-relevant information.

The instruction provides witnesses a retrieval strategy that facilitates overcoming both the gap between memory availability and accessibility and the gap between memory availability and output regulation, eliciting more details with no significant increase of errors.

Social scientific research is having a substantial impact on eyewitness identification procedural reforms. Police agencies in the USA have changed their eyewitness practices based on the results of social scientific research. The purpose of this paper is to contribute new knowledge by using a unique set of data to describe detailed aspects of eyewitness identification procedures conducted as part of robbery investigations in Houston, TX.

Robbery investigators completed surveys following identification procedures conducted during a six-month period of time. The sample includes 975 identification procedures. The analysis describes important features of identification procedures and places results in the context of existing research.

Results show that photo spreads were the most frequently used lineup procedure and selection outcomes were similar to recent field studies conducted in the USA. Results also show that the type of procedure, presence of a weapon, cross-race identifications, and viewing opportunity were significantly correlated with selection outcomes.

Police are reforming their eyewitness identification procedures based on findings from social science research. The study measures and describe the characteristics of a large sample eyewitness procedures conducted by investigators in the field.

The purpose is of this paper is to investigate whether the tracking ability of exchange traded funds (ETFs) is lower in highly volatile periods, and to shed more light on the factors behind the tracking error.

The authors apply the Error Correction Model that incorporates a short‐run adjustment mechanism on domestic US ETFs that follow industrial indices.

It was found that tracking errors attained pronounced levels during 2008 compared to 2006 and 2007, mainly in ETFs from the real estate and banking and finance sectors. In addition, tracking error is positively correlated with the daily volatility of the ETF, while trading volume has a limited effect on reducing tracking errors.

The paper sheds more light on the relationship between securities and their fundamentals, and contributes to the literature on the information transmission mechanism for dually‐listed securities.

The paper uses the co‐integration tests and the error correction model (ECM) to test the long‐run relationship between returns on domestic exchange trade funds (ETFs) and the returns on the underlying indices. In particular, the ECM is used for ETFs for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the utilisation of patient wristbands (PWs) and patient identification (PI) process in a training hospital in Ankara, Turkey.

This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted in a training hospital with 640 beds, accreditied by Joint Commission International. The views of 348 patients and 419 hospital personnel on the implementation of patient wristbands and identification process were evaluated.

The results indicated that lack of information among patients about the importance of PWs and the misknowledge among staff participants on when, where, and by whom PWs should be put on and verified were the weakest points in this hospital.

PI process must be strictly implemented according to the standard procedures of patient safety. Both patients and hospital personnel should be trained continuously, and training sessions must be held to increase their awareness about the importance of PWs and identification process.

Finding new ways and using new methods for increasing knowledge about PI and PWs are necessary. Hospital management should prepare a written PI and PW policy and procedure documents by taking the views of patients and hospital personnel and share these with them.

This study incorporates the views and attitudes of patients and health care personnel in improving health care quality by increasing awareness about PI and wristbands.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Clark et al.’s (2013) claim that, contrary to the white paper produced by the American Psychological Association (Wells et al., 1998), the match-to-description method of choosing foils is inferior to the similarity-to-suspect method.

Examining the existing empirical evidence.

There is no difference between the two methods in rate of identifications. Sometimes, however, the rate of false identifications is larger when the similarity-to-suspect method is used.

The white paper’s recommendation should remain in place.

Keeping the white paper’s recommendation is important to prevent false identifications.

Interview data is often the cornerstone of qualitative field studies, yet problems with getting sufficient, rich, reliable data in a cost effective manner can inhibit the progress of field study research. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of a novel interview method, the cognitive interview, in an exploratory field study of management accounting change where in‐depth access was impractical.

The cognitive interview was developed by cognitive psychologists for use in police witness interviewing. It has been found to substantially improve the amount of information that subjects recall while maintaining or slightly improving accuracy levels.

The cognitive interview was found to be effective at gathering rich, detailed data despite the restriction of conducting only one or two interviews at each company. The cognitive interview uncovered information that did not fit with the participants' initial account of events. The structure of the cognitive interview often led participants to provide narrative accounts, allowing narrative analysis techniques such as genre analysis to be used. Asking participants to retell their accounts in reverse order may allow researchers to discern the schema (mental template) that the participant was using to organise their memories of the change process.

In its first known use for business research, the cognitive interview was effective at moving beyond the rationalized accounts that participants often provide initially. Researchers who conduct interviews to collect data may find this of particular interest.

The primary aim of this article is to ascertain the modalities of leveraging Lean Six Sigma (LSS) for Industry 4.0 (I4.0) with special reference to the process industries. Moreover, it intends to determine the applicability of simulation-based LSS in the automation of the mineral water industry, with special emphasis on the robust design of the control system to improve productivity and performance.

This study adopts the action research methodology, which is exploratory in nature along with the DMAIC (define-measure-analyze-improve-control) approach to systematically unearth the root causes and to develop robust solutions. The MATLAB simulation software and Minitab statistical software are effectively utilized to draw the inferences.

The root causes of critical to quality characteristic (CTQ) and variation in purity level of water are addressed through the simulation-based LSS approach. All the process parameters and noise parameters of the reverse osmosis (RO) process are optimized to reduce the errors and to improve the purity of the water. The project shows substantial improvement in the sigma rating from 1.14 to 3.88 due to data-based analysis and actions in the process. Eventually, this assists the management to realize an annual saving of 20% of its production and overhead costs. This study indicates that LSS can be applicable even in the advent of I4.0 by reinforcing the existing approach and embracing data analysis through simulation.

The limitation of this research is that the inference is drawn based on a single case study confined to process industry automation. Having said that, the methodology deployed, scientific information related to optimization, and technical base established can be generalized.

This article is the first of its kind in establishing the integration of simulation, LSS, and I4.0 with special reference to automation in the process industry. It also delineates the case study in a phase-wise manner to explore the applicability and relevance of LSS with I4.0. The study is archetype in enabling LSS to a new era, and can act as a benchmark document for academicians, researchers, and practitioners for further research and development.

Credit scoring datasets are generally unbalanced. The number of repaid loans is higher than that of defaulted ones. Therefore, the classification of these data is biased toward the majority class, which practically means that it tends to attribute a mistaken “good borrower” status even to “very risky borrowers”. In addition to the use of statistics and machine learning classifiers, this paper aims to explore the relevance and performance of sampling models combined with statistical prediction and artificial intelligence techniques to predict and quantify the default probability based on real-world credit data.

A real database from a Tunisian commercial bank was used and unbalanced data issues were addressed by the random over-sampling (ROS) and synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE). Performance was evaluated in terms of the confusion matrix and the receiver operating characteristic curve.

The results indicated that the combination of intelligent and statistical techniques and re-sampling approaches are promising for the default rate management and provide accurate credit risk estimates.

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of ROS and SMOTE in combination with logistic regression, artificial neural networks and support vector machines. The authors address the role of sampling strategies in the Tunisian credit market and its impact on credit risk. These sampling strategies may help financial institutions to reduce the erroneous classification costs in comparison with the unbalanced original data and may serve as a means for improving the bank’s performance and competitiveness.