There is a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) within education globally, with disproportionate claims being made about what they show, 'what works', and what constitutes the best 'evidence'. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship from across the world, Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education critically addresses the increased use of RCTs in education, exploring their benefits, limits and cautions, and ultimately questioning the prominence given to them. While acknowledging that randomized controlled trials do have some place in education, the book nevertheless argues that this place should be limited. Drawing together all arguments for and against RCTs in a comprehensive and easily accessible single volume, the book also adds new perspectives and insights to the conversation; crucially, the book considers the limits of their usefulness and applicability in education, raising a range of largely unexplored concerns about their use. Chapters include discussions on: The impact of complexity theory and chaos theory. Design issues and sampling in randomized controlled trials. Learning from clinical trials. Data analysis in randomized controlled trials. Reporting, evaluating and generalizing from randomized controlled trials. Considering key issues in understanding and interrogating research evidence, this book is ideal reading for all students on Research Methods modules, as well as those interested in undertaking and reviewing research in the field of education.

There is a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) within education globally, with disproportionate claims being made about what they show, 'what works', and what constitutes the best 'evidence'. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship from across the world, Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education critically addresses the increased use of RCTs in education, exploring their benefits, limits and cautions, and ultimately questioning the prominence given to them. While acknowledging that randomized controlled trials do have some place in education, the book nevertheless argues that this place should be limited. Drawing together all arguments for and against RCTs in a comprehensive and easily accessible single volume, the book also adds new perspectives and insights to the conversation; crucially, the book considers the limits of their usefulness and applicability in education, raising a range of largely unexplored concerns about their use. Chapters include discussions on: The impact of complexity theory and chaos theory. Design issues and sampling in randomized controlled trials. Learning from clinical trials. Data analysis in randomized controlled trials. Reporting, evaluating and generalizing from randomized controlled trials. Considering key issues in understanding and interrogating research evidence, this book is ideal reading for all students on Research Methods modules, as well as those interested in undertaking and reviewing research in the field of education.

Select the Optimal Model for Interpreting Multivariate Data Introduction to Multivariate Analysis: Linear and Nonlinear Modeling shows how multivariate analysis is widely used for extracting useful information and patterns from multivariate data and for understanding the structure of random phenomena. Along with the basic concepts of various procedures in traditional multivariate analysis, the book covers nonlinear techniques for clarifying phenomena behind observed multivariate data. It primarily focuses on regression modeling, classification and discrimination, dimension reduction, and clustering. The text thoroughly explains the concepts and derivations of the AIC, BIC, and related criteria and includes a wide range of practical examples of model selection and evaluation criteria. To estimate and evaluate models with a large number of predictor variables, the author presents regularization methods, including the L1 norm regularization that gives simultaneous model estimation and variable selection. For advanced undergraduate and graduate students in statistical science, this text provides a systematic description of both traditional and newer techniques in multivariate analysis and machine learning. It also introduces linear and nonlinear statistical modeling for researchers and practitioners in industrial and systems engineering, information science, life science, and other areas.

Measures of Interobserver Agreement and Reliability, Second Edition covers important issues related to the design and analysis of reliability and agreement studies. It examines factors affecting the degree of measurement errors in reliability generalization studies and characteristics influencing the process of diagnosing each subject in a reliability study. The book also illustrates the importance of blinding and random selection of subjects. New to the Second Edition New chapter that describes various models for methods comparison studies New chapter on the analysis of reproducibility using the within-subjects coefficient of variation Emphasis on the definition of the subjects' and raters' population as well as sample size determination This edition continues to offer guidance on how to run sound reliability and agreement studies in clinical settings and other types of investigations. The author explores two ways of producing one pooled estimate of agreement from several centers: a fixed-effect approach and a random sample of centers using a simple meta-analytic approach. The text includes end-of-chapter exercises as well as downloadable resources of data sets and SAS code.

