Examines racial attitudes of hearing-impaired Black and White adolescents with regard to socioeconomic status and commute-to or residence-in school. Concludes by recommending administration of SAS-S and QSL tests to a wider ranging sample of students from more diverse backgrounds. (Author/DA)

Seven discriminant analyses were performed with significant group separation occurring for six of these. Classification analyses indicated that using the 10 major subtests produced accurate classification in approximately 71 percent of cases. Results were discussed in the light of previous research methodologies and the debate as to the…

Study attributes personality and motivation of students choosing supervised or unsupervised study in a group of high school juniors, and, using discriminant analysis, derives profiles of students who chose independent or dependent study. (RAO)

Discusses distance learning demographics, distance learning motivation, and barriers, and reports results of a questionnaire sent to students at a Canadian university that identified characteristics of students enrolling in distance education programs. Examines four models of descriptive characteristics (demographic, experiential, motivational,…

Discriminant analysis was used to identify variables predictive of success in the computerized National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses with data from 289 nursing graduates. Using seven significant predictors, 94% of passes and 92% of failures were correctly identified. (Contains 23 references.) (SK)

Item bias is a major threat to measurement validity. Methods for detecting differential item functioning (DIF) are now commonly used to identify potentially biased items. DIF detection methods for dichotomous items are well developed, but those for ordinal items are less well developed. In this article, the authors compare four methods for…

Recurrent problems in medical teaching clinic are common and difficult to address because of complex interpersonal dynamics. To minimize this difficulty, we developed a conceptual model that simplifies problems and identifies the root cause of tension between groups in clinic. We used recursive analysis and modeling of the data from a larger…

Purpose: This study's main purpose was to (a) identify acoustic signatures of hypokinetic dysarthria (HKD) that are robust to phonetic variation in conversational speech and (b) determine specific characteristics of the variability associated with HKD. Method: Twenty healthy control (HC) participants and 20 participants with HKD associated with…

In this article, we examine the extent to which children with autism and children with learning difficulties can be discriminated from their responses to different patterns of sensory stimuli. Using an adapted version of the Short Sensory Profile (SSP), sensory processing was compared in 34 children with autism to 33 children with typical…

Questionnaire responses of 457 students and 602 tutors were used to investigate conceptions of a "good tutor." In each case, factor analysis identified scales that reflected key constructs; cluster analysis identified subgroups with different patterns of scale scores; and discriminant analysis determined the scales that contributed the…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…

Academic failure among first-year university students has long fuelled a large number of debates. Many educational psychologists have tried to understand and then explain it. Many statisticians have tried to foresee it. Our research aims to classify, as early in the academic year as possible, students into three groups: the "low-risk"…

A subset of a real data set from a national survey on alcohol use and driving in Canada (original sample of 6,457) is used to illustrate an ad hoc analysis with missing data on multiple response variables. A complete-case analysis initiates this strategy, determining variables that may be deleted without losing effects of interest. By such a…

The use of multivariate statistics in the social and behavioral sciences is becoming more and more widespread. One multivariate technique that is commonly used is discriminant function analysis. This paper compares and contrasts the two purposes of discriminant analysis, prediction and description. Using a heuristic data set, a conceptual…

A study examined the evaluative structures employed by voters in making decisions about political contenders, specifically as a function of the level of the election involved and the incumbent-challenger status of the candidates. Data were obtained by questionnaires administered within two weeks prior to the 1984 general election to 550…