Shakespeare's genius as a creative playwright can be judged both subjectively and objectively. Cognitive psychology uses specific behavioral measures to assess performance. A product is marked by latency, quantity, and quality. When college students engage in tests of originality, these measures support many theories of creativity. A similar…

Noting that launching a new magazine in a competitive market is both complicated and costly, a study analyzed four "Teddy Bear" magazines and their market to determine the viability of launching a new Teddy Bear magazine. The market includes "Bear Tracks,""The Teddy Tribune,""Teddy Bear and Friends," and,…

This paper describes a critical study of the available forecasts and forecasting studies for the home video player market over a 15-year period which was undertaken to discover why so many forecasts were wrong about consumer adoption of home videocassette players and videodisk players, the reasons for these errors, and ways in which this knowledge…

A study examined and classified the typing vocabulary present in six contemporary texts used in secondary school typing classes. During this examination, the researcher classified words pertaining to the following instructional areas: learning the keyboard letters and numbers, learning machine parts, developing typing speed, and improving typing…

A study was conducted to determine the political issues of the 1980 presidential campaigns as expressed by televised political spot advertisements during the primaries. Issue information was coded for 140 30- and 60-second political commercials. An advertisement's issue score was defined as the number of terms used that matched terms from a…

Measurements were taken from 8 randomly selected Gannett papers and from 23 non-Gannett papers in an effort to determine whether Gannett papers are unlike other kinds of papers. The content of every issue of every newspaper was divided and measured into eight categories: advertising, news, opinion, letters, sports, features, entertainment, and…

The annual reports of 197 publicly held American corporations were analyzed to determine the relationship of corporate social responsibility activities to boundary-spanning activities (attempts to relate the firm to the outside world). Data gathered included (1) the number of directors from inside and outside a corporation, (2) the number of…

Research and reviews of college introductory sociology textbooks reveal that most do not accurately reflect the diversity of views and perspectives in sociology and do not accurately convey the research-based knowledge of the discipline. Content analysis of textbooks published in the last 20 years indicates that most textbooks are comprehensive,…

Content analysis was used to study the values evident in televised beer and wine commercials. Seventy-seven prime time commercials, 7.6% of a week's total, were analyzed along value dimensions adapted from Gallup's measure of popular social values. The intensity of each value was coded on a five-point scale. None of the commercials in the beer and…

A study examined the possible sources for story ideas within a local television newsroom, with a special emphasis on the role of the reporter. Fifteen newscasts, comprising 227 stories that appeared on early evening newscasts of the three network affiliated television stations in Memphis, Tennessee, were coded for the original source for each…

A new readability formula is designed to work on passages that are 40 to 99 words long, while existing readability formulas require a passage of 300 words or longer. The new formula requires the passage to have at least three sentences and is reliable for the fourth through the twelfth grades. (Four figures which demonstrate the use of the formula…

A study examined whether "Sports Illustrated" offers a biased view of the sports world by focusing primarily on the eastern teams. The units of analysis were articles about Major League baseball appearing in the "Sports Illustrated" issues from late April to early October in the years 1975 to 1984. The teams were divided into…

To examine the role that items on the list of "What Literate Americans Know" (developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) plays in the nation's literacy, a study conducted an electronic search of "The New York Times" to establish the frequency of occurrence for a sample from the list. A random sample of 424 terms (9% of the total list) was…

To examine how the contents of Korean television serial dramas have changed and to determine trends of their portrayals of male and female characters' lifestyles, a study analyzed Korean television dramas of 1977 and 1987. A sample of three channels' video--22 daily and 14 weekly episodes of 18 different television dramas during weekday prime time…

Jacques Ellul defined "prepropaganda" as the subtle and sophisticated use of news services to improve an authoritarian government's public image. Because its value is directly related to its being used sparingly, he predicted that prepropaganda would increase when an authoritarian government felt threatened and decrease when it once more…