Outside of education, many academic disciplines developed and promulgated checklists to evaluate the quality of qualitative studies. This article used an embedded mixed methods approach in three stages: development of a conceptual framework reviewing 62 guidelines; a content analysis of key areas of the guidelines; and review of dissertations to…

Many practitioner researchers strive to understand which assessment practices have the best impact on learning, but in authentic educational settings, it can be difficult to determine whether one intervention, for example the introduction of an online quiz to a course studied by diverse students, is responsible for the observed effect. This paper…

The purpose of this study was to examine the quality of quantitative articles published in the "Journal of Counseling & Development." Quality concerns arose in regard to omissions of psychometric information of instruments, effect sizes, and statistical power. Type VI and II errors were found. Strengths included stated research…

Consistency in the title, problem, purpose, and research question improve the logic and transparency of research. When these components of research are aligned research design and planning are more coherent and research reports are more readable. This article reviews the process for checking for and improving consistency. Numerous examples of…

A number of studies have used mindfulness-based interventions to influence the behavior of people with intellectual disabilities, to improve their quality of life, and to reduce challenging behavior. The present review critically evaluates 18 studies and assesses the clinical and academic impact of their findings. Strengths identified included…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of conducting ethnographic research. Methodology definition and key characteristics are given. The stages of the research process are described including preparation, data gathering and recording, and analysis. Important issues such as reliability and validity are also discussed.

Much of educational administration research suffers from lack of conformity between data analysis and research design, inattention to the test/retest stability of measurement instruments, and the use of statistics for nominal or interval data with ordinal data, random-sample statistics with nonrandom samples, and unnecessarily complex statistical…

Discusses, in the context of library evaluation, the major sources of untrustworthy information and describes what can be done to control them. The emphasis is on assessing the impact of changed operations. (JD)

Views intercoder reliability as a sampling problem for content analyses. Develops a formula for generating sample sizes needed to have valid reliability estimates. Suggests steps for reporting reliability. (TB)

The authors of this article contend that the Guinan and Foulds study was inadequately designed and executed, and the results indicate little of the "usefulness" of the test, much less illuminate the important hypothesis central to the investigation. Specific suggestions for further research in marathon group evaluation are made. (Author)

Discussed methodological errors in child and marital treatment research. Made suggestions to avoid such errors. Areas covered are selection of subjects and therapists, scope and source of dependent measures, treatment specification and experimental design. Errors include unsubstantiated diagnoses; client labels; restricted outcome criteria; and…

The problem of change scores' correlation with initial status and the problem of low reliability in the measurement of change are addressed. By treating the correlation between initial status and change as a design problem rather than a statistical issue, research questions can be formulated in terms of changes in the shapes of growth curves…

Educational researchers have claimed that the quantitative and qualitative approaches to educational inquiry are, indeed, compatible. However, it would be unfortunate to discontinue this debate. The quantitative-qualitative debate began with the interpretive approach to social inquiry. Dilthey argued that since cultural/moral sciences differ from…

This paper presents a review of the literature on reliability in qualitative studies. Reliability is defined as the extent to which studies can be replicated, using the same methods, and getting the same results. It is the degree to which data are independent of the accidental circumstances of the research. The review includes the following three…

Exploratory research with large numbers of variables and even larger numbers of relationships is likely to result in frequent Type II errors; that is falsely accepting an incorrect null hypotheses. There are three ways of reducing Type II errors: (1) choosing a lower significance level, which then increases the probability of Type I error; (2)…