A review of The Creative Experience" (Grossman), edited by Stanley Rosner and Laurence E. Abt. The Book is essentially a record of conversations with prominent scientists and artists about their life and work. (Author/RY)

A review of Research and the School Counselor (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass., 1970) by Stanley H. Cramer, Edwin L. Herr, Charles N. Morris, and Thomas T. Frantz. (DB)

A pilot study of the use of an investigative journalism document-tracking procedure in the evaluation of library operations is discussed. The technique provides a straightforward but powerful method of evaluation that is equally applicable in simple studies and complex investigations. (Author/AL)

Discusses the application of statistical sampling to the compiling of reference-desk statistics, and describes a technique that uses the Pearson correlation procedure of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to determine appropriate sampling periods for keeping reference desk statistics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. (FM)

Open-ended interviews and participant observation are instruments for discovering how economic participants think about the world. They are a means of identifying the model of that portion of the socioeconomic world that the participants themselves use in making decisions. (Author/IRT)

Field stimulation is a method of investigation designed to encourage researchers to uncover the nature of organizations without asking for an accounting on a questionnaire, which is a method that may only play back an investigator's fantasies because of the way questions are posed in it. (Author/IRT)

An attempt is made to provide more general approaches for evaluating products. These approaches were used to help organize not only the methods and results for drama film evaluation but also a discussion concerning evaluation more generally and the film evaluation more particularly. (Author/RC)

Reviews the data collection process--process is crucial because data offer empirical answers to theoretical research questions. Finds that, although the literature provides much instruction on the treatment of collected data, far less has been written about the selection of the data. Focuses on this overlooked portion of research methodology. (PA)

Elements of the Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS) were collected from 188 medical records in South Dakota acute care facilities. NMDS provided a description of nursing practice and enabled comparison among facilities and patients. Cost and time considerations in using the NMDS were identified. (SK)

Recommends six steps school districts should follow to effectively use data collection instruments to improve school safety: Survey each school respondent group, organize a safe schools action team, obtain additional information, conduct a safe schools analysis and develop recommendations, take action. Describes advantages collecting school safety…

Despite the Hate Crime Statistics Act, signed into law in 1990 to make hate crimes a federal offense, these types of crimes appear to be continuing in the new millennium. Provides hate crime statistics for 1996-98, presents theories on the cause and spread of hate, asserts that a general profile of those with a propensity to act on hate can be…

To obtain earnings data for the Occupational Outlook Handbook, economists primarily use the Current Population Survey. Other sources include the Occupational Compensation Survey and surveys of professional, industry, and educational associations, and unions. Interviews are used if no survey data exist. (JOW)

Examines current trends in data collection and information use in human services organizations. Describes issues for managers who are planning information systems, including practitioner resistance to automation. Proposes that conceptual integration of agendas for human services automation, practice evaluation, and service effectiveness enables…

Provides an overview of content analysis, a powerful data reduction technique. It is a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. The technique extends far beyond simple word frequency counts, but requires careful definition of categories. (SLD)

Questionnaire data have many important uses, but is laborious for the subjects to provide. EDUFORM tries to alleviate this problem by enabling the creation of adaptive online questionnaires. The idea is to build a probabilistic model from previously gathered data, and employ it for predicting the profiles of new users on the basis of a subset of…