The effectiveness of the educational efforts of the Ohio Cooperative Extension Service was studied. A random selection of two counties from each of the ten supervisory areas was used. Information was gathered by mail questionnaires sent to 1,000 randomly selected clientele from the 20 counties. Conclusions are: (1) The extension effectively…

The purpose was to test the effectiveness of a $5.00 incentive on the rate of return of mail questionnaires sent to 353 schools in the United States. The effects of the geographical region and the size of the city in which the sampled schools were located, and the school type (junior high vs. senior high) also were studied. Results showed that a…

A numeric classification system has been devised for a meteorological data collection which is based upon World Meteorological Organization region numbers. An enriched KWIC index has been prepared for this collection, which contains material in a variety of physical forms. (Author)

It is argued that numerical peculiarities in Burt's reports of kinship correlations are more reasonably attributable to carelessness than to fraud. No analysis shows that Burt's results are biased so as to favor his theory, and they are in close agreement with numerous independent studies. (Author/AM)

A sense mark card was designed to facilitate the computer scoring of medical examinations. (JY)

This report summarizes NCES's current statistical programs, major publications and plans for future work. The publication includes descriptions, timelines and plans for all of the NCES data collections, such as the Common Core of Data, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data system and the National Assessment of Education Progress. Also included…

This digest provides an introduction to content analysis, a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of a text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. This allows inferences to be made that can then be corroborated using other methods of data collection. In a technical sense, content analysis is not…

Today many data warehousing systems are data rich, but information poor. Extracting useful information from an ocean of data to support administrative, policy, and instructional decisions becomes a major challenge to both database designers and measurement specialists. This paper focuses on the development of a data processing system that…

Prior to conducting a statistical analysis, sufficient data screening methods should be used for all research variables to identify miscoded, missing, or otherwise messy data. The primary purpose of these exercises was to demonstrate the role of data screening techniques and their potential to improve the performance of statistical methods. A…

A review of The Creative Experience" (Grossman), edited by Stanley Rosner and Laurence E. Abt. The Book is essentially a record of conversations with prominent scientists and artists about their life and work. (Author/RY)

A review of Research and the School Counselor (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass., 1970) by Stanley H. Cramer, Edwin L. Herr, Charles N. Morris, and Thomas T. Frantz. (DB)

A pilot study of the use of an investigative journalism document-tracking procedure in the evaluation of library operations is discussed. The technique provides a straightforward but powerful method of evaluation that is equally applicable in simple studies and complex investigations. (Author/AL)

Discusses the application of statistical sampling to the compiling of reference-desk statistics, and describes a technique that uses the Pearson correlation procedure of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to determine appropriate sampling periods for keeping reference desk statistics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. (FM)

Open-ended interviews and participant observation are instruments for discovering how economic participants think about the world. They are a means of identifying the model of that portion of the socioeconomic world that the participants themselves use in making decisions. (Author/IRT)

Field stimulation is a method of investigation designed to encourage researchers to uncover the nature of organizations without asking for an accounting on a questionnaire, which is a method that may only play back an investigator's fantasies because of the way questions are posed in it. (Author/IRT)