The dependency model of mass media effects predicts that dependency on media information increases as the level of societal structural conflict and change increase, resulting in greater mass media influence. However, this model appears to ignore the structural constraints that a nation's political system can have on media even before they deliver…

Educational research can serve to improve education in both developed and developing countries. It can be oriented toward increasing knowledge about the educational reality, generating theories, or confirming immediate educational political decisions. Educational research should be an interdisciplinary undertaking; this variety helps to unify…

One of a series of teacher-developed curriculum guides designed to encourage student participation and involvement in important social issues, this secondary level guide presents toxic waste as one example of a current issue requiring social action. The first section focuses on the skill of investigating as a means of introducing students to…

This paper examines the unresolved epistemological and theoretical problems in comparative communication research. The first section examines what "comparative" means by reviewing various fields in the social sciences. The second section provides an overview of epistemic assumptions of comparative communication research and suggests that in the…

This document reviews a number of recent studies written in French that investigate the nature of communication between 2-year-old infants and others. The review includes three parts. The first part focuses on studies aiming to constitute a behavioral catalog of the child. Characteristically, these studies offer a posteriori interpretations of…

This information bulletin provides an overview of some of the documents that were identified as a result of limited searches of the literature related to science education attitude research and highlights some of the problems and concerns involved in this research. Major areas considered include: (1) problems of defining scientific attitudes; (2)…

This report estimates costs of feeding and clothing Australian children at a basic survival level. Detailed information is provided on the types of costs incurred by families at different income levels and with children of different ages. After a brief introduction characterizing the study and summarizing findings, discussion focuses on the…

This article presents a meta-analysis of the effects of examiner familiarity/unfamiliarity on children's performance during individual testing. Data came from 22 controlled studies involving 1489 subjects. In a typical study, the effect of examiner familiarity raised test performance by .35 standard deviations. Differential performance favoring…

A review of the literature pertaining to organizational interviewing reveals a number of issues that have hindered research in that area in recent years. An analysis of these issues suggests that researchers should adopt an integrative approach to theory development--one that recognizes the situational differences of various organizational…

Given the extensive adoption of research orientations that employ qualitative data collection techniques in education, Margaret Haughey found it exciting to read about a meta-analytical method that combined findings from studies within these research orientations with those from the well-established traditional forms that most often employed…

This survey of the state-of-the-art of research and theory in the study of intercultural communication considers the following areas: history of the field, clients, basic assumptions, derivations of the ideas in the field, research methodology, available resources, and predictions for the future. The paper notes that the field of intercultural…

This paper reports two studies that examined changes in the participants' level of moral reasoning after exposure to the Kohlberg cognitive-developmental intervention model (1975). This approach focuses on universal moral principles which are manifested in a series of developmental stages. Knowledge of these stages provides one with an outline for…

The vast bulk of psychosocial research data about the family are derived from two basic sources: self-report, retrospective data obtained by questionnaires or interviews; and direct observations of behavior occurring in a laboratory or treatment setting. Despite an emerging enthusiasm for the notion of studying behavior in its natural environment…

Vocational education as a social intervention process operates on two levels: (1) the micro level at which services are designed to improve the employability of the individual and (2) the macro level where the objective is to heighten the awareness and the sensitivity of the community as to the importance of human resource development for the…

The 1975 conference on Alternative Methods for Public Policy Research in Rural America was held to improve research and design methods for the study of public policy issues in rural development so that research can be more readily used by policy makers. The preface to the conference papers discusses theories offered to explain low utilization of…