A discussion of constructing research designs that avoid the conflict between securing internal validity at the expense of external validity. Several such designs and examples of their application are offered. (HB)

Short-term studies often do not capture the full story of the effect that a researcher is trying to describe. If one wishes to elucidate long-term educational processes and outcomes, the only direct way of doing so is to stretch the duration of research projects and to study the same subjects over time. The limited availability of valid…

Most, though not all, qualitative research is naturalistic in that the researcher enters the world of the participants as it exists and obtains data without any deliberate intervention to alter the setting. The resulting accounts of what people say and do form the basis for inductive rather than deductive analysis--theory is created to explain the…

A conceptualization of generalization and its place in educational research is proposed. Problems with existing approaches to generalization include limited concepts, misleading or simplistic results, perception variance or change, and the discouragement of sensitivity due to convenience. Researchers should distinguish between conclusions which…

The state of the art of research on child development in New Zealand is reported in this paper. It is noted that while many courses in child development are taught in New Zealand, few incentives or resources for a viable and continuous child development research program are provided. Perhaps because of restricted opportunities for research and…

The authors contend that the experimental psychology of mental retardation suffers from methatheoretical and methodological weaknesses, preeminently the failure to consider the ecology of mental retardation. (CL)

Attempting to characterize the research literature on schooling, this paper discusses six possible inquiry perspectives termed analytic, portrait, intentional, structural, societal, and narrative. These perspectives are then analyzed and related to forms of knowledge about educating children. While preferring the narrative approach, the article…

Hypothesizes that, because education is a multivariant process, research attempting to test hypotheses about univariant data will find "nonsignificant" results; several nonsignificant variables may cumulatively or in combination have a significant effect; and many "nonsignificant" findings result from inadequate research design and data analysis.…

Examined matching-to-sample procedures that might result in emergence in preschool children of conditional behavior that was never explicitly taught. Children were asked to match a novel and a familiar picture to a spoken word which was English or nonsense. (SKC)

A review of the conceptual and methodological considerations in assessment and treatment of children's fears and phobias is presented. Areas discussed include the definitional problems in the field, analogue and clinical research, experimental research methods, and criteria for the evaluation of outcome in fear and phobia research. (Author/DWH)

Although the primary responsibility rests with the authors of articles reporting nonsignificant results to demonstrate the worth of the results by discussing the power of the tests, consumers should be prepared to conduct their own power analyses. This article demonstrates the use of power analysis for the interpretation of nonsignificant…

In experimentation where change in X produces a change in Y, the researcher must identify, measure, and control intervening variables by experimental design or statistical procedure. (Author)

Rewritten and shortened version of presentation given at a symposium of the American Psychological Association meeting, New York 1966. (MS)

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…

Methodological problems associated with treatment research on cigarette smoking are explored, and possible solutions are discussed. The main problems considered are the selection and retention of subjects, the measurement of smoking, the design of treatment studies, and the interpretation and generalizability of experimental results. (Author)