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…

Using the evaluation work on the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Unleashing Resources Initiative as an example, in this article we explicate a general four-step model appropriate for multilevel evaluation alignment. We review the relevant literature, argue for the need for evaluation alignment in a multilevel context, explain the four-step model,…

Thirty years after the first national estimates of intimate partner violence were published, the field has reached such a level of maturity that complex questions can be posed and sophisticated research studies can be designed to answer them. Out of this body of research, one of the most important things that researchers have learned is that…

America brims with education data and these days it seems everyone in education claims to be guided by data. In this book, leaders and scholars map the landscape of data providers and users and explores why what is supplied by the former but frequently fails to meet the needs of the latter. It documents the barriers to collecting good information,…

Issues of ethics and leadership are important, growing and intense in universities. Five examples are discussed, drawn from the personal experience of the author. These involve the selection of research, the collection and use of ethically sensitive materials, major relationships with industry and donors, access and admissions, and the content of…

The current research employs the use of content analysis to teach research methods concepts among students enrolled in an upper division research methods course. Students coded and analyzed Jimmy Buffett song lyrics rather than using a downloadable database or collecting survey data. Students' knowledge of content analysis concepts increased after…

Students can imitate scientists at work by conducting inquiry investigations in the classroom, thereby exhibiting a multitude of skills and competencies. As stated by Bransford and Donovan (2005), learning science as a process of inquiry involves students in observation, imagination, and reasoning about the phenomena under investigation. Rather…

An experiment in chemical kinetics as part of our Discovery Chemistry curriculum is described. Discovery Chemistry is a pedagogical philosophy that makes the laboratory the key center of learning for students in their first two years of undergraduate instruction. Questions are posed in the pre-laboratory discussion and assessed using pooled…

In the context of health sciences education, and education in general, the knowledge or ability of one or several subjects in a specific area is frequently compared using different forms of a test, or by means of different instruments aimed at measuring this knowledge or ability. In such cases, test scores must be equated so that they can be…

Research has generally amalgamated minority ethnic (all called "Asian" or "black") disabled young people's experiences and failed to acknowledge the multiple aspects of Asian and black disabled identities, for example how the combined attributes of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, culture, class and disability shape their…

Fieldwork remains the mainstay in the study of geography and in the analysis of the environmental processes. However, an in-depth understanding of the environmental and geographical processes requires extensive as well as intensive fieldwork that involves time and substantial effort, both of which may pose a problem within a given curriculum time.…

The "Under the Mistletoe" project was developed to capitalize on student curiosity about the American Christmas Mistletoe plant and draw learners into an engaging, inquiry-based exercise that incorporates numerous life science standards and collaborative research. By collecting data on host and nonhost tree size, location, and number of mistletoe…