Compares scientific explanations of addiction of the 1920s and 1930s to today's. Details the history of addiction testing and research, the development of criteria for defining addiction, and both physiological and psychological definitions of addiction. Suggests that the changing status of addiction as a disease reflects different meanings…

Argues that fieldworkers' difficulties in gaining access to public schools for research can be resolved by examining the schools' organizational logic. Compares public and religious schools to show how access problems and strategies to overcome them vary with schools' organizational features. Offers examples from research conducted at midwestern…

This commentary on EC 602 595 questions cognitive referencing's validity as a model for allocating special services to young children with disabilities. The paper raises methodological issues in studies supporting use of the cognitive referencing model. These issues include the construct of delayed development, subject description, and use of a…

Discusses the difficulties and frustrations of trying to make explicit connections among teaching, scholarship, and feminism. Points out the deleterious effects of the feminization of the field of composition on the research and scholarship of women in the field. (SR)

Discusses shortcomings in research on child maltreatment, including a lack of sensitive differentiation across types of child maltreatment, and a lack of attention to differences resulting from perpetrator gender. Provides corrective recommendations and describes a new approach that enhances research sensitivity. (MM)

Reviews the scholarly work that uses content analysis to study political substance in magazines. Uses a modified version of Laswell's communication model to classify the current literature. Discusses problematic issues and offers possible solutions. (SR)

Shows why most discussions of self-esteem theory and practice are unsatisfactory. Part I reviews available research, which finds little causal relationship between self-esteem and student achievement. Part II calls into question the values inherent in the concept, particularly the overemphasis on individualism and self-actualization. Part III…

Addresses strategies needed in using longitudinal data on psychopathology to test cause-and-effect relationships, including natural experiments, testing of competing hypotheses on mechanisms, study of reversal effects, multiple replications in different circumstances, use of designs to dissociate possible mechanisms, testing for dose-response…

Much research comparing public and private schools infers that private schools' superiority is trivial, misleading, and results from skimming the best students. This article describes nontrivial private school advantages, such as a communitarian emphasis, greater influence on outside-class behavior, promotion of intergenerational bonding,…

This reaction paper criticizes the characterizations of clusters used in a study concerning a taxonomy of lifestyles of families with severely mentally retarded children, by I. T. Mink and others (EC 211 387). The criticism focuses on the use of cluster scores on criterion variables and use of cluster profiles across studies. (JDD)

The article examines the ethics and case law associated with the "works for hire" principle concerning institutional or researcher ownership of research data. Institutions are encouraged to clearly state their policies regarding ownership of data. Guidelines for such a policy are presented. (Author/DB)

Discusses procedures and considerations involved with secondary analyses of longitudinal databases. Procedures involve (1) formulating questions; (2) creating a feasibility matrix; (3) reformulating questions; (4) creating derived variables; (5) performing data reduction; (6) analyzing data; and (7) interpreting results. Problems associated with…

A middle school teacher reflects on her year-long experience of applying the Foxfire approach to a language arts class, on student successes and disappointments, and on the difficulties of carrying out meaningful research on this process. Student comments are included. (SV)

A method is presented for determining the optimal number of conditions to use in measurement designs when resource constraints are imposed. The method is illustrated using a multivariate two-facet design, and extensions to other designs are discussed. (SLD)

In a study of the relationship between moral reasoning and teenage drug use, problems arose in an attempt to reduce qualitative data to a quantitative format: (1) making analytic sense of singular and universal responses; (2) the mistaken logical inference that each pattern of judgment should have behavioral indicators; and (3) construction and…