Responds to Sarah J. McCarthey's article in the same issue. Considers particularly the limitations of McCarthey's research design. (HB)

Critiques Lytton's article in this issue that argues against focusing on the relative strength of child effects versus environmental effects. It is recommended that researchers should instead focus on the issues on which mechanisms operate and how they interact during transactional development. (RH)

Designed three-factor experiment to evaluate potential for improving first-session performance of six trainee-therapists as measured by postsession client ratings (n=48). Rather than through standardizing therapist behavior by using training manual beforehand, therapist effects were handled through statistical control. Found that more frequent…

Notes inconsistencies in drug abuse prevention research findings related to such issues as study design and methodology. Presents consensus recommendations made by drug abuse prevention researchers and practitioners who met at National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1989. Includes specific recommendations directed to modifying prevention approaches;…

Reflects briefly on how the author chooses what research to do. Discusses specific communication research projects that arose from near-sighted, midrange, and far-sighted planning. (RS)

A brief overview of the various methodologies used to study second-language acquisition focuses on the particular complexities presented by the interdisciplinary character of the field and its effects on such aspects as theory construction, empirical methodology, epistemological positions, data collection, hypothesis testing, and data…

Reviews concepts of aptitude and aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) and summarizes lessons learned in ATI research on educational treatments to help ATI research on psychotherapeutic treatments. Research design and data analysis recommendations address aptitude distributions, multivariate aptitude complexes, detective work with scatterplots,…

Discusses aspects of quantitative experimental design to help college science faculty investigate college-level science instruction. (PR)

Describes methods of designing natural resource monitoring programs to provide indications of ecosystem health, define limits of normal variation, identify abnormal conditions, and suggest potential agent of abnormal change. (MDH)

Examines characteristics of educational knowledge produced by educational researchers and considers how this impacts on educational research. Reviews the negative and positive consequences of this structurally egalitarian and substantively divergent knowledge production in education schools. (MMU)

Describes a simple exercise that can be used to demonstrate the concepts of SI units, experimental design, and significant digits in a manner that holds the attention of students who already understand these concepts but is still valuable for students who are less prepared. (CCM)

Highlights effective graphical methods for screening and cleaning data, exploring and identifying models, and displaying data in counseling-psychology publications. Argues that graphs are not ancillary to scientific publications but are essential and, in some cases, sufficient expositions of results. (Author/GCP)

Presents an analysis of 19 studies that apply content analysis techniques to the World Wide Web. Offers how researchers can apply content analysis to the Web with primary focus on formulating research questions/hypotheses, sampling, data collection and coding, training/reliability of coders, and analyzing/interpreting data. (SC)

An analysis of 168 public administration doctoral dissertations revealed substantial improvements over those analyzed in 1990. A substantially higher percentage conducted basic research and reported findings, and more students are using rigorous research designs that involve attention to causal relationships. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/JOW)

Describes and assesses missing data methods currently used to analyze data from matrix sampling designs implemented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Several improved methods are developed, and these models are evaluated using an EM algorithm to obtain maximum likelihood estimates followed by multiple imputation of complete data…