Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

A modification of the Family Adaptation Scale of Antonovsky and Sourani (1988), was developed for assessing the adaptation of ministers' families. A sample of 317 individuals (ministers, spouses, and children aged 8 to 18) from 135 protestant ministers' families was used to test the scale. The self-report questionnaire was tested for internal…

Basic facts are summarized about the public schools of Wisconsin in the 1993-94 school year. Nine statewide summary tables (Section A) present information about ethnicity and the numbers of schools, districts, students, teachers, and other school personnel. Student and staff data are shown by school district in a table in Section B. Two tables in…

This report on the private school universe, a data collection system developed by the National Center for Education Statistics, presents data on schools with grades kindergarten through 12 by school size, school level, religious orientation, geographical region, and program emphasis. Numbers of students and teachers are reported in the same…

Methods of adjusting cut scores used in placement decisions are examined empirically. Admission and performance variables are used to study alternate methods of adjusting cut scores for placement in standard and accelerated rhetoric courses in a large university setting, with the predicted variable being success or failure as measured by…

Countries with mature social security systems have declining rates of labor force participation of the aged. The experience of nine countries (United States, Canada, Belgium, France, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom) over the last two decades provided the statistical data presented and analyzed in the…

The general goal of this paper is to help researchers conduct appropriately designed goodness of fit studies for item response model applications. The specific purposes are to describe: (1) an up-to-date set of promising and useful methods for addressing a variety of goodness of fit questions; and (2) current research studies to advance this set…

A more familiar and efficient method for estimating the parameters of Cason and Cason's model was examined. Using a two-step analysis based on linear regression, rather than the direct search interative procedure, gave about equally good results while providing a 33 to 1 computer processing time advantage, across 14 cohorts of junior medical…

Political communication researchers recently have emphasized conditional relationships as crucial to specifying and understanding the effects of the mass media. In many cases, however, researchers will not predict which variables will modify the form or existence of media effects. They therefore will not include measures of the conditional…

This paper deals with test fairness regarding a test consisting of two parts: (1) a "common" section, taken by all students; and (2) a "variable" section, in which some students may answer a different set of questions from other students. For example, a test taken by several thousand students each year contains a common multiple-choice portion and…

The purpose of this study was to compare the results of an analysis of covariance design to a method developed by the authors called within-class regression. Application of this statistical method can be to any quasiexperimental design with a large number of groups. A test of statistical significance to use with the within-class regression…

To examine and clarify background conditions for understanding variables which affect salary, the salary and compensation programs at two industrial and three educational organizations were subjected to a statistical audit. Data were available on 272 employees. Ten compensation variables were studied as having direct or indirect effects on salary:…

A procedure for assessing content-area and total-test dimensionality which uses response function discrepancies (RFD) was studied. Three different versions of the RFD procedure were compared to Bejar's principal axis content-area procedure and Indow and Samejima's exploratory factor analytic technique. The procedures were compared in terms of the…

The TESTFACT computer program and full-information factor analysis of test items were used in a computer simulation conducted to correct for the guessing effect. Full-information factor analysis also corrects for omitted items. The present version of TESTFACT handles up to five factors and 150 items. A preliminary smoothing of the tetrachoric…

The tests for zero partial association in a multiple contingency table have gained new importance with the introduction of graphical models. It is shown how these may be performed as exact conditional tests, using as test criteria either the ordinary likelihood ratio, the standard x squared statistic, or any other appropriate statistics. A…