Large Group Awareness Training: An Historical Context Groups associated with the human potential movement have been a controversial feature of American life during the last three decades. In the 1950's and 1960's, the movement was dominated by various types of small groups (SGs), which included sensitivity training groups, encounter groups, as well as several others (see Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles, 1973). Some people viewed SGs as an effective means for attaining personal and organizational...

When as a practicing lawyer I published my ?rst article on statistical evidence in 1966, the editors of the Harvard Law Review told me that a mathematical equa- 1 tion had never before appeared in the review. This hardly seems possible - but if they meant a serious mathematical equation, perhaps they were right. Today all that has changed in legal academia. Whole journals are devoted to scienti?c methods in law or empirical studies of legal institutions. Much of this work involves statisti...

This work has the aim of making facet theory, and the approach to research which derives from it, more accessible to behavioral and social scientists than has been possible in the past. In a first section the book gives the background to the theory and associated methods of analysis, illustrating the major components of the ap proach in use. A second section then provides detailed examples of the applications of the facet approach in developmental, clinical, and environmental psychology, a...

This book is an authoritative handbook of current topics, technologies and methodological approaches that may be used for the study of scholarly impact. The included methods cover a range of fields such as statistical sciences, scientific visualization, network analysis, text mining, and information retrieval. The techniques and tools enable researchers to investigate metric phenomena and to assess scholarly impact in new ways. Each chapter offers an introduction to the selected topic and ...

This book proposes a model for understanding how innovative policy decisions are taken in complex political and organizational systems as well as the possible strategies that the promoter of the innovation can employ in order to maximize the probability of successful adoption and implementation. It presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of decisional situations in order to design the most appropriate strategies for overcoming conflict (e.g. of the NIMBY variety) and/or increasing...

A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the worldFrom the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the tran...

This book tells the story of how a group of far-sighted, academic researchers came to the aid of an overwhelmed local government. It details the history of the Washington State Census Board, which began in 1943 as part of an emergency measure during a massive wartime in-migration. The narrative also shows the demographic legacy of the Board and, ultimately, provides an unforgettable look into the creation and evolution of applied demography.Inside, readers will discover how Washing...

This book describes how to use test equating methods in practice. The non-commercial software R is used throughout the book to illustrate how to perform different equating methods when scores data are collected under different data collection designs, such as equivalent groups design, single group design, counterbalanced design and non equivalent groups with anchor test design. The R packages equate, kequate and SNSequate, among others, are used to practically illustrate the different meth...

This book describes why conventional methods fall short to solve the comparability problem and introduces three successive innovations to overcome these shortcomings. Comparability of results from different surveys using different items for the same topic is greatly hampered by the differences in response scales used. This reduces our accumulation of knowledge and has challenged researchers in the field of survey research for long to develop appropriate methods to transform ratings on diff...

This volume presents contributions on handling data in which the postulate of independence in the data matrix is violated. When this postulate is violated and when the methods assuming independence are still applied, the estimated parameters are likely to be biased, and statistical decisions are very likely to be incorrect. Problems associated with dependence in data have been known for a long time, and led to the development of tailored methods for the analysis of dependent data in variou...

Through accounts from innovative research projects by world-leading political scientists, this volume offers a unique perspective on research methodology. It discusses the practical and intellectual dilemmas researchers face throughout the research process in a wide range of fields from implicit attitude testing to media analysis and interviews.

This book presents a collection of results from the interdisciplinary research project “ELLI” published by researchers at RWTH Aachen University, the TU Dortmund and Ruhr-Universität Bochum between 2011 and 2016. All contributions showcase essential research results, concepts and innovative teaching methods to improve engineering education. Further, they focus on a variety of areas, including virtual and remote teaching and learning environments, student mobility, support throughout the st...