Argues that reliance upon verification procedures has inhibited theory building in communication. Advances four falsification procedures and presents examples from communication studies. Offers several implications these procedures have for empirical research in communication. (PD)

The Mean Cost Rating, P(A) from Signal Detection Theory, Kendall's rank correlation coefficient tau, and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma measures of predictive power are compared and shown to be different transformations of the statistic S. Gamma is generally preferred for hypothesis testing. Measures of association for ordered contingency tables are…

The form of the Johnson-Neyman region of significance is shown to be determined by the statistic for testing the null hypothesis that the population within-group regressions are parallel. Results are obtained for both simultaneous and nonsimultaneous regions of significance. (Author)

The G index is a measure of the similarity between individuals over dichotomous items. Some tests for the G-index are described. For each case an example is included. (Author/GK)

This paper demonstrates that multiple comparison tests using a pooled error term are dependent on the circularity assumption and shows how to compute tests which are insensitive (robust) to this assumption. (Author/GK)

If the null hypothesis of a one-sample test of multivariate means is rejected, the dimension of the line joining the population centroid and the hypothesized centroid can be interpreted with a linear function, using a discriminant function and the correlation of each dependent variable with a discriminant score. (Author/BW)

The validity conditions for univariate repeated measures designs are described. Attention is focused on the sphericity (equality of variance) requirement. It is recommended that separate rather than pooled error term procedures be routinely used to test a priori hypotheses. (Author/JKS)

Procedures for the analysis of profiles of means in repeated measures designs under order restriction for patterns of mean change are described. Tables of critical values are provided for the case of simple-order alternatives. (Author/JKS)

Cattell's scree test and Bartlett's chi-square test for the number of factors to be retained from a factor analysis are shown to be based on the same rationale, with the former reflecting subject sampling variability, and the latter reflecting variable sampling variability. (Author/JKS)

The popular factor analytic procedure of putting unities in the main diagonal and retaining all factors with an eigenvalue greater than one is criticized with respect to the number of factors retained and resultant estimates of common variance. Ways of avoiding these difficulties are discussed. (JKS)

Monte Carlo techniques were used to compare the power of Wilcoxon's rank-sum test to the power of the two independent means t test for situations in which samples were drawn from (1) uniform, (2) Laplace, (3) half-normal, (4) exponential, (5) mixed-normal, and (6) mixed-uniform distributions. (Author/JKS)

Errors of misclassification associated with two concept acquisition criteria and their effects on the actual significance level and power of a statistical test for sequential development of these concepts are presented. Explicit illustrations of actual significance levels and power values are provided for different misclassification models.…

The effect of the variance stabilizing transformations on the significance level and power of the F test, applied to Binomial and Poisson variables, was examined by a Monte Carlo study. The results indicate that the significance level is not affected by the transformations. (Author/JKS)

Procedures are developed for testing the hypothesis that Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient is equal for two tests given to the same subjects. (Author/JKS)

Orthogonal target analysis, a technique employed in confirmatory factor analysis, is investigated via a simulation study. The results indicate that the technique will recover the correct underlying population pattern except under very unfavorable data conditions and that a close fit to a binary target is not necessarily forced. (Author/JKS)