The present study explored the heterogeneous nature of popularity by investigating subgroups of popular girls (N = 365) in their first year of secondary school (mean age = 13.05). Cluster analysis revealed the presence of five subgroups based upon sociometric popularity (i.e., those considered "likeable" by peers) and consensual popularity (i.e.,…

The utilization of health services by older adults has received increased attention over the past decade, but little is known about how service utilization varies between rural and urban areas. In an era of restructuring and downsizing within the Canadian health care system, there are concerns that rural older adults may be increasingly…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if there were differences in the levels of pedagogical knowledge and skills as perceived by the student teachers who were enrolled in the Primary and the Secondary Post Graduate Diploma in Education programme at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. 170 Primary and 426 Secondary student…

Periodically, Maryland's sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders are surveyed to determine the nature, extent, and trend of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use among adolescents. The "2007 Maryland Adolescent Survey (MAS)" presents the latest findings regarding ATOD use by Maryland's adolescents and compares State and local…

The purpose of this study was to examine self-determination and achievement motivation as predictors of successful school performance for high school African American males enrolled in an urban Texas school district. The students (N = 108) were placed into two distinct groups: higher-performing and lower-performing African American males based…

This paper reports on the examination of physics teachers' beliefs and perceptions of laboratory and ICT supported physics instruction. The findings indicate that the teachers in the sample were generally positive about the affordances offered by the physics lab and ICT in physics instruction. However, school culture context, mainly the need to…

Dichotomous item response theory (IRT) models can be viewed as families of stochastically ordered distributions of responses to test items. This paper explores several properties of such distributions. The focus is on the conditions under which stochastic order in families of conditional distributions is transferred to their inverse distributions,…

Since canonical correlation analysis subsumes multiple regression as a special case, and since commonality analysis (a variance partitioning procedure) has proven useful in interpreting multiple regression results, the interpretation of canonical correlation results might also be enhanced by the use of commonality analysis. In this paper, a…

Love is among the most fundamental aspects of the experience of being human. Achieving successful love relationships has been associated by counselors--both counseling theories and researchers--with good mental and good physical health. Yet our knowledge of the nature of love remains primitive, because until recently it was not considered…

Most of the multivariate statistical techniques rely on the assumption of multivariate normality. The effects of non-normality on multivariate tests are assumed to be negligible when variance-covariance matrices and sample sizes are equal. Therefore, in practice, investigators do not usually attempt to remove non-normality. In this simulation…

The relationships among the use of self-regulated learning strategies and two important cognitive motivational factors, expectancy of success and task value, were studied using hierarchical regression analysis. Since there are differences in self-regulated strategy use according to level of test anxiety, test anxiety was used as a control…

The need for using invariance procedures to establish the external validity or generalizability of statistical results has been well documented. Invariance analysis is a tool that can be used to establish confidence in the replicability of research findings. Several approaches to invariance analysis are available that are broadly applicable across…

This Monte Carlo study examines whether, given various numbers of variables, treatments, and sample sizes, in a one-way multivariate analysis of variance, Type I error rates of the test approximations provided by the BMDP program, the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Roy's largest…

This study investigates the accuracy of the Woodruff-Causey technique for estimating sampling errors for complex statistics. The technique may be applied when data are collected by using multistage clustered samples. The technique was chosen for study because of its relevance to the correct use of multivariate analyses in educational survey…

The effects on reading speed and comprehension of window proportions and page turning in electronic text were investigated in this study. Subjects--61 undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin--Whitewater--were administered a standardized reading text displayed as photocopied dot matrix print in simulation of electronic text. There…