Major advances in the number, capabilities, and quality of state, national, and transnational databases have opened up new opportunities for evaluators. Both large-scale data sets collected for administrative purposes and those collected by other researchers can provide data for a variety of evaluation-related activities. These include (a)…

Over the past few years, the focus group method has assumed a very important role as a method for collecting qualitative data in social and behavioural science research. This article elucidates theoretical and practical problems and prospects associated with the use of focus groups as a qualitative research method in social and behavioural science…

This article offers an evaluation of the implementation of the American Sociological Association's Integrating Data Analysis Project in a large introductory sociology course. This project was designed following an examination of the curricula of 13 disciplines that revealed that sociology failed to integrate empirical, quantitative literacy…

Evaluators who perform formative evaluations would be well served to apprise themselves of recent survey research in framing formative evaluations. Illustrative examples are used from research into such diverse areas of activity as: the development of identities attached to different forms of modern rock and roll; the rationales that juvenile…

Choosing the most appropriate method to handle missing data during analyses is one of the most challenging decisions confronting researchers. Often, missing values are just ignored rather than replaced with a reliable imputation method. Six methods of data imputation were used to replace missing data from two data sets of varying sizes; this…

A model is described which illustrates two general uses of multiple analyses to evaluate quasi-experiments: obtaining estimates of the treatment effect, and checking the validity of the experiment. (MH)

These technical appendices are bound separately from the report "Strategies for Knowledge Use and School Improvement" which evaluates the National Institute of Education's Research and Development Utilization (RDU) program. Appendix A contains a preliminary report on the statistical quality of the quantitative data, focusing primarily on…

Research practitioners have traditionally collected and analyzed data using experimental designs and inferential statistical procedures. In addition to being difficult to learn and apply, these quantitative procedures generally leave out such variables as attitudes, feelings, and emotions. This paper describes the nature and role of qualitative…

The movement toward integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods within the same study has been most evident in social policy research. Four major approaches to integrating can be identified in recent studies. The sequential, the parallel, and the fused models have been rather widely used. The interactive model, developed during…

Offered in response to a request by the National Science Foundation for information on how knowledge affects policy, the document investigates federal support of social research and development and evaluates the relevance of this research to social policy. Social research and development (R & D) concerns the identification and solution of…