Proactive preliminary minimum sample size determination can be useful for the early planning stages of a latent variable modeling study to set a realistic scope, long before the model and population are finalized. This study examined existing methods and proposed a new method for proactive preliminary minimum sample size determination.

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of…

It is more common for educational and psychological data to be nonnormal than to be approximately normal. This tendency may lead to bias and error in point estimates of the Pearson correlation coefficient. In a series of Monte Carlo simulations, the Pearson correlation was examined under conditions of normal and nonnormal data, and it was compared…

This century is a century in which vertiginous rapid change is experienced. In each day, new innovations are being part of our lives. For this reason, innovation term is a dynamic concept that emerges in every field and it is inside of life. "Innovation" is an English term but it is adopted in daily life in Turkish as…

Longitudinal research has demonstrated a link between exposure to sexual content in media and subsequent changes in adolescent sexual behavior, including initiation of intercourse and various noncoital sexual activities. Based on a reanalysis of one of the data sets involved, Steinberg and Monahan (2011) have challenged these findings. However,…

Confidence intervals are widely accepted as a preferred way to present study results. They encompass significance tests and provide an estimate of the magnitude of the effect. However, comparisons of correlations still rely heavily on significance testing. The persistence of this practice is caused primarily by the lack of simple yet accurate…

The focus of the study was on empirically providing a composite picture of the relationship of some representatives of school, student and teacher factors on students' environmental conservation habit of a school-based Environmental Education programme. The study sample comprised 584 members of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) School…

This study investigated the main effects of social support measures and their stress-buffering effects in two samples of homeless adults (Ns =249 and 219) obtained in the same large county (surrounding Detroit) at different points in time over an 8-year period (1992-1994 and 2000-2002). The findings suggest that the construct of social support,…

The utility of value-added estimates of teachers' effects on student test scores depends on whether they can distinguish between high- and low-productivity teachers and predict future teacher performance. This article studies the year-to-year variability in value-added measures for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers from five large…

The purpose of this paper is to prove that one currently recommended method of obtaining the reliability of an instrument defined on a population of aggregate units is invalid. This method randomly splits the aggregate into two halves, correlates the two half unit scores by a Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, and corrects the…

Kelly's formula estimates sampling variance of correlation corrected for attenuation by using split-half reliabilities. In some cases, coefficient alpha estimate of reliability is preferable. A simulation study suggests a variation of Kelly's formula can be used appropriately with coefficient alpha. Kelly's formula is modified to accept…

Multivariate methods are being used with increasing frequency in educational research because these methods control "experimentwise" error rate inflation, and because the methods best honor the nature of the reality to which the researcher wishes to generalize. This paper: explains the basic logic of canonical analysis; illustrates that…

Three techniques for assessing the adequacy of correlation matrices for factor analysis were applied to four examples from the literature. The methods compared were: (1) inspection of the off diagonal elements of the anti-image covariance matrix S(to the 2nd) R(to the -1) and S(to the 2nd); (2) the Measure of Sampling Adequacy (M.S.A.), and (3)…

Describes a correlation method for calculating reference statistics using weekly door counts that was tested at the University of South Carolina while studying a sampling technique for collecting reference statistics. Results indicate this method may offer libraries an accurate and less time-consuming procedure for keeping reference statistics.…

This report gives some simple examples of stability for one factor and 2 x 2 factorial analysis of variance, reliability and correlations. The findings are very different: from superstability (no transformation whatsoever can change the result) to almost total instability. This is followed by a discussion of applications to multivariate analysis,…