Background: Africa is increasingly becoming an important region for health research, mainly due to its heavy burden of disease, socioeconomic challenges, and inadequate health facilities. Regulatory capacities, in terms of ethical review processes, are also generally weak. The ethical assessment of social and behavioral research is relatively…

The current study proposes a new procedure for separately estimating slope change and level change between two adjacent phases in single-case designs. The procedure eliminates baseline trend from the whole data series before assessing treatment effectiveness. The steps necessary to obtain the estimates are presented in detail, explained, and…

Models of a psychological process can be difficult to discriminate experimentally because it is not easy to determine the values of the critical design variables (e.g., presentation schedule, stimulus structure) that will be most informative in differentiating them. Recent developments in sampling-based search methods in statistics make it…

Third stream evaluation, the fusing of the ecological perspective with experimental or quasi-experimental evaluation design, is described. The ecological perspective necessitates that the conceptualization and analysis of a setting and the design of the study emphasize the interdependent relations among organisms, behavior and environment in…

Applied research, as compared to basic nonapplied research, offers the potential for the development of unique insights into the nature of social theory. Cultural deprivation theorizing is used to illustrate the interplay between research and theory. (Author/CTM)

The similarities between television viewing and fantasy activity (daydreaming, reverie, mind-wandering, internal dialogue) more than warrant the building of a theoretical construct, especially in the context of recent empirical research on television viewing consequences. A construct of the television viewing process, based on cognitive theories…

Critical features of sound observational studies fall under three categories: the sampling framework; the theoretical model; and the statistical procedure. If the methodology for explanatory, rather than descriptive, observational studies can be applied within these categories, more consistent, convincing, useful explanations of educational…

This paper comments on and assesses the power of the research of six studies presented at the American Educational Research Association symposium, "Linking Behavioral Research and Administrative Science." Three of the studies (Jordan, Koehler and Ismail, Bredo) are classified in terms of organizations as formal structures, and as instruments of…

In attempting to define the "ecology" of human development, the term's history and connotations are discussed. The ecological approach requires that the person, the environment, and the relations between them be conceptualized in terms of systems, and subsystems within systems. The experimental situation is not limited to being…

Laboratory simulations combine the strengths of lab experiments and field studies while avoiding many of their liabilities. They permit the emotional involvement, the time needed for development of norms and interlocked systems of interaction, and the broad range of variables typical of field settings, yet allow for experimental controls and…

An approach to the study of drug sub-culture groups and a model for predictive research in the identification and isolation of heroin addicts are developed in this thesis. The basic methodologies employed are the linguistic methods of Kenneth Pike and Claude Levi-Strauss for use in the analysis of social phenomena. Communicative mechanisms by…

The literature on the behavior effects of videotaped playback reveals that little theoretical formulation has been offered to explain the positive results which have been reported. Two theoretical models are considered in regard to these results. The first, a reinforcement model, suggests that some behaviors are reinforced positively and some…

This study explored varying uses of the concept "involvement" in ordinary speech, examined the concept as found in the literature on adult education program planning, and analyzed its use and validity in empirical behavioral science research. It was expected that the concept would be further clarified, thus increasing the likelihood of forming…

The research design (called a Model for Educational Improvement), which was employed to compare the process of community educational change in Wisconsin, England, and Taiwan, is described. It was designed to demonstrate the means by which the following can be compared across cultures: Comparative influence on educational matters that are assigned…

The issue of what educational research has illuminated to date about the universally accepted practice of student teaching is discussed in this paper. A critical review is provided of selected literature on student teaching within the context of two contrasting paradigms for conducting educational research: psychometric and social-anthropological.…