A research design is used to find out how effective a given piece of research has been. This short course in the fundamentals of research design is intended to bring together a few typical examples and a few generally accepted principles of research in a practical kit. After a brief introduction on how to progress from data that is uncountable to…

The general objectives of this study were to develop, investigate, and analyze the academic patterns of Iowa State journalism graduates from 1965-1970 and, with the use of multivariate statistical techniques, attempt to ascertain and determine possible inferences regarding their academic success. Grade point averages were considered as…

A definitive study of the sizes of documents in the ERIC Data Base is reported by the ERIC Processing and Reference Facility. This is a statistical and frequency distribution study encompassing every item in the file whose record contains pagination data in machine readable form. The study provides pagination data that could be used by present and…

The Child Welfare Information Service (CWIS), a computerized information system in New York City, provides data about the movement of children from natural parents through the foster care system to independence. (Author/SE)

The interrelationships among within-aggregate, between-aggregate, and total-group correlation coefficients are summarized with artificial and real-data examples. The relevance of correlation analyses at various levels of aggregation and some of the difficulties encountered in cross-level inference are also discussed. (Author/JKS)

It is argued that numerical peculiarities in Burt's reports of kinship correlations are more reasonably attributable to carelessness than to fraud. No analysis shows that Burt's results are biased so as to favor his theory, and they are in close agreement with numerous independent studies. (Author/AM)

Presents a comprehensive profile of data elements for describing computer software and identifies their probable application in library catalogs, bibliographic references, program documentation, program front matter, program packaging, software catalogs, and eye-legible labels. The data elements are correlated with existing MARC tags, to provide…

Examines the data from the Osmond (1984), Acock and Edwards (1982), and Scanzoni (1979a, 1979b) debates concerning female status attainment. Concludes that substantive conclusions are only as valid as the data on which they are based. (LLL)

Using signal detectability theory, analysis was performed on auditory frequency sensitivity data obtained by Hutt et al, 1968, on human neonates. Reanalysis using 12 male infants confirms superiority of lower frequencies and square waves in provoking startles in neonates. No state of arousal effects were found on sensitivity. (JH)

Prior to conducting a statistical analysis, sufficient data screening methods should be used for all research variables to identify miscoded, missing, or otherwise messy data. The primary purpose of these exercises was to demonstrate the role of data screening techniques and their potential to improve the performance of statistical methods. A…

In intervention studies, it is important to assess whether one program might be more effective for individuals with extreme initial difficulties, while another might be more effective for individuals with less extreme initial difficulties. In setting in which time-series data are obtained for each person, this entails examining interactions…

The jackknife, as refined by J. Tukey (1958), is a valuable tool for the internal replication of a study. The jackknife statistic is particularly useful with small sample sizes. Large samples are labor intensive, and other methods better address this situation. The jackknife procedure involves the use of a single sample drawn from a normally…

This research shows that by submitting samples of the client's recent professional reading material to automatic text analysis, Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) profiles can be prepared that result in significantly higher initial recall scores than do those prepared by conventional techniques; relevance scores are not significantly…