Research in psychology and education tend to use large-N group designs that necessitate reporting of mean measures analyzed mostly with null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST), but sometimes with Bayesian, or the estimation approaches in inferential statistics. These approaches all render the average person or student as the the putative…

Factor analysis is a statistical method of reducing a set number of variables by finding similarities between them. This paper reviews the potential of factor analysis, focusing on exploratory factor analysis, in research on psychotherapy. Within the field of psychotherapy, the use of factor analysis can be classified into three groups. The first…

The need for humanistically-oriented research may be viewed as the unfinished business of humanistic psychology. Additional research is needed to support some of the theoretical positions of humanistic psychology which have emerged from clinical practice, education, and management consultation rather than from laboratories and field studies. The…

Previous studies on common fears have been vague and have not met requirements for using factor analysis. To avoid some of these problems, a broader age range and a separate analysis of males and females were designed for a sample of 545 individuals, ages 15-89, who responded to 133 fear-scale items. "Death of a loved one" was the greatest fear…

The extent to which evaluation research and psychology share some common objectives, methods and aims for validity is examined. The conventional dichotomy drawn between the two disciplines is seen as spurious and misleading to scholars and practitioners in each area. To demonstrate the proposed synergy between the two disciplines, an integrative…

An experiment which varied indications about the possibility of psychological risk and deception in consent information provided to subjects prior to participation in Asch's (1952) line-judgment task is presented. The number of erroneous line-judgments (conformity) made by subjects across five consent treatments and a no-consent control group were…

This document contains four papers about the ideological structure of personality. A proposal for a theoretical and methodological reworking of the life-historical inquiry of personality psychology is presented along with a report of some preliminary studies that employ an intensive life-history approach to a distinct topic within the context of…

Bootstrap analysis, both for nonparametric statistical inference and for describing sample results stability and replicability, has been gaining prominence among quantitative researchers in educational and psychological research. Procedurally, however, it is often quite a challenge for quantitative researchers to implement bootstrap analysis in…

Postmodern, multicultural, and feminist critiques of psychology have changed how longitudinal researchers construct their inquiries and frame their data. Also the new scholarship brings to the longitudinal investigation perspectives from other disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and history, among others. The book used as a framework…

An overview of the state of the art in psychological research is presented, with an emphasis on the attention given to effect sizes. The acceptance of small effect sizes for biomedical research is contrasted with the rejection of similar effect sizes for psychological research. The Binomial Effect Size Display is used to depict the practical…

This paper is the introduction to an inquiry into the relationship of post-structural reader theories to cognitive theories in the study of educational media. Basic concepts in reader and cognitive theories are defined, including the notions of "meaning" and "learners." Similarities and differences in the theories are…

The use of systems terms and ecological concepts is increasingly common in psychology, and in particular, community psychology. Interest in systems theory began with the development of general systems theory during the 1950's, and led to the adoption of an ecological-systems orientation which recognized the environment as a major determinant of…

The concept of control is fundamental to comparative research. In research designs where randomization of observational units is not possible, control has been exercised statistically from a single covariate by a process of residualization. The alternative, known as subclassification on the propensity score, was developed primarily for…

The Pearson product moment (P.M.) correlation ("r") and four of its most widely used variations--the phi, the rho, the biserial, and the point-biserial coefficients--are reviewed. Using small data sets between one and nine, the conditions under which the various forms are restricted in power and robustness are explored. Seven sample data…

This document discusses the creation of a new formal language for the field of counseling psychology. Constructs for such a language are applied specifically to the communication of research information (especially research concerned with the effects of counselor action on clients) for experimental replication. Grammatical concepts of a formal…