Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

This paper reviewed the research literature on graduation rates in U.S. high schools to evaluate and assess the findings. The methodology employed was to determine the measuring method that researchers used in reaching their findings. The strengths and weaknesses of the method employed were then analyzed. Flaws and inaccuracies were examined and…

This introduction to a special section on psychobiological studies of stress and coping discusses the problems of interpreting and integrating information on stress reactivity derived from a combination of behavioral and physiological measures. (PCB)

This paper reviews the prominent concepts of the stuttering event and concerns about the reliability of stuttering event measurements, specifically interjudge agreement. Recent attempts to resolve the stuttering measurement problem are reviewed, and the implications of developing an improved measurement system are discussed. (Author/JDD)

Argues that educational researchers analyzing multilevel data must identify appropriate sets of research questions at and within various levels of analysis and must specify appropriate models for analyzing the data. Covers problems, terminology, and measurement and statistical issues associated with multilevel research. (PGD)

Suggest practical procedure for estimating number of subjects that need to be screened to obtain sample of fixed size that meets multiple correlated criteria. Procedure described is based on fact that least-squares regression provides good quadratic fit for Monte Carlo estimates of multivariate probabilities when they are plotted as function of…

Investigators interested in conducting school health research face many challenges. This article focuses on an analysis of research designs and measurement issues that most frequently confront school health researchers. (Author/DF)

The 1992 American Association on Mental Retardation definition of mental retardation is critiqued. The definition is seen as lacking precision and necessitating identification dependent upon assessment of behavioral dimensions for which there are no reliable measurement instruments. These problems, which are attributed to advocacy concerns, are…

Because health behavior is often concerned with dynamic constructs, a longitudinal approach to measurement is needed. The Longitudinal Guttman Simplex (LGS) is a measurement model developed especially for dynamic constructs exhibiting cumulative, unitary development measured longitudinally. Data from the Television Smoking Prevention Project, a…

The methods of 27 studies focusing on toy play among young children with mental retardation were reviewed. Considerable variability was noted with respect to sample characteristics, contextual parameters, and type of measurement. Researchers frequently neglected to provide potentially useful methodological information. Suggestions for future…

Research using measures of racial exposure has been appearing with increasing frequency in the literature on race relations. A methodological analysis finds the following problems with these measures: (1) they fail to characterize meaningfully the actual composition of sub-areas; (2) a particular exposure value can describe a wide variety of…

Of three methods (free recall, verbally prompted recall, and visually prompted recall) for eliciting understanding of a folk tale by 35 adolescents with intellectual disability, none proved significantly better in eliciting story understanding. All measures correlated with short-term memory, suggesting that subjects' difficulty encoding stories…

Error profiles for the Fall Enrollment Survey of the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) were developed as part of an assessment of the quality of survey data. Three statistics were of particular interest: the count of full-time equivalent students, the breakdown by race/ethnicity, and the count of unclassified students. Attention…

Sampling distributions for ten tests for comparing population variances in a two group design were generated for several combinations of equal and unequal sample sizes, population means, and group variances when distributional forms differed. The ten procedures included: (1) O'Brien's (OB); (2) O'Brien's with adjusted degrees of freedom; (3)…

The purpose of this research study was to assess item response model-test data fit using residuals. First, a comparison of raw and standardized residuals for describing model-test data fit was carried out. Second, hypotheses concerning the relationship between residual sizes and several item characteristics were studied. The analyses with…