BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Environmental worry involve primarily the thoughts of some hazardous immediate and long-run side effects of degradation that happened to our ecological system. Despite the side effects of this phenomenon, psychometrics measuring environmental worry from the African context are insufficient. Therefore, the Environmental Worry index (EWI-11) was developed to assess proximal and personal experiences of worry about climate change and environmental degradation. METHODS: This study used a qualitative method among environmental professionals and students (between the ages of 18 to 65) in a university to generate the themes and the pool of items that were used to determine the Environmental Worry index (EWI-11). Thereafter, 925 participants were purposively selected and assessed from Ibadan city through a cross-sectional survey to ascertain the validity and reliability of this new scale. The participants were selected in Ibadan city, Nigeria. The software of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (Version 26. 0) was used for all analyses. FINDINGS: Using exploratory factor analysis, the construct validity and Varimax rotation showed that the scale has two components (KMO = 0. 892, df=91, p. 00), thus showing a strong validity. The reliability dimensions and subscales have meritorious reliability (Proximal, α,=. 894, and Personal experience of worry, α,=. 671). The overall Cronbach’, s Alpha was 0. 894. CONCLUSION: The EWI-11 is adequate for measuring environmental worry and could be useful for experts in mental and environmental research and practice. EWI-11 is therefore recommended as a reliable and valid screening tool for environmental worry and may be acceptable across Africa and other countries as well.

This study aims at investigating the validity of the Fog-index of Readability, one of the most popular readability formulas. It explores the fact that this formula is not at all sensitive to the difficulty/ease level of reading passages when their readability is changed up to a certain degree. To do so, some reading passages were selected. Then a number of multiple-choice questions were devised for each passage. The readability of the passages was changed i.e., the passages were respectively made difficult or easy by decreasing or increasing the number of sentences. The scores obtained from administering the test revealed that the subjects who took part in this study did not find the passages significantly different.

Background: The preparedness of families for disasters can set auspicious grounds for the preparedness of the whole society. In the health system of Iran, the Household Disaster Preparedness index (HDPI) composed of 15 items is applied for the assessment of household preparedness in disasters. Objectives: The current study was carried out in order to investigate the reliability and validity of the HDPI. Methods: Two methods, namely internal consistency and stability determination, were utilized for the investigation of HDPI reliability. Face validity, content validity, and construct validity were examined for the assessment of HDPI validity. Accordingly, in addition to interviewing with experts and family heads, 200 families were selected from a study population, including the families in all the counties of Isfahan province, Iran, based on multistage cluster sampling. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for the investigation of content validity. Furthermore, exploratory factor analysis was the method of choice for the examination of construct validity. Results: The rate of HDPI internal consistency was calculated at 0. 786 which was within an acceptable range. Moreover, HDPI stability was computed at 0. 98 using the test-retest method which was also within an optimal level. Therefore, it can be stated that the HDPI enjoys the required reliability. The investigation of HDPI face validity indicated that the families have problems in perceiving some of the items of this index. The experts put forward suggestions for the improvement of HDPI content validity following the qualitative investigation of content validity. In the examination of content validity ratio, all the items except those numbered 1, 3, and 4 were within an acceptable range; however, the investigation of the content validity index demonstrated that only the validity of the items numbered 12 and 13 was acceptable regarding all the three scales of relevancy, clarity, and simplicity. For the determination of construct validity, exploratory factor analysis was applied to extract five factors (i. e., subscales), namely the reduction of vulnerability, planning for disasters, family empowerment, procurement of resources for disasters, and specialized programs. The investigation of the internal consistency of the aforementioned subscales indicated that only the internal consistency of the first and second factors was within an acceptable range. Conclusion: The results of the present study revealed that although the HDPI is a reliable measure, it does not enjoy the required validity for the assessment of household preparedness for disasters.

In some complicated datasets, due to the existence of noisy data points and outliers, cluster validity indices can yield con icting results in terms of determining the optimal number of clusters. This paper presents a new validity index for fuzzy-possibilistic C-means clustering called Fuzzy-Possibilistic (FP) index, which works well in the presence of clusters that vary in shape and density. Moreover, like most of the clustering algorithms, Fuzzy-Possibilistic C-Means (FPCM) is susceptible to some initial parameters. In this regard, in addition to the number of clusters, FPCM requires a priori selection of the degree of fuzziness (m) and the degree of typicality ( ). Therefore, an e cient procedure was presented for determining optimal values of m and  . The proposed approach is evaluated using several synthetic and real-world datasets. Final computational results demonstrate the capabilities and reliability of the proposed approach compared with several well-known fuzzy validity indices in the literature. Furthermore, to clarify the ability of the proposed method in real applications, the proposed method is implemented in microarray gene expression data clustering and medical image segmentation.

This study aimed to explore reliability, validity and standardization the Comparative Feeling of Inferiority index (CFII; Strano & Dixon, 1990) among junior students of Karaj. 641 Iranian junior students in grade 1, 2, and 3 participated in the study (328 girls and 313 boys) completing the CFII, resulted in omitting 3 items due to low correlation and factor loadings. Cronbachʼ s alpha for the remaining 27 items for Self-Rating Scale and Family-Rating Scale were 0. 799 and 0. 751 and test-retest reliability of both scales were 0. 845 and 0. 707 respectively. Results of explanatory factor analysis showed that the Self-Rating Scale include four factors (1. goals and standards, 2. negative psycho-physical, 3. social and 4. positive psycho-physical) and the Family-Rating Scale include three factors (1. positive psycho-physical, 2. negative psycho-physical and 3. social). The extracted factors confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. A correlation (rS=-0. 440, rF=-0. 405, P<0. 01) between Self/Family Rating Scale and the Self-Esteem (Coopersmith, 1967) and (rS=0. 326, P<0. 01; rF=0. 221, P<0. 05) Rogers Self-Concept Test supported the divergent validity.