Assessment of mental health, religion and culture: The development and examination of psychometric measures focuses on questionnaires that are of practical value for researchers interested in examining the relationship between the constructs of mental health, religion, and culture. Three particular areas of development and evaluation are represented within this volume: firstly, the psychometric properties of recently developed new questionnaires; secondly, the psychometric properties of established questionnaires that have been translated into other languages; and thirdly, the psychometric properties of questionnaires employed in various cultural contexts and religious samples. The research in this book is authored by a wide range of international scholars working on diverse samples and in a variety of different cultures. In doing so, the book facilitates future research in the area of mental health, religion, and culture. This book was originally published as two special issues of Mental Health, Religion & Culture.

Delivering Psycho-educational Evaluation Results to Parents presents a concrete and adaptable Feedback Model that efficiently communicates complex evaluation results to parents in an easily understandable manner. The book discusses a model rooted in basic learning principles, effective communication practices, and practitioner empathy towards the parent experience of the home-school relationship, hinging upon practitioners and parents jointly creating a permanent product of the evaluation results during the feedback process. It provides early career school psychologists with a parent-friendly Feedback Model that can be adapted to their school-based setting. The text includes specific verbiage to explaining constructs in the cognitive, achievement, visual-motor, and social-emotional domains, along with considerations in application to working with diverse populations. The text is intended for school psychologists and professionals who complete psycho-educational evaluations for special education eligibility. More specifically, the text is envisioned to support the graduate training of school psychologists and the professional development of early career professionals in the field.

Delivering Psycho-educational Evaluation Results to Parents presents a concrete and adaptable Feedback Model that efficiently communicates complex evaluation results to parents in an easily understandable manner. The book discusses a model rooted in basic learning principles, effective communication practices, and practitioner empathy towards the parent experience of the home-school relationship, hinging upon practitioners and parents jointly creating a permanent product of the evaluation results during the feedback process. It provides early career school psychologists with a parent-friendly Feedback Model that can be adapted to their school-based setting. The text includes specific verbiage to explaining constructs in the cognitive, achievement, visual-motor, and social-emotional domains, along with considerations in application to working with diverse populations. The text is intended for school psychologists and professionals who complete psycho-educational evaluations for special education eligibility. More specifically, the text is envisioned to support the graduate training of school psychologists and the professional development of early career professionals in the field.

Recognised as the most influential publication in the field, ARM facilitates deep understanding of the Rasch model and its practical applications. The authors review the crucial properties of the model and demonstrate its use with examples across the human sciences. Readers will be able to understand and critically evaluate Rasch measurement research, perform their own Rasch analyses and interpret their results. The glossary and illustrations support that understanding, and the accessible approach means that it is ideal for readers without a mathematical background. Highlights of the new edition include: More learning tools to strengthen readers' understanding including chapter introductions, boldfaced key terms, chapter summaries, activities and suggested readings. Greater emphasis on the use of R packages; readers can download the R code from the Routledge website. Explores the distinction between numerical values, quantity and units, to understand the measurement and the role of the Rasch logit scale (Chapter 4). A new four-option data set from the IASQ (Instrumental Attitude towards Self-assessment Questionnaire) for the Rating Scale Model (RSM) analysis exemplar (Chapter 6). Clarifies the relationship between Rasch measurement, path analysis and SEM, with a host of new examples of Rasch measurement applied across health sciences, education and psychology (Chapter 10). Intended as a text for graduate courses in measurement, item response theory, (advanced) research methods or quantitative analysis taught in psychology, education, human development, business, and other social and health sciences. Professionals in these areas will also appreciate the book's accessible introduction.

