An experiment was performed to obtain judgments of 324 college students about a list of 18 causal explanations for good or poor performance on an examination. These stimulus causes were judged with respect to a description of two hypothetical situations in which a student either did well or did poorly on the examination. Half the sample judged the…

Marital satisfaction, involving 150 couples selected at-large and 40 couples in therapy, was investigated in two studies. An initial focus was the development of a 280-item Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) including one validity scale, one global affective scale, and nine additional scales focusing on specific areas of marital interaction.…

A comparison was made of responses to two types of personality inventory items, either sentence-type items or adjective-type items. Three methods of analysis were applied. It was concluded that the two item types give approximately equal results. (CTM)

Ten poems were read and evaluated for perceived similarity by freshmen and senior college students majoring in engineering and literature, to determine whether their education affected the students' ability to read and subjectively perceive poetry. Results showed that literary instruction did not change the students' ability to perceive poetry.…

The factorial structure of the Rotter Internal-External (IE) scale was examined. While there was strong evidence against the unidimensionality of the Rotter scale, the findings suggested that the first-order factors do define a single higher-order construct that may represent the generalized IE construct. (Author/LMO)

Judgments of similarities between numbers were solicited from kindergarten, third-grade, sixth-grade, and adult subjects. Results suggested children become sensitive to an expanding set of numerical relations during the period from kindergarten through sixth grade. Results of a second study suggested that the number similarity judgments of…

Results provide a first step toward the establishment of guidelines for the experimenter who wishes to use nonmetric multidimensional scaling effectively, especially when an underlying configuration is hypothesized. (Author)

A copy of the computer program, which determines the transformation matrix used to rotate the configuration, the dilation factor, and the translation vector, is available from the first author. (CB)

Multidimensional scaling and unfolding algorithms were used to explore teacher perceptions of special education labels in terms of student behaviors across gender and ethnicity. The resulting two-dimensional scaling solution revealed teacher perceptual distinctions between student acting-out and passive behaviors, and between student intellectual…

This article reviews two experiments on the mapping and planning of actual (campus buildings) and hypothetical (ideal town facilities) items in a two-dimensional space. Direct mapping (planning) techniques are preferred over the method of pair comparisons, especially for the actual environment. (See TM 504 879-880) (Author/CTM)

This study indicated that the dimensions of the configuration provided by INDSCAL multidimensional scaling are psychologically relevant to learning the concept of artistic style and that sensitivity to these dimensions, as measured by INDSCAL subject weights, can predict important individual differences in responses to another group of stimuli.…

The construct validity of scores on the Mathematics Assessment Questionnaire of 1,505 junior high school students was studied using 3-way multidimensional scaling analyses. Findings generally support validity and confirm that psychological constructs are differentially important to students' perceptions of instructional activity settings. (SLD)

Performed correlational and multidimensional scaling analyses to assess the similarity between two models. Results support the similarity in structure between the people-things dimension from Holland's RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model with the affiliation dimension from Wiggins' interpersonal…

Explores the relationship of attitudes toward disability and the frequency of contact with mainstreamed disabled children. Suggests the mere presence of disabled students in school settings does not have an intensive effect on the emotional reaction of nondisabled students and may be associated with more negative attitudes toward disabled persons.…

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) and components solutions were compared using two balanced self-report item sets. Results suggest that when self-report items are balanced and negatively worded items are not reverse scored, MDS and components solutions can differ largely, due to a component associated with measures of acquiescence. (SLD)