Judgments Of Quality Research Articles

Level of quality of option B+PMTCT service provision in public health facilities in Mekelle zone, northern Ethiopia: cross-sectional study

BackgroundSubstantial improvements have been observed in coverage and access to maternal health services in Ethiopia. However, the quality of care has been lagging behind. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the level of quality of Option B+ PMTCT in Northern Ethiopia.MethodsA facility based survey was conducted from February to April 2016 in Northern Ethiopia. Twelve health facilities were enrolled in the study. Mixed method approach was used in line with Donabedian (Input- Process-Output) service quality assessment model. Data of 168 HIV positive mothers & their infant were abstracted from registers, and follow up charts. During the Option B+ service consultation, a total of 60 sessions were involved for direct observation. Of which, 30 clients and 12 service providers were subjected for exit and in-depth interview respectively. Facilities were categorized rendering good service quality based on predetermined quality judgment criteria. Reasons of good and bad service quality were thematically fitted with each quality component based on emerging themes (TM1-TM3), and categories (CA1-CA6).ResultsOf the total 12 study health facilities, 2(16.7%) were achieved the desired level of service quality based on the three quality components. The input quality was better and judged as good in 33.3% health facilities. However; process and output service quality were realized in one - fourth of them.ConclusionInsignificant numbers of facilities fulfilled the aspired level of service quality. Quality of care was found influenced by multiple inputs, processes, and output related barriers and facilitators. Comprehensive Program monitoring is needed based on three quality components to improve the overall service quality.

Investigating the Perceptual Validity of Evaluation Metrics for Automatic Piano Music Transcription

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is usually evaluated using low-level criteria, typically by counting the number of errors, with equal weighting. Yet, some errors (e.g. out-of-key notes) are more salient than others. In this study, we design an online listening test to gather judgements about AMT quality. These judgements take the form of pairwise comparisons of transcriptions of the same music by pairs of different AMT systems. We investigate how these judgements correlate with benchmark metrics, and find that although they match in many cases, agreement drops when comparing pairs with similar scores, or pairs of poor transcriptions. We show that onset-only notewise F-measure is the benchmark metric that correlates best with human judgement, all the more so with higher onset tolerance thresholds. We define a set of features related to various musical attributes, and use them to design a new metric that correlates significantly better with listeners’ quality judgements. We examine which musical aspects were important to raters by conducting an ablation study on the defined metric, highlighting the importance of the rhythmic dimension (tempo, meter). We make the collected data entirely available for further study, in particular to evaluate the perceptual relevance of new AMT metrics.

Perception of quality and complexity in wine and their links to varietal typicality: An investigation involving Pinot noir wine and professional tasters

Quality and complexity are abstract terms employed frequently to describe a wine’s overall attributes. In the present study, we investigated: (i) attributes driving wine professionals’ judgments of quality and complexity in Pinot noir wines; (ii) the relation between these two abstract concepts; and (iii) association of each concept with varietal typicality. Twenty-two wine professionals evaluated 18 New Zealand Pinot noir wines in both clear and opaque glassware via two sensory tasks, a descriptive rating task and an 8-attribute, perceived complexity questionnaire. Sensory data were associated with wine UV-spectrophotometry colour measures to aid interpretation of the influence of tasting-glass colour. Results demonstrated the key drivers of perceived quality were descriptors varietal typicality, expressiveness, overall structure, and attractive fruit aromatics, along with complexity questionnaire attributes of harmony, balance and number of identifiable flavours. Reductive notes drove low-quality judgments. Data show that quality and complexity were positively associated concepts and that both were linked positively with varietal typicality. Visual influence was not a major driver of wine professionals’ judgments but being able to see a wine’s colour influenced tasters’ judgments to wines at each end of the price/quality spectrum. We discuss the results in terms of cognitive phenomena associated with judgments by those with domain-specific expertise.

