Problems associated with rural economic development--involving maldistributions of population, income, and employment--suggest the need for statistical indicators of rural area growth and development. Development problems are not usually aligned geographically with the boundaries of a city, county, or state, but multicounty units of observation…

A study designed to investigate the validity of using scale scores in lieu of factor scores for factors derived from a factor analysis technique is presented. The Work Values Inventory (WVI) was selected for use because of its purported factor structure. The population consisted of ninth-grade students from a suburban area of a large metropolitan…

This study was designed to assess the conceptual structure of the Task of Public Education Opinionnaire (TPE). Since the development of the instrument, several psychometric techniques have been formulated. Two of those methods, image component and alpha factor analysis, were applied to the items of the TPE after the correlation matrices were…

This study measured the effectiveness of teacher education programs in modifying cross-cultural attitudes through Osgood's Semantic Differential (SD) techniques, coupled with factor and pattern similarity analyses. The five concepts rated were desegregation, discipline, instructional technique, professionalism, and students. Subjects were 51 black…

This paper concerns situations in which a p x p covariance matrix is a function of an unknown q x 1 parameter vector y-sub-o. Notation is defined in the second section, and some algebraic results used in subsequent sections are given. Section 3 deals with asymptotic properties of generalized least squares (G.L.S.) estimators of y-sub-o. Section 4…

A battery of instruments intended to predict on-the-job performance of patrolmen was administered to civil service police applicants, and the resulting data were factor analyzed. The factor structures which emerge closely resemble the intended structures and appear promising for planned predictive studies of criterion performance on the job. The…

The present study explored the effects of complex relational sentences upon the acquisition and recall of surrounding material in immediate and long-term memory. The study also investigated the effects of an immediate prompted recall test upon long-term retention, and the recallability of different types of content. Reading time (subject-paced; 16…

Seventy-two scales collected from a previous study were administered to a group of 557 sixth grade, Philadelphia public school children who were mainly from the lower socioeconomic class. A matrix sampling approach was used in collecting the data. The mean value for each scale was established and these values were correlated. The resulting 72 x 72…

During the past decade both the Guilford and Torrence groups have developed numerable measures to assess creative potential. Many of these measures purport to evaluate "creativity" but one element seems to be lacking in each: i.e., the last of "reality-based, real world measures" which would allow relevant response tendencies…

The purposes of this paper are to (1) discuss general issues related to a newly proposed methodology for item content and construct validation and (2) apply the new method in the context of developing a scale for measuring attitudes toward black people. Latent partition analysis was proposed and applied for the study of item content validity using…

The psychometric reliability of a factor, defined as its generalizability across samples drawn from the same population of tests, is considered as a necessary precondition for the scientific meaningfulness of factor analytic results. A solution to the problem of generalizability is illustrated empirically on data from a set of tests designed to…

A factor analytic study is presented of the Learning Environment Inventory, an instrument originally designed to assess secondary students' perception of 15 school environment dimensions. Responses from 3,613 subjects were analyzed through principal components and varimax rotation procedures. In contrast to the expected structure, analyses…

A factor analysis of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) battery was undertaken to gain a better understanding of the specific abilities which contribute to performance on the tests. To determine whether greater amounts of testing time should be allocated to groups of items defined by the factor analysis, a validity study was conducted. Existing…

This paper describes a study that developed and tested a research measure for investigating the concerns of teachers at different stages in the adoption of educational innovations. Through a review of the literature, the staff of the Procedures for Adopting Educational Innovations project identified seven different stages of teacher concern about…

The optimum weighting of variables to predict a dependent-criterion variable is an important problem in nearly all of the social and natural sciences. Although the predominant method, multiple regression analysis (MR), yields optimum weights for the sample at hand, these weights are not generally optimum in the population from which the sample was…