This study is an attempt to model the similarities of 84 medical schools with respect to their orientations toward applicants qualified for research and applicants interested in delivering primary care or locating in non-urban settings. These characteristics are defined in 17 institutional variables. The patterns of insti(utional similarity are…

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in finding ways of promoting and evaluating structural knowledge (knowledge of how ideas, events, and principles are interrelated). Research has demonstrated that students' numerical judgments of the strength of relatedness among ideas drawn from a domain provide insights into how they have…

A study was conducted to determine the dimensions underlying the items on a course-instructor survey instrument currently in use to measure graduate student ratings of instruction (attached). Both factor analysis and multidimensional scaling methods were used to analyze the response data, so that the results of each could be evluated, and the two…

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)