A substantial number of published articles in speech communication research today is experimental/social scientific in nature. It is only in the past decade that scholars have begun to put the history of communication under the lens. Early advocates of the adoption of the method of social scientific inquiry were J. A. Winans, J. M. O'Neill, and C.…

The visual image is so information-rich that describing its content fully can be very problematic. Trying to codify or analyze the content in any systematic way often proves even more difficult. Nevertheless, reducing certain aspects of visual data to a set of numbers can be useful because it exposes characteristics of the message that might be…

Applied psychologists who provide services to nations composed of multiple and widely varied cultural groups face certain ethical dilemmas that would not arise in more homogeneous societies. These ethical dilemmas revolve around the concept of population generalizability, which refers to the applicability of research findings across different…

Problems inherent in relying solely on statistical significance testing as a means of data interpretation are reviewed. The biggest problem with statistical significance testing is that researchers have used the results of this testing to ascribe importance or meaning to their studies where such meaning often does not exist. Often researchers…

This document results from a seminar held to initiate a dialogue on the ways and means of strengthening research capacity in developing countries. The seminar participants hoped to take stock of the economic and social changes that nations around the world have witnessed in this decade. These changes have engendered shifts in educational research…

To assess young children's understanding of false belief, investigators often show them a familiar container, then demonstrate that it holds an object different from the one the children expected. The children are then asked what they originally thought the container held, and what another container will hold. Three-year-old children typically…

Research results should not be taken at face value; some research is not well designed, and readers must be able to assess whether the research carried out actually supports the results or may be explained otherwise. Research reports are usually divided into introduction or literature review, methods, results, and discussion and conclusions. Basic…

The effects of various discourse variables on the psycholinguistic processing of sentences within paragraphs by 36 competent adult readers were investigated. Eye movement measures were used as the dependent variables reflecting psycholinguistic processing. When all of the constraints within which the study had to be performed were examined, it…

A quantitative method, meta-analysis, is used to integrate research findings from a representative group of 38 coaching studies. Because different studies reported results on different scales, effect size was used to transform all results to a common metric. This meta-analysis showed that there are two distinct literatures on the effectiveness of…

Many problems confront researchers who are developing appropriate methods to determine the effects of sexual abuse. Particularly serious problems arise when the victims are children who were abused while attending a day care center. Several methods for studying child sexual abuse have been recommended. This paper discusses problems researchers…

Issues of meaning have become central concerns of research on language development. There are at least four reasons for the neglect of meaning by earlier researchers. First, Chomsky's original theory assumed that syntax could be described and explained independently of meaning. Second, linguists had long assumed that semantics was too messy and…

This paper presents a model which illustrates the cyclical and interactive nature of the basic elements of the research design process. Rather than presenting each research design component in isolation, the model emphasizes their interrelationships. A brief discussion is presented on each of the following components of the model: (1) the "words"…

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 and observed its 50th anniversary in 1985. This document discusses the changes that have taken place in knowledge about alcoholism. Specifically, this booklet compares what behavioral scientists knew about alcohol abuse and alcoholism in 1935 and what they knew and could do about them in 1985. Contributions…

A dilemma faces the ethnographer whose discipline forces the creation of an objective text from an intimate participatory experience. There have been three ways in which ethnographers have attempted to solve the dilemma of producing the objectivity of a scientific text while acknowledging their presence in the field. The first approach is the…