Describes a new analytical tool, data envelope analysis (DEA) model, which can provide better understanding of the efficiency of academic research libraries. Reports the results of a study using 1994-1995 Association of Research Libraries statistics together with expert judgments, in terms of constraints, to make the model more applicable to the…

Compares directors' use of Public Library Data Service statistics and Federal-State Cooperative System for Public Library Data statistics to show how directors make use of statistics and to highlight the statistical information that directors find particularly useful. The survey addressed: last time of use; ways of use; frequency of use of…

Describes an exercise for college and high school students that relates descriptive statistics to the regional climatic classification. The exercise introduces students to simple calculations of central tendency and dispersion, the construction and interpretation of scatterplots, and the definition of climatic regions. Forces students to engage…

Explores electronic journal usage statistics and develops three metrics and three benchmarks based on those metrics. Topics include earlier work that assessed the value of print journals and was modified for the electronic format; the evaluation of potential purchases; and implications for standards development, including the need for content…

Suggests that political apathy among young people is the result of not having the conceptual tools necessary to comprehend present issues. Argues that to grasp many issues, students need to be mathematically literate, which many are not. Suggests that instructors should expose students to comparative numbers more often. (DSK)

Reviews current trends in the networked community information literature, including public library involvement, and discusses a present study for which multiple methods are being used to collect data from users, librarians, and service providers in three states. Particular attention is given to explaining use of theory specification to apply…

Relative reinforcing efficacy refers to the behavior-strengthening or maintaining property of a reinforcer when compared to that of another reinforcer. Traditional measures of relative reinforcing efficacy sometimes have led to discordant results across and within studies. By contrast, previous investigations have found traditional measures to be…

Russian levels of alcohol consumption and suicide are among the highest in the world. While observers have long suspected an association between the two, they were unable to investigate this hypothesis until recently due to past Soviet secrecy and thus a lack of data. This study took advantage of the newly available data during the post-Soviet era…

This article provides an illustration of how multilevel modelling, which is the standard method for assessing the "school effect" in school effectiveness research, can be combined with the regression-discontinuity approach. While multilevel modelling yields only estimates of relative school effects (differences between schools), the…

Purpose: This study investigated mother?child storybook telling and joint writing as predictors of early literacy among kindergartners with hearing loss. Method: Participants were 30 Israeli kindergartners with hearing loss and their mothers. Early literacy assessments tapped children's alphabetic skills (e.g., word writing, word recognition, and…

In this article, a new method is presented and implemented for deriving a scale of socioeconomic status (SES) from international survey data using a multilevel Bayesian item response theory (IRT) model. The proposed model incorporates both international anchor items and nation-specific items and is able to (a) produce student family SES scores…

The current investigation tested a model in which low self-esteem mediated the effects by parenting processes (monitoring, closeness, and support) on measures of dating violence (victimization, perpetration, attitudes, and perceptions) in a sample of adolescents (n=809; mean age=16.4 years) from both low- and high-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds.…

The development of the DETECT procedure marked an important advancement in nonparametric dimensionality analysis. DETECT is the first nonparametric technique to estimate the number of dimensions in a data set, estimate an effect size for multidimensionality, and identify which dimension is predominantly measured by each item. The efficacy of…

Sixty veterans (54 men, 6 women) with chronic military-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) participated in a wait-list controlled trial of cognitive processing therapy (CPT). The overall dropout rate was 16.6% (20% from CPT, 13% from waiting list). Random regression analyses of the intention-to-treat sample revealed significant…

In this article, we formulate a nonlinear structural equation model (SEM) that can accommodate covariates in the measurement equation and nonlinear terms of covariates and exogenous latent variables in the structural equation. The covariates can come from continuous or discrete distributions. A Bayesian approach is developed to analyze the…