What matters most? Stakeholders’ perceptions of river water quality

The need to integrate stakeholders’ views into environmental policy is increasingly gaining attention because this offers the opportunity to design sustainable and synergistic environmental strategies. Understanding and integrating the views of resource users into policy design and implementation could help address the most important challenges, gain community support, enhance project ownership, and avoid policies being rejected by local people. As a result, research in environmental management has focussed on stakeholders’ perceptions of river water quality and how to integrate such views into policy. While existing studies offer insights into the different ways in which stakeholders evaluate river water quality and potential factors influencing judgements, they appear to be limited in a number of ways. First, most of these studies focus on developed countries and may have limited contextual relevance to the developing world. Moreover, past studies focus on segments of society such as farmers and mainly on wastewater for agriculture. These shortcomings may limit our understanding of the topic and our ability to design effective policies to address water quality problems. Drawing on survey data from the Wenchi municipality in Ghana, we examine public perceptions of what constitute important measures of river water quality as well as factors influencing such judgements. Results suggest that while variables such as taste, colour, smell and litter are important, the presence of faecal matter in and/or around the river was rated the most important measure of river water quality while depth of river was the least important. Results further suggest that education, age, number of years a person had lived in a community, depth of river and the presence of aquatic vegetation influence water quality judgements. The findings of this research provide insights into what policymakers and regulators need to consider when attempting to influence behaviours in relation to water resources. We note, however, that while public perceptions of river water quality could guide water management policies, scientific measurements of water quality must not be replaced with stakeholder perceptions. This is because aspects such as ecological integrity may not be important to segments of the public but are an important aspect of water management. This is reinforced in the present study as there seems to be a lack of concern among the participants regarding river depth – an important factor for habitat provision and pollution dilution.

Let the Children Listen: A First Approximation to the Sound Environment Assessment of Children through a Soundwalk Approach.

The urban sound environment is one of the layers that characterizes a city, and several methodologies are used for its assessment, including the soundwalk approach. However, this approach has been tested mainly with adults. In the work presented here, the aim is to investigate a soundwalk methodology for children, analyzing the sound environment of five different sites of Gothenburg, Sweden, from children’s view-point, giving them the opportunity to take action as an active part of society. Both individual assessment of the sound environment and acoustic data were collected. The findings suggested that among significant results, children tended to rank the sound environment as slightly better when lower levels of background noise were present (). Moreover, traffic dominance ratings appeared as the best predictor among the studied sound sources: when traffic dominated as a sound source, the children rated the sound environment as less good. Additionally, traffic volume appeared as a plausible predictor for sound environment quality judgments, since the higher the traffic volume, the lower the quality of the sound environment. The incorporation of children into urban sound environment research may be able to generate new results in terms of children’s understanding of their sound environment. Moreover, sound environment policies can be developed from and for children.

Assessing the predictive validity of perceived globalness and country of origin of foreign brands in quality judgments among consumers in emerging markets

AbstractConsumers in emerging markets are known to have strong preferences for well‐known foreign brands. Drawing on schema and categorization theories, this study empirically investigates how accessible two components of brand foreignness – globalness and country of brand origin – are in consumer perceptions of brand quality in emerging markets. In addition, we argue that brand globalness can be shaped by inferential reasoning and test how consumer perceptions of brand globalness are affected by both a brand's country of origin and its perceived quality. Two different studies were conducted with young‐adult consumers in China. The study found that in their evaluations of foreign brands consumers are more influenced by country of origin than by brand globalness. It also found that consumers tend to perceive a high level of globalness in high‐quality brands and brands from a favorable country‐of‐origin. Further, this tendency was found to differ between well‐known and lesser‐known brands. These findings confirm the predictive validity of country of origin, but contrast with extant literature on the role of brand globalness as a principal quality cue for foreign brands among consumers in emerging markets. Our findings also imply brand globalness can be an inferred attribute of perceived brand quality and country‐of‐origin image. Keywords: brand foreignness, brand globalness, country‐of‐origin effect, emerging markets.

