Community and culture significantly influence value orientation, perceived needs, and motivation as well as provide the ground for creating shared understanding. All disciplines have their own cultures, and all cultures evolve through cross-cultural exchanges. The computing community has created and documented a sound body of knowledge of…

Meta-analysis does not solve all the problems encountered in qualitative research reviews, but it holds out some hope for increasing the reliability and dependability of a reviewer's conclusions. Several developments in meta-analysis are cause for optimism. First, different meta-analysts are doing work in the same areas, leading to increased…

Using enrollment decline cases for data, the case survey method analyzes the content of case studies, thus allowing data from various cases to be aggregated and researchers to overcome constraints on data collection. The analyst uses six steps in this method in reviewing the case literature: (1) definition of the unit of analysis, (2)…

The most important problem in psychology and the social sciences today is the failure to produce cumulative knowledge. This situation has led many to conclude that cumulative knowledge and general principles and theories may be impossible to establish in psychology, a conclusion suggesting that psychology can never be a science--only at best a…

Bases for recent allegations of sex bias in Kohlberg's theory of moral development are discussed, and studies comparing the development of moral reasoning across the sexes are reviewed. A meta-analysis supported the conclusion that the overall pattern is one of nonsignificant sex differences in moral reasoning. (Author/RH)

An action theoretic account of skill learning and skill use is offered as a useful heuristic for life-span developmental psychology. The version presented is one that is particularly prominent in industrial psychology in the German-speaking countries. (Author/RH)

Over the years, methodologists have been recommending that researchers use magnitude of effect estimates in result interpretation to highlight the distinction between statistical and practical significance (cf. R. Kirk, 1996). A magnitude of effect statistic (i.e., effect size) tells to what degree the dependent variable can be controlled,…

The article reviews psychosocial treatments for phobic and anxiety disorders in youth. Using criteria from Nathan and Gorman (2002), 32 studies are evaluated along a continuum of methodological rigor. In addition, the treatments evaluated in each of the 32 studies are classified according to Chambless et al.'s (1996) and Chambless and Hollon's…

S. Jackson and S. Jacobs' article entitled "Generalizing about Messages" represents an important methodological innovation in communication research. The article urges procedural change by recommending the use of multiple-message designs because of a weakness in single-message designs; it recommends analyzing message-replication data…

One purpose for combining research studies is to estimate a population treatment effect. The internal validity of a model for how effect size estimates should be computed and combined will hinge upon the homogeneity of the effect size variation. Effect size variation may be assessed in the form of a summary fit statistic, and a direct…

This research describes the statistics and interpretations currently used for reporting discriminant analysis results and attempts to provide some approximate guidelines. Articles in the last 10 years of the American Educational Research Journal (AERT) were scanned. Eighteen studies containing 86 different discriminant analyses were identified and…

The article describes procedures employed for the quantitative synthesis of single-subject research literature in special education. The need for objective, systematic review procedures is noted; previous approaches are reviewed; and the authors' approach (which makes use of overlapping data across phases as an outcome metric) is outlined.…

An evaluation of the "Percentage of Nonoverlapping Data" approach for quantifying outcomes of single-subject research in special education reveals that it is potentially too sensitive to atypical baseline data, not powerful enough to discriminate important treatment differences, and adversely affected by even subtle trends in the data.…

The response to a critique of a proposed method of quantifying outcomes of single-subject research in special education suggests that the alternative procedure proposed has theoretical but not practical merit due to the limited number of observations typically found in single-subject baselines. (Author/DB)

The method of using the percentage of nonoverlapping data points to summarize and synthesize single-subject research in special education was applied to six specific studies. The method was found lacking for such reasons as its failure to identify patterns across time or vital idiosyncrasies in behavior within and across studies. (Author/DB)