Examined the construct validity of the Middle Childhood Temperament Questionnaire. Factor analysis revealed five factors. The factors of task persistence, negative reactivity, approach-withdrawal, and activity, but not the factor of responsiveness, were determined to have satisfactory levels of reliability. (MM)

Reviews research that sheds light on the comparability of Oral Proficiency Interview and the Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview. Suggestions are provided for further research. (16 references) (VWL)

Mothers, teachers, and assistant teachers completed two measures of child behavior when children born prematurely were two and three years old. Interinstrument correlations for total scores, and the stability of the Behavior Check List from two to three years, were moderate. Interrater agreements between teachers and assistant teachers were…

Analysis of reliability among peer reviews of 422 unsolicited articles for the "Journal of Clinical Anesthesia" found that most articles' reviews were consistent or near consistent. However, articles reviewed by two of the editorial board members were much less likely to be accepted than those read by two nonmembers. (Author/MSE)

Sixty-one examiners provided a rating of whether a significant change in performance of handicapped individuals occurred across the baseline and treatment phases of six graphs of hypothetical data from single-subject designs. Results revealed considerable interrater disagreement on four graphs, especially those involving change in variability or…

D.V. Budescu and J.L. Rogers (1981) proposed a method of adjusting correlations of scales to eliminate spurious components resulting from the overlapping of scales. Three reliability correction formulas are derived in this article that are based on more tenable assumptions. (SLD)

Developed Personal Independence Profile (PIP) as an instrument to measure aspects of independence beyond physical and cognitive functioning in people with diverse disabilities. PIP was tested for reliability and validity with 185 subjects from 10 independent living centers. Findings suggest that the Personal Independence Profile measures the…

Unsophisticated raters judged speech naturalness and stuttering severity in audio-only and audiovisual presentations of speech samples. For stutterer samples, raters judged the audiovisual presentation more unnatural than the audio presentation, but for the nonstutterer samples, there was no difference. Stuttering severity ratings did not differ…

Comparison of self- and others' ratings of 335 managers' job performance found moderately low agreement between the two. Managers consistently reported practicing specific skills more frequently than raters' feedback showed, across 20 management practices areas. (SK)

Relatives of patients with dementia completed questionnaires about caregiver stress and patients' functional and psychiatric problems during initial evaluation, at 4-17-month follow-up, and retrospectively. Retrospective accounts correlated well with initial reports but psychiatric symptoms were underreported in retrospective accounts. Spouses…

This article describes the Scale for the Evaluation of Gifted Identification Instruments, developed for use by school decision makers. Development of the scale is reviewed in terms of five areas of assessment: validity, reliability, propriety, respondent appropriateness, and utility. Specific guidelines and cautions in using the scale are also…

Presents general principles for cleaning data sets. Suggests techniques: check for column shifts, data completeness, marginal frequencies, and selected cross-tabulations; examines a sample of cases. Gives strategies for preventing data processing errors. (SK)

Fifteen deaf and 11 hearing children (ages 8-10) witnessed slides depicting a wallet theft and were interviewed using a free recall approach followed by increasingly directive questions. Although accuracy of the two groups did not differ in free recall, deaf children provided less accurate responses to directive questions, whereas accuracy of the…

This article presents arguments that the correlation measure "r" of halo is not conceptually more appropriate than the standard deviation (SD) measure. It also describes conditions under which halo effects occur and when the SD and r measures can be used. Neither measure is uniformly superior to the other. (SLD)

A previous paper proposed a generalized family of coefficients of relational agreement for multiple judges. It focused on the concept of empirically meaningful relationships. This paper presents an ordinal coefficient of relational agreement as a special case of the generalized family. The proposed ordinal coefficient encompasses other ordinal…