This book presents hands-on information on how to plan, administer, and analyze opinion polls. Guidance is also offered on how to make this strategy accessible to public interest groups. Several examples, checklists, warnings of possible pitfalls, and lists of material and human resources occur throughout the chapters. Major sections address the…

A common problem in the behavioral sciences is to determine if a set of observed variables can be more parsimoniously represented by a smaller set of derived variables. To address this problem, the performance of five methods for determining the number of components to retain (Horn's parallel analysis, Velicer's Minimum Average Partial (MAP),…

Guidelines are provided for designing and conducting a telephone opinion poll of the community. Issues discussed in the first part of this guide include determining the proper sample size, drawing a representative sample of the general adult population or of voters, selecting phone numbers, making call-backs, obtaining the proper male-female…

The purpose of this study was to determine the types of research methods used to study cognitive processing development in gifted learners, from 1975-1986. Of 870 research publications identified on giftedness, 522 publications (60 percent) dealt with cognitive processing development. Research designs used most frequently were causal-comparative,…

The governance options matrix is provided to offer a way for state and university policymakers to examine the functioning environments of specific university-owned public teaching hospitals. With it, they can consider the benefits and problems involved with different options for governance. The issues related to the environmental factors affecting…

This report is about the problem of making transition or enrollment rate gains comparable. It is shown that measures based on the proportions themselves, i.e. the difference between proportions, the proportion ratio and the residual gain ratio do not make the gains comparable. Instead a non-linear transformation has to be done. Two such…

Written in response to a request by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) for information on the extent to which federal agencies are not complying with the clearance provisions of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, this brief narrative report presents the results of an Information Management and Technology Division survey of 90 out of 2,551…

The accuracy and variability of 4 cross-validation procedures and 18 formulas were compared concerning their ability to estimate the population multiple correlation and the validity of the sample regression equation in the population. The investigation included two types of regression, multiple and stepwise; three sample sizes, N = 30, 60, 120;…

This paper examined the rank transformation approach to analysis of variance as a solution to the Behrens-Fisher problem. Using simulation methodology four parameters were manipulated for the two group design: (1) ratio of population variances; (2) distribution form; (3) sample size and (4) population mean difference. The results indicated that…

The testing of research hypotheses is directly comparable to the dichotomous decision-making of medical diagnosis or jury trials--not ill/ill, or innocent/guilty decisions. There are costs in both kinds of error, type I errors of falsely rejecting a null hypothesis or type II errors of falsely rejecting an alternative hypothesis. It is important…

Both popular studies and more serious empirical studies of attitudes toward feminism are reviewed beginning with Clifford Kirkpatrick's early empirical work and including the more recent empirical studies completed since 1970. The review examines the contents of items used to measure feminism, and the methodology and sampling used in studies, as…

In spite of impressive expansion in the educational systems of the Arab Middle East countries, educational research in that region is slow to mature. A number of practical and theoretical problems responsible for the slow development of educational research are identified and discussed. (Editor)

Argues that even for purposes of applied decision making, reliance upon criterion validity -- the degree to which measures correlate with specific criteria -- or content coverage is not enough, that the meaning of the measure must also be analyzed in order to evaluate responsibly the possible consequences of the proposed use, it is stated.…

The author conducted a cross national analysis of sociological research reported in leading journals at two points in time over a ten year period to determine if sociologists' ability to produce valid social generalizations had improved significantly over the recent past. The official journals of the United States (American Sociological Review),…

Three related studies were conducted to examine the effects of variations in procedures used for curriculum-based assessment of reading proficiency: the first addressed the question of the influence of sample duration on the concurrent validity of the measure; the second addressed the question of the influence of sample duration on the level,…