Considerable evidence has been found to support the hypothesis that actors' and observers' attributions diverge. It is also becoming clear that this divergence is not the result of a single process, but is the result of factors which co-occur and differentiate actors from observers. Observers' beliefs about their similarity to actors were…

The "emic" research method used in cultural anthropology is described and its usefulness in developmental psychology is illustrated. A distinction is made in cultural anthropology between "etic" and "emic" research methods. In etic research observers employ established categories, such as prior definitions of…

Many teachers and administrators would acknowledge there are areas of concern in their classrooms and schools. Whether termed "problems," "issues," "challenges," or, as Nunan (1994) put it "puzzles," they provide committed professionals with an opportunity to improve the status quo. Action research is one…

Three- and four-year-olds who had been in day care from infancy were compared with matched subjects who had no day care experience on eight personality characteristics. (DP)

This experiment was designed to investigate the generality-specificity of the accuracy of both encoders and decoders across different types of nonverbal behavior. It was expected that encoders and decoders would exhibit generality in their behavior--i.e., the same level of accuracy--on the dimension of behavior content…

Evaluation results of a program (Infant School Program at New York University Medical Center) serving 40 multihandicapped preschool children over a 3-year period are given. Originally presented with accompanying slides, the paper lists goals of early childhood education and describes methods of data collection and program procedures. Ss were…

Monte Carlo methods were used to investigate the robustness of techniques used in judging the magnitude of a sample correlation coefficient when observations are correlated. Empirical distributions of r, t, and Fisher's z were generated. A technique for controlling error rates in certain situations is suggested. (Author/BJG)

Research based upon a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the Graduate School, University of Pittsburgh, and supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service grant MH-1290 and by the New York State Research Foundation.

To document the frequency of sharing in the context of classroom activities, a total of 116 preschool children 3 to 5 years of age were observed for half-hour periods in 17 classrooms of 4 preschools. Sharing was defined as interchanges in which the original holder grants to another child the partial use, or possession of a thing. All observations…