Postmodern, multicultural, and feminist critiques of psychology have changed how longitudinal researchers construct their inquiries and frame their data. Also the new scholarship brings to the longitudinal investigation perspectives from other disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and history, among others. The book used as a framework…

Researchers and educators sometimes need to be reminded of the broad range of factors which have a crucial impact on how writers write. This paper offers a personal checklist of six factors which have been shown to be important, yet which are easy to forget in in heat of research because of the tendency to become immersed in a particular agenda…

This paper discusses the problems of conducting research on a low-base rate sensitive family problem, parental child snatching, and proposes that telephone interviewing is a cost efficient and methodologically appropriate solution to these problems. The paper reviews the scant literature on parental child snatching by presenting what are…

Research with older persons suffering from physical illness presents numerous challenges to gerontologists. Issues of conceptualization pertaining to the definition of illness, its location in the research paradigm, and the context in which illness occurs must be addressed prior to dealing with methodological problems. Access to physically ill…

The purposes of this paper are to consider how the prototypical research design of day care studies may unjustifiably emphasize day care as the effective factor or "treatment" in children's development, and to describe processes by which the family or some interaction between the family and day care may also affect preschoolers'…

Some 1000 questions in education journals were analyzed for aspects of usage and content, linguistic structure, cognitive process, and logical operation. Only half of the studies examined were found to use questions, and only a third of the questions addressed teaching and learning, curriculum and milieu. The great majority of questions entailed a…

The range of methodological choices appropriate to adult education research is surveyed in this study. The most central consideration is the conflict between emphases on quantitative techniques and various approaches to researchable areas which are not grounded in positivistic/empirical designs. Skills, talents, defects, and ideologies reflected…

The major emphasis of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS) has been directed toward individuals in the 1972 high school graduating class. Consequently, sampling parameters were established to ensure student representation, and the bulk of data collected were individual-level data. School-level data exist on a…

This presentation outlines a perspective on job analysis and comments on research reported at a symposium with reference to that perspective. The perspective discusses two questions pertaining to job analysis that are referred to as the Stage I and Stage II evaluation operations: What should be done? and How well was it done? Stage I evaluation is…

Needed research refers to both the kind of study and the area in which the work is done. Design elements and characteristics for needed research include (1) normative studies, (2) statements of statistical significance, (3) precisely formulated problems, (4) carefully defined hypotheses, (5) well-defined populations and randomly selected samples,…

Reported is a discussion concerning the effect of different analyses of the same empirical data. Students (N=over 200) enrolled in an introductory college chemistry course for science majors were randomly assigned to two experimental treatments. Treatment O was designed to help students understand the objectives of the course and to emphasize the…

This paper reviews 69 studies on microteaching, focusing on three main areas: a) the rationale behind its use, b) the conditions and degrees of possible goal attainment, and c) policy making in teacher education in relation to it. The first section of the paper presents an overview of microteaching, emphasizing the criteria used in analysis. The…

Presents four letters pointing out design difficulties in the experiments of Morrison, Giordani, and Nagy in their investigation of reading disabilities, memory, and perception. (SL)

Suggests that where institutions such as universities agree with gatekeepers that proposed sensitive and critical research would be inappropriate researchers must create autonomous positions from which to conduct their research. (Author/AM)