Comparison of direct and indirect perceptual head-related transfer function selection methods.

When a personalized set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) is not available, a common solution is identifying a perceptually appropriate substitute from a database. There are various approaches to this selection process whether based on localization cues, subjective evaluations, or anthropomorphic similarities. This study investigates whether HRTF rankings that stem from different selection methods yield comparable results. A perceptual study was carried out using a basic source localization method and a subjective quality judgment method for a common set of eight HRTFs. HRTF rankings were determined according to different metrics from each method for each subject and the respective results were compared. Results indicate a significant and positive mean correlation between certain metrics. The best HRTFs selected according to one method had significant above-average rating scores according to metrics in the second method.

Pinot Blanc: Impact of the Winemaking Variables on the Evolution of the Phenolic, Volatile and Sensory Profiles.

The impact of two different winemaking practices on the chemical and sensory complexity of Pinot Blanc wines from South Tyrol (Italy), from grape pressing to the bottled wine stored for nine months, was studied. New chemical markers of Pinot blanc were identified: astilbin and trans-caftaric acid differentiated the wines according to the vinification; S-glutathionylcaftaric acid correlated with the temporal trends. Fluorescence analysis displayed strong time-evolution and differentiation of the two wines for gallocatechin and epigallocatechin, respectively. After nine months of storage in bottle, the control wine showed higher amounts of most ethyl esters, acetate esters and octanoic acid, whereas higher alcohols characterized instead the wine obtained with prefermentative cold maceration. The sensory panel found notes of apple and tropical fruit in the control wine and attributed a higher overall quality judgement to it, whereas the cold-macerated wine was described by olfactory intensity, spicy and pear attributes.

Knowledge of Potential Harms and Benefits of Tamoxifen among Women Considering Breast Cancer Preventive Therapy.

Tamoxifen reduces breast cancer incidence in women at increased risk, but may cause side effects. We examined women's knowledge of tamoxifen's potential harms and benefits, and the extent to which knowledge reflects subjective judgments of awareness and decision quality. After a hospital appointment, 408 (55.7%) women at increased risk of breast cancer completed a survey assessing objective knowledge about the potential benefit (risk reduction) and harms (endometrial cancer, thromboembolic events, and menopausal side effects) of tamoxifen, and subjective tamoxifen knowledge and decisional quality. Two hundred fifty-eight (63.2%) completed a 3-month follow-up survey. Sixteen percent (15.7%) of participants recognized the potential benefit and three major harms of using tamoxifen. These women were more likely to have degree-level education [vs. below degree level; OR, 2.24; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.11-4.55] and good numeracy (vs. poor numeracy; OR, 5.91; 95% CI, 1.33-26.19). Tamoxifen uptake was higher in women who recognized all harms and benefits (vs. not recognizing; OR, 2.47; 95% CI, 0.94-6.54). Sixty-six percent (65.8%) of tamoxifen users were unaware of its potential benefit and harms. Most (87.1%) women reported feeling informed about tamoxifen, and subjective decisional quality was high [Mean (SD), 17.03 (1.87), out of 18]. Knowledge regarding the potential harms and benefit of tamoxifen is low in women considering prevention therapy, and they may need additional support to make informed decisions about tamoxifen preventive therapy.

Prevalence and Profile of Discarded Liver Donors in a Tertiary Health Service in Brazil From 2015 to 2018

