Faculty and Staff

Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students via an online survey, community residents as part of a city’s budget engagement activity, a random sample of rural landowners, and a national sample of adult Americans via an Amazon Mechanical Turk study). Across studies, a number of common findings emerged. First, the best fitting models in each study maintained separate factors for each trust-relevant construct. Furthermore, post hoc analyses involving addition of higher-order factors tended to fit better than collapsing of factors. Second, dispositional trust was easily distinguishable from the other trust-related constructs, and positive and negative constructs were often distinguishable. However, the items reflecting positive trust attitude constructs or positive trustworthiness perceptions showed low discriminant validity. Differences in findings between studies raise questions warranting further investigation in future research, including differences in correlations among latent constructs varying from very high (e.g., 12 inter-factor correlations above .9 in Study 2) to more moderate (e.g., only 3 correlations above .8 in Study 4). Further, the results from one study (Study 4) suggested that legitimacy, fairness, and voice were especially highly correlated and may form a single higher-order factor, but the other studies did not. Future research is needed to determine when and why different higher-order factor structures may emerge in different institutional contexts or with different samples.

Self-Efficacy Theory (SET; Bandura, 1986, 2000) has generated research and practice ramifications across areas of psychology. However, self-efficacy has yet to be assessed in a legal context. The present paper juxtaposes self-efficacy with self-confidence in terms of theoretical foundations and practical implications, with attention to the area of witness testimony. It is concluded that the concept of witness self-efficacy possesses thorough theoretical grounding as a potential target for witness preparation. As such, we put forth an integrated model of witness preparation featuring self-efficacy bolstering techniques within an established witness training framework.

Accessibility is increasingly used as a metric when evaluating changes to public transport systems. Transit travel times contain variation depending on when one departs relative to when a transit vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated given a particular timetable. In addition, there is necessarily uncertainty in the value of the accessibility metric during sketch planning processes, due to scenarios which are underspecified because detailed schedule information is not yet available. This article presents a method to extend the concept of "reliable" accessibility to transit to address the first issue, and create confidence intervals and hypothesis tests to address the second.

There is a need for indicators of transportation-land use system quality that are understandable to a wide range of stakeholders, and which can provide immediate feedback on the quality of interactively designed scenarios. Location-based accessibility indicators are promising candidates, but indicator values can vary strongly depending on time of day and transfer wait times. Capturing this variation increases complexity, slowing down calculations. We present new methods for rapid yet rigorous computation of accessibility metrics, allowing immediate feedback during early-stage transit planning, while being rigorous enough for final analyses. Our approach is statistical, characterizing the uncertainty and variability in accessibility metrics due to differences in departure time and headway-based scenario specification. The analysis is carried out on a detailed multi-modal network model including both public transportation and streets. Land use data are represented at high resolution. These methods have been implemented as open-source software running on commodity cloud infrastructure. Networks are constructed from standard open data sources, and scenarios are built in a map-based web interface. We conclude with a case study, describing how these methods were applied in a long-term transportation planning process for metropolitan Amsterdam.