Adolphe Quetelet and the legacy of the "average man" in psychology.

Adolphe Quetelet was a Belgian polymath who aimed to advance aggregate-level statistical tools as a unifying framework for all scientific disciplines. In doing so, Quetelet adopted the astronomer's Law of Error (i.e.

Primary Study Quality in Psychological Meta-Analyses: An Empirical Assessment of Recent Practice.

As meta-analytic research has come to occupy a sizeable contingent of published work in the psychological sciences, clarity in the reporting of such work is crucial to its interpretability and reproducibility. This is especially true regarding the assessment of primary study quality, as notions of study quality can vary across research domains. The present study examines the general state of reporting practices related to primary study quality in a sample of 382 published psychological meta-analyses, as well as the reporting decisions and motivations of the authors that published them.

A psychometric evaluation of the Multidimensional Social Competence Scale (MSCS) for young adults.

The current study contributes to previous work on measuring the social phenotype in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by validating a multidimensional test of social competence developed for use with individuals with and without ASD. The "Multidimensional Social Competence Scale" (MSCS) was previously validated as a parent-rating scale with youth 11-18 years with ASD without intellectual disability and typically developing adolescents of comparable age. The current study presents a validation of a self-report version of the MSCS in a non-clinical young adult population (N = 1178, males = 360, females = 817, age range = 17-25 years).

Does reassessment of risk improve predictions? A framework and examination of the SAVRY and YLS/CMI.

Although experts recommend regularly reassessing adolescents' risk for violence, it is unclear whether reassessment improves predictions. Thus, in this prospective study, the authors tested 3 hypotheses as to why reassessment might improve predictions, namely the shelf-life, dynamic change, and familiarity hypotheses. Research assistants (RAs) rated youth on the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) and the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI) every 3 months over a 1-year period, conducting 624 risk assessments with 156 youth on probation.