BackgroundLittle has changed in donor management and liver utilization rates in Brazil over the last decade. With a growing demand for liver donations, organ waste is an important obstacle toward better patient care. The study of discarded donors helps to shed light on the possibilities of increasing organ usage, including by using extended criteria donors. MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed all discarded liver donors in a high-volume Brazilian transplant center from January 2015 to December 2018. Pertinent clinical and laboratorial data were collected from the donors’ electronic health records. ResultsIn our study period, there were 248 liver harvests, of which 67 (27.0%) were discarded. Most discarded donors were male (65.7%). More than three-quarters of donors were Caucasian (79.1%). Median donor body mass index was 26.27 kg/m2, and most discarded donors presented no comorbidities. Donor liver injury tests were abnormal in 56 (83.5%) out of 67 discarded donors. Forty-three (64.1%) donors presented elevated transaminases. Alanine aminotransferase levels were elevated in 35 (52.2%) discarded donors, with a median value of 38 U/L. Half of all discarded livers were due to graft-related issues. Twenty-eight organs (41.79%) presented external pathologic alterations. Organ refusal due to donor clinical and laboratorial condition was reported in 24 cases. ConclusionIt is clear there is a considerable issue of organ waste in Brazil, with the subjective judgment of graft quality and inadequate interpretation of donor’s laboratorial exams leading to excessive denial of organs that could be fitted into extended criteria for donation.

Evaluation Of CPR Quality Via Smartphone With A Video Livestream – A Study In A Metropolitan Area

Background Telephone-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is an effective and proven tool to improve patient survival and outcome after cardiac arrest, and is therefore recommended in international resuscitation guidelines. A new technology that provides the emergency medical services (EMS) dispatcher with a video livestream from a smartphone during telephone-assisted CPR was investigated to assess whether a correct judgment of CPR quality is feasible. Material and Methods After Ethics Committee approval, we conducted this study from August to September 2018 in the University Hospital of Cologne and its metropolitan area. Our study team set up a full-scale resuscitation mannequin on 54 study sites. Video telephony between caller and EMS dispatcher was established, and CPR was initiated with randomized common quality issues concerning compression frequency, compression depth, and compression point. It was evaluated whether the dispatcher recognized correct and incorrect resuscitation performance. Results Forty-six video calls were established successfully. EMS dispatching staff identified correct compression frequency (100-120/min) in 87.5% of the cases, too low frequency (<80/min) was correctly identified in 92%, and too high frequency (>140/min) in 58.5%, respectively. Correct compression depth (5-6 cm) was identified in 70.6%, shallow compressions (<3cm) in 92.9% and a continuous decrease of depth in 100% of all cases. Correct compression point was identified in 87.5%, incorrect epigastric compression in 92.3%, incomplete release in 58.8%. Conclusion A video livestream from a smartphone can support an EMS dispatcher’s assistance in resuscitation. Typical resuscitation mistakes, like incorrect compression frequency or depth, and incorrect compression points could be recognized and corrected efficiently via video livestream.

Native and non-native listeners’ judgements on the overall speech quality of hearing-impaired children

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the influence of listeners’ native language on their judgement of the overall speech quality of normally hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) children. Studies have shown that listeners’ native language influences their judgements on linguistic aspects of a foreign language. Since judging speech quality does in principle not require any knowledge of the language, the question arose if the native language influences listeners’ judgements. For this purpose, the overall speech quality of seven-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 21) with an acoustic hearing aid (HA), a cochlear implant (CI) and normal hearing (NH) was judged by four listener groups (native speakers of Italian, German, French and Dutch). Listeners completed a comparative judgement task in which stimuli were presented in pairs. For each pair, they selected the better sounding stimulus. This procedure ultimately led to a ranking of the stimuli according to their speech quality. The ranking showed that NH children had a significantly higher speech quality than HI children. Interestingly, there was no significant effect of language background. Both native and non-native listeners perceived a significant difference in speech quality. Also, within the group of HI children, all listener groups preferred the speech of CI children when comparing them to HA children. These results indicated that the differences were purely speech related since the non-native listeners had no linguistic knowledge of Dutch. Considering that all listeners perceived a similar qualitative difference, we conclude that there was no transfer of native language in this type of judgement.

