Of 460 two-year colleges responding to a national survey in 1973-74, 63 percent reported some kind of institutional research, but only 15 percent reported that their colleges routinely based important decisions on the results of this research. The most popular areas of research were students, student services, and institutional operations. Other…

A critical overview is presented of the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Zimbardo and his coinvestigators in which they attempted a structural analysis of the problems of imprisonment. Key assumptions are questioned, primarily on methodological grounds, which casts doubts on the plausibility of the experimenters' final causal inferences.…

Piaget's class-inclusion task was revised class-inclusion tasks were administered to 64 kindergarten and 64 first-graders. Each of the revisions enhanced performance as compared with Piaget's standard procedures. These results are considered in terms of two possible interpretations. (Author/SDH)

This paper discusses problems encountered by researchers in applying the guidelines of Finkelhor (1986) for the selection of research instruments for gathering data on the effects of child sexual abuse. Discussion focuses on measures of effects of the abuse experience, measures of post-abuse experiences, and of mediating variables. The data…

Social studies research has been criticized for sampling bias, inappropriate methodologies, incorrect or inappropriate use of statistics, weak or ill-defined treatments, and lack of replication and/or longitudinal follow-up. In an effort to ascertain whether past criticisms were true of current research as well, a review was conducted of 118…

A discussion of the data obtained from grammaticality judgment tasks argues that despite the light shed by these data on problems of second language acquisition theory, there is not yet adequate knowledge of how to interpret those data within a coherent model of performance of the tasks. Therefore, it is concluded, there is no basis for deciding…

In order to inform policy and programs, research on child abuse must be not only methodologically rigorous, but also practically feasible. However, practical problems make child abuse research difficult to conduct. Definitions of abuse must be explicit and different types of abuse must be assessed separately. Study samples should be as…

Young children acquire a knowledge of, and beliefs about, gender-roles at a rapid rate. A total of four studies were conducted to examine some of the factors thought to mediate the impact of examiner's sex on children's gender-typed activities and cognitions. The first two studies looked at children's ratings of videotaped male and female adults…

There is a strong statistical correlation between delinquency activity level and the level of alcohol and other drug (AOD) use in adolescents. A strong association between drug use, drug trafficking, and youth gangs has also emerged. However, several important questions concerning the relationship of delinquency, gang membership, and AOD use…

This study reviews research examining the incidence of incest and child sexual abuse, focusing on the apparent discrepancy between incidence rates based on child service agency incident reports and the surveys of victims reports. Research is reviewed from the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s. Research problems and limitations are described. The problem…

Identifying effective reading instruction through "process-product" research narrowly focuses attention on immediate practice and desirable outcomes as measured by tests. Failure to conduct long-term research and make instructional decisions within a historical context may discourage discovering new and innovative ways to teach reading.…

A series of studies evaluated methodological issues in the investigation of children's developing comprehension and production of the words "because" and "so." The familiarity of task materials and their relevance to 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children's experience were the focus of the first study. For the second study, involving…

This publication reports the findings of research carried out in recognition of the need for an in-depth analysis of the U.S. jazz music audience in order to identify and assess ways to shape the future of jazz as part of the "Survey of Public Participation in The Arts" conducted in 1982. The research problem was to learn the size,…

Methodological deficiencies inherent in expert-novice reading research make it impossible to draw inferences about curriculum change. First, comparisons of intact groups are often used as a basis for making causal inferences about how observed characteristics affect behaviors. While comparing different groups is not by itself a useless activity,…