Population shifts directly affect the bottom line, so the basics of demography are now basic to business as well. Demographics combine demographic data with socioeconomic and geographic factors to help business and other managers know the market for the goods and services they offer. This guide explains market, product, and site analyses,…

The changing structure of Southern farming amid the pressures of the farm crisis produces an information gap that has forced policymakers to rely on trial and error in institutional design. Existing data systems monitoring the farm sector either use the county as the primary observation unit, or they survey different individual farmers each year.…

Communication scholars should be skilled in the use of focus groups in communication research and in interpreting the data this approach generates. The focus group is a discussion group that concentrates on a particular topic or topics and typically consists of eight to 12 participants. The group is facilitated by a moderator who follows a…

A software package is described that collects and reduces eye behavior data (eye position and pupil size) using an IBM-PC compatible computer. Written in C language for speed and portability, it includes several features: (1) data can be simultaneously collected from other sources (such as electroencephalography and electromyography); (2)…

Intended for administrators, the booklet outlines procedures for evaluating district special education programs. An introductory chapter presents the rationale for evaluation as an efficient management tool. A review of the literature addresses five stages in evaluation: (1) defining the evaluation model, (2) collecting evaluation information, (3)…

After a brief introduction and discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of questionnaires, this publication explains how to develop a questionnaire. Each of the five parts of a questionnaire (heading, procedural statements, items, comment space, and procedures for return) are discussed, with concrete examples. Guidelines for pre-test/tryout…

Speech communication workers have been reluctant to use physiological variables in their work. The arguments against their use have ranged from a fear of invading the realm of the psychologist or physiologist, thereby damaging the uniqueness and disciplinary identity of speech communication, to a feeling by certain scholars that the appropriate…

An ex post facto study involving a survey of exceptionally good and exceptionally problematic principals of Ohio secondary schools was undertaken to assess a method of obtaining a high response rate. The sample included 50 subjects (31 principals of good schools and 19 principals of problem schools), representing 7% of the 720 secondary schools in…

Age is often ranked as a significant variable in research studies concerned with the measurement of intellectual and linguistic capacities, including reading. In fact, age is often cited as the cause of a decline in performance on such tasks. However, determining the social, psycho-social, and physiological status of subjects and applying…

Three general approaches are available to help discipline the use of qualitative methods in educational research without sacrificing subjective understanding, according to this paper. The most private, least confirmable, yet richest approach is the intuitive, which depends on the researcher's thorough immersion in the field setting and…

This article offers some suggestions as to ways in which the outcome of independent study programs can be assessed. (Author)

Through utilization of effective sampling procedures, libraries may obtain substantial savings in terms of data collection costs. (Author)

Social workers are turning increasingly to organized data to describe, test, and improve their programs. Computerized information systems, sharply focused field experiments, and scientifically based behavioral models of practice will be prominent in social work in the 1980s. (Author)

This article is an abridgement of the author's dissertation research, which investigated the circumstances under which organizations and agencies in an urban community will make resources available for use in public schools. (Editor)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of various attributes of the family in the structure and process of social influence during adolescence. (Author)