This book offers a refreshing new approach to mental health by showing how 'mental health' behaviours, lived experiences, and our interventions arise from our social worlds and not from our neurophysiology gone wrong. It is part of a trilogy which offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people's social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions. 'Mental health' behaviours are carefully analysed as ordinary behaviours which have become exaggerated and chronic because of the bad life situations people are forced to endure, especially as children. This shifts mental health treatments away from the dominance of psychology and psychiatry to show that social action is needed because many of these bad life situations are produced by our modern society itself. By providing new ways for readers to rethink everything they thought they knew about mental health issues and how to change them, Bernard Guerin also explores how by changing our environmental contexts (our local, societal, and discursive worlds), we can improve mental health interventions. This book reframes 'mental health' into a much wider social context to show how societal structures restrict our opportunities and pathways to produce bad life situations, and how we can also learn from those who manage to deal with the very same bad life situations through crime, bullying, exploitation, and dropping out of mainstream society, rather than through the 'mental health' behaviours. By merging psychology and psychiatry into the social sciences, Guerin seeks to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than being isolated inside their heads with a 'faulty brain', and this will provide fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and for counsellors and therapists.

"Describes recent developments and surveys important topics in the areas of multivariate analysis, design of experiments, and survey sampling. Features the work of nearly 50 international leaders."

This book, originally published in 1970, concerns the new technique of computer simulation in psychology at the time. Computer programs described include models of learning, problem-solving, pattern recognition, the use of language, and personality. More general topics are discussed including the evaluation of such models, the relation of the field to cybernetics, and the problem posed by consciousness. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

* Explores the overlap/parallels between the work of clinicians and qualitative researchers. * Suggests how postmodern therapeutic approaches can be integrated into methods of data collection and analysis. * Examines a range of postmodern therapies, including collaborative language systems, narrative therapy, and solution-focused brief therapy. * Offers an innovative and unique way of enhancing the skills of the qualitative researcher, with an emphasis on reflective practice.

This book, specifically developed for students of psychology, covers a wide range of topics in statistics and research designs taught in psychology, in particular, and other disciplines like management, sociology, education, home science, and nutrition, in general, in most universities. It explains how to use Excel to analyze research data by elaborating statistical concepts. Each chapter contains sections like "Check you Computing skill" and "Check your Statistical Concepts" to enable students to assess their knowledge in a graded manner. The book addresses one of the major challenges in psychology research, viz., how to measure subjective phenomenon like attitude, desire, and preferences of an individual. Separate emphasis has been given to the measurement techniques which are essential tools to assess these subjective parameters in numerical form, required for statistical analysis to draw meaningful conclusions. The book is equally helpful to students of humanities, life sciences and other applied areas. Consisting of 14 chapters, the book covers all relevant topics of statistics and research designs which are important for students to plan and complete their research work.

Recognised as the most influential publication in the field, ARM facilitates deep understanding of the Rasch model and its practical applications. The authors review the crucial properties of the model and demonstrate its use with examples across the human sciences.

Readers will be able to understand and critically evaluate Rasch measurement research, perform their own Rasch analyses and interpret their results. The glossary and illustrations support that understanding, and the accessible approach means that it is ideal for readers without a mathematical background.

Highlights of the new edition include:

• More learning tools to strengthen readers’ understanding including chapter introductions, boldfaced key terms, chapter summaries, activities and suggested readings.
• Greater emphasis on the use of R packages; readers can download the R code from the Routledge website.
• Explores the distinction between numerical values, quantity and units, to understand the measurement and the role of the Rasch logit scale (Chapter 4).
• A new four-option data set from the IASQ (Instrumental Attitude towards Self-assessment Questionnaire) for the Rating Scale Model (RSM) analysis exemplar (Chapter 6).
• Clarifies the relationship between Rasch measurement, path analysis and SEM, with a host of new examples of Rasch measurement applied across health sciences, education and psychology (Chapter 10).

Intended as a text for graduate courses in measurement, item response theory, (advanced) research methods or quantitative analysis taught in psychology, education, human development, business, and other social and health sciences. Professionals in these areas will also appreciate the book’s accessible introduction.

Bayesian Demographic Estimation and Forecasting presents three statistical frameworks for modern demographic estimation and forecasting. The frameworks draw on recent advances in statistical methodology to provide new tools for tackling challenges such as disaggregation, measurement error, missing data, and combining multiple data sources. The methods apply to single demographic series, or to entire demographic systems. The methods unify estimation and forecasting, and yield