Suggests research designs and methodologies that are useful in program evaluation when information is hard to measure, or sensitive in nature, or difficult for the respondent to articulate. Illustrates the application of these methods, which include intersubjective certifiability and triangulated respondent groups among other approaches, through…

Derives benefit-cost rations for 14 disability cohorts served by the Vocational Rehabilitation Program. Estimates earnings impacts in a quasiexperimental framework using an internal comparison group. Earnings data are from a panel constructed by linking data from the Rehabilitative Services Administration with data from the Social Security…

Examination of methodological issues in the design and interpretation of studies on the genetics of reading disability suggests three tests of increasing rigor for determining whether reading score distributions are categorical and thus not subject to analyses which assume a continuous normal distribution. Also noted are interactive relationships…

Objective: To consider the research design requirements needed to provide a rigorous test of environmental mediation hypotheses and to summarize the main findings from research using such designs. Method: Selective review of empirical evidence dealing with psychopathology. Results: There is robust evidence of environmentally mediated risks for…

An experimental research design was used to examine the effectiveness of a targeted, long-term intervention to promote school completion and reduce dropout among urban high school students with emotional or behavioral disabilities. African American (67%) males (82%) composed a large portion of the sample. This intervention study was a replication…

More than three-fourths of older adults with developmental disabilities and mental illness live in the community with aging parents, the majority of whom do not complete plans for the residential, financial, and legal future of their offspring. The authors used a true experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of a six-week…

To determine the extent to which published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of psychotherapy can be generalized to a sample of outpatients, the authors matched information obtained from charts of patients who had been screened out of RCTs to inclusion and exclusion criteria from published RCT studies. Most of the patients in the sample who had…

Of interest in this study were the factors that lead to quality child care centers. The Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) was examined for its utility as an effective training device to enlighten directors and classroom teachers of what constitutes quality classrooms. An experimental design was employed for this study.…

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a data-analytic technique that allows researchers to test complex theoretical models. Most published applications of SEM involve analyses of cross-sectional recursive (i.e., unidirectional) models, but it is possible for researchers to test more complex designs that involve variables observed at multiple…

Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding of relations across list items. Of interest is whether generation can also increase the…

This article discusses the concept of school counselor as researcher. Qualitative research is defined, explained, and differentiated from quantitative research. School counselor questions that lend themselves to qualitative research are explored. The article also discusses the steps of qualitative research in depth, including developing questions,…

The problem of finding optimal calibration designs for dichotomous item response theory (IRT) models has been extensively studied in the literature. In this study, this problem will be extended to polytomous IRT models. Focus is given to items described by the nominal response model (NRM). The optimizations objective is to minimize the generalized…

The nature of public schooling, particularly at the early and middle childhood levels, makes designing critical qualitative studies around gay and lesbian issues in the school context problematic at best. This article provides a retrospective dialogue between an associate professor and her then Ph.D. candidate advisee that reflects on the tension…

Cultural context should be taken into account in our research so that we characterize how people behave in their everyday lives, not just a sterile laboratory environment. Much developmental research treats children as though they group in a sociocultural vacuum. Such research misses important points about development. The article illustrates the…

In order to learn the concept of statistical techniques one needs to run real experiments that generate reliable data. In practice, the data from some well-defined process or system is very costly and time consuming. It is difficult to run real experiments during the teaching period in the university. To overcome these difficulties, statisticians…