Describes a two-year study of 76 prereading children, examining relationships between phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and the development of reading and spelling. Indicates that phonological awareness predicted later reading and spelling even when simple and backwards repetition were controlled. Suggests that verbal working memory…

Identifies factors that might have influenced individual newspapers' coverage of the suffrage movement, including the personal positions of publishers and editors, political affiliations, the demographic characteristics of the readership area, circulation size, place of publication, and sources of the stories. Finds that these examples of the…

The "Stages of Change Scale-Substance Abuse" (SCS-SA) was developed to measure readiness to change among individuals in treatment for substance abuse and was field tested with 457 participants. Factor analysis on SCS-SA items defined 4 subscales: Precontemplation, Determination, Participation, and Relapse. The SCS-SA appears to have potential in…

Describes a study that identified attributes that can characterize the Net generation and examines how these attributes, together with perceived seductive properties of the Internet (e.g., pleasure of control and fluidity of identity) and gratifications obtained from the Internet can predict popular Internet activities. Reports results of a…

This study supported evidence of reliability and validity of the Theoretical Orientation Profile Scale-Revised (TOPS-R) scores. The TOPS-R was designed to measure theoretical orientation among counselors and trainees. Factor analysis yielded a 6-factor solution accounting for 87.5% of the total variance in the scale. The 6 factors corresponded to…

Describes the development and validation of a measure of the stress experienced by African Americans as a result of daily encounters with racism and discrimination. The scale has adequate indexes of internal consistency and fair-to-adequate estimates of test-retest stability. Several other factors also indicated the measure's reliability. (RJM)

Examines a taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties. A questionnaire was administered to 563 young adults at the beginning of their career decision-making process. The relations among the 10 scales, which represent 10 theoretical categories of difficulties, and those among the items within 2 selected categories, were similar in the 2…

Discussion of author cocitation analysis focuses on Pathfinder Networks (PFNET) where nodes represent authors and links represent weighted paths between nodes, the weights being cocitation counts. Highlights include remapping information science; comparison with principal components analysis; a correlation-based PFNET; and AuthorLink, a Web-based…

The factor structure of the Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC) was examined with 383 individuals (aged 5-22 years) with autism spectrum disorders. A five-factor model accounted for 80% of the total variance. However, no support was found for classifying the checklist's 57 items into the previously proposed five subscales. (Contains references.)…

Factor analysis of the Activity Card Sort results for 53 Israeli college students and 131 older adults indicated that students were involved primarily in leisure, the elders in independent daily living activities. Five student activity categories were distinct; four elders' categories overlapped substantially. (Contains 19 references.) (SK)

This study obtained multiple measures of three factors (capacity, strategies, and metamemory) hypothesized to cause memory improvement with age among younger (ages 5 to 8) to older (ages 8 to 11) children. Results suggested that fit of the 3-factor model was statistically significantly better than a 1-factor, general memory model for both age…

Latent dimensions underlying individual differences in performance of information-processing tasks and dual task combinations, and the existence of a time-sharing (TS) ability were studied in 81 male college students. Supportive evidence for a general TS ability was not found. An identified TS factor specific to task combinations is discussed.…

Discusses the Attitude Functions Inventory (AFI), which assesses the extent to which a person's attitude fulfills each of four psychological functions. Reports findings of a study, involving 249 undergraduates, that tested the construct validity of the AFI. Suggests that the AFI provides conceptually meaningful measures of the functions of…

Variations in "foot-in-the-door" effect (gaining compliance in small requests to increase compliance with larger requests) examined for enhancing client motivation to change in counseling. Participants (N=56) assigned to one of four conditions in 2 x 2 factorial design based on presence or absence of request and motivation labeling.…

In a Delphi study of research needs in educational technology, 89 experts suggested 163 research needs. High-priority needs were identified by the Scree test--a method usually restricted to factor analysis. The usefulness of the technique for analysis of survey results suggests that it should be extended to other applications. (SLD)