Quality Assessment Protocols for Omnidirectional Video Quality Evaluation

In recent years, with the introduction of powerful HMDs such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Pro, the QoE that can be achieved with VR/360° videos has increased substantially. Unfortunately, no standardized guidelines, methodologies and protocols exist for conducting and evaluating the quality of 360° videos in tests with human test subjects. In this paper, we present a set of test protocols for the evaluation of quality of 360° videos using HMDs. To this aim, we review the state-of-the-art with respect to the assessment of 360° videos summarizes their results. Also, we summarize the methodological approaches and results taken for different subjective experiments at our lab under different contextual conditions. In the first two experiments 1a and 1b, the performance of two different subjective test methods, Double-Stimulus Impairment Scale (DSIS) and Modified Absolute Category Rating (M-ACR) was compared under different contextual conditions. In experiment 2, the performance of three different subjective test methods, DSIS, M-ACR and Absolute Category Rating (ACR) was compared this time without varying the contextual conditions. Building on the reliability and general applicability of the procedure across different tests, a methodological framework for 360° video quality assessment is presented in this paper. Besides video or media quality judgments, the procedure comprises the assessment of presence and simulator sickness, for which different methods were compared. Further, the accompanying head-rotation data can be used to analyze both content- and quality-related behavioural viewing aspects. Based on the results, the implications of different contextual settings are discussed.

Full-reference IPTV image quality assessment by deeply learning structural cues

Image quality assessment (IQA) attempts to quantify the quality-aware visual attributes perceived by humans. They can be divided into subjective and objective image quality assessment. Subjective IQA algorithms rely on human judgment of image quality, where the human visual perception functions as the dominant factor However, they cannot be widely applied in practice due to the heavy reliance on different individuals. Motivated by the fact that objective IQA largely depends on image structural information, we propose a structural cues-based full-reference IPTV IQA algorithm. More specifically, we first design a grid-based object detection module to extract multiple structural information from both the reference IPTV image (i.e., video frame) and the test one. Afterwards, we propose a structure-preserved deep neural networks to generate the deep representation for each IPTV image. Subsequently, a new distance metric is proposed to measure the similarity between the reference image and the evaluated image. A test IPV image with a small calculated distance is considered as a high quality one. Comprehensive comparative study with the state-of-the-art IQA algorithms have shown that our method is accurate and robust.

A cockpit of multiple measures for assessing film restoration quality

In machine vision, the idea of expressing the quality of a films by a single value is very popular. Usually this value is computed by processing a set of image features with the aim of resembling as much as possible a kind of human judgment of the film quality. Since human quality assessment is a complex mechanism involving many different perceptual aspects, we believe that such approach may scarcely provide a comprehensive analysis. Especially in the field of digital movie restoration, a single score can hardly provide reliable information about the effects of the various restoring operations. For this reason we introduce an alternative approach, where a set of measures, describing over time basic global and local visual properties of the film frames, is computed in an unsupervised way and delivered to expert evaluators for checking the restoration pipeline and results. The proposed framework can be viewed as a car or airplane cockpit, whose parameters (i.e. the computed measures) are necessary to control the machine status and performance. This cockpit, which is publicly available online, would like to support the digital restoration process and its assessment.

Negative valence specific deficits in judgements of musical affective quality in alexithymia

ABSTRACT Alexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgements of discrete emotions rather than of affect, which is a precursor to emotion construction. In the current study, higher alexithymia was predicted to be related to more neutral judgements of valence and arousal of music representing a range of emotions. Participants (N = 162) listened to ten 15-second musical pieces that represented five target emotions (happy, sad, tender, angry, and fearful) and rated the valence and arousal of each. Participants also listed emotion words they knew to be expressed in music. Analyses revealed that alexithymia was not related to the number of emotion words generated but was related to valence-specific affect judgements of music. Participants higher in alexithymia rated sad, angry, and fearful pieces as more neutral in valence and arousal. Alexithymia was not related to ratings of valence or arousal for happy and tender pieces. These findings suggest that perceptual deficits in alexithymia may be specific to negative emotions. Our results are consistent with the idea that alexithymia is related to the direction of attention away from negative stimuli.

Saturation controversy in qualitative research: Complexities and underlying assumptions. A literature review

Judgement of quality in qualitative has been a contested and controversial issue amongst researchers. Contention has always emanated from the subjective nature of qualitative studies, absence of clear guidelines in sampling as well as the lack of generalisability of findings. Numerous avenues have been suggested to improve qualitative research quality and key amongst the suggestions is the concept of saturation. It is viewed as a contemporary measure to alleviate the subjectivity in qualitative research, a yardstick for estimating sample sizes in qualitative research as well as an assurance for rigour and quality. Despite its recognition as a vital tool, it has its own fair share of controversies and contradictions. This research, through a comprehensive and evaluative literature review sought to unpack the saturation puzzle, controversies in definitions and underlying assumptions. The objective was to make a contribution to the contemporary but growing body of knowledge on the saturation conundrum. The study found out that there are various forms of saturation and with varying underlying propositions, therefore in order to meaningfully apply the concept, researchers have to appreciate the forms of saturation, link the appropriate form to their qualitative research design. It is undoubtedly important for research to define fully the form adopted, explicate the steps followed to achieve it and how it was ultimately achieved. In short, narrow the scope of saturation and contextualise it to your research.

How to Evaluate Single-Round Dialogues Like Humans: An Information-Oriented Metric

Developing a dialogue response generation system is one of important topics in natural language processing, but many obstacles are yet to be overcome before autogenerated dialogues with a human-like quality can become possible. A good evaluation method will help narrow the gap between machines and humans in dialogue generation. Unfortunately, the existing automatic evaluation methods are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgments of response quality. Such methods are incapable of assessing whether a dialogue response generation system can produce high-quality, knowledge-related and informative dialogues. In response to this challenge, we design an information-oriented framework to simulate human subjective evaluation. Using this framework, we implement a learning-based metric to evaluate the quality of a dialogue. An experimental validation demonstrates our proposed metric's effectiveness in dialogue selection and model evaluation on a Twitter dataset (in English) and a Weibo dataset (in Chinese). In addition, the metric is more relevant than the existing methods of dialogue evaluation to human subjective judgment.

The Role of Outpatient Care Accreditation in Enhancing Foreign Patients' Perception of Colombian Medical Tourism: A Quasi-experimental Design.

This study analyzes whether hospitals accredited by the Joint Commission International in outpatient medical care protocols located in Colombia achieve a higher quality perception from foreign patients compared to others treated in a non-accredited one. A t-test with Welch correction, chi-square test, correlation coefficient of Tau Kendall, pre-test, post-test, complementary questionnaire and a 2 focus groups were used in 178 foreign patients. It was observed that patients treated in accredited hospitals had a higher quality perception than the non-accredited group. However, it was found that an unbalanced application of the 3 variables negatively alters quality judgment. Findings contributes to understanding the Colombian medical tourism in depth using non-conventional instruments.

The effect of cohesive features in integrated and independent L2 writing quality and text classification

Cohesion features were calculated for a corpus of 960 essays by 480 test-takers from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to examine differences in the use of cohesion devices between integrated (source-based) writing and independent writing samples. Cohesion indices were measured using an automated textual analysis tool, the Tool for the Automatic Assessment of Cohesion (TAACO). A discriminant function analysis correctly classified essays as either integrated or independent in 92.3 per cent of cases. Integrated writing was marked by higher use of specific connectives and greater lexical overlap of content words between textual units, whereas independent writing was marked by greater lexical overlap of function words, especially pronouns. Regression analyses found that cohesive indices which distinguish tasks predict writing quality judgments more strongly in independent writing. However, the strongest predictor of human judgments was the same for both tasks: lexical overlap of function words. The findings demonstrate that text cohesion is a multidimensional construct shaped by the writing task, yet the measures of cohesion which affect human judgments of writing quality are not entirely different across tasks. These analyses allow us to better understand cohesive features in writing tasks and implications for automated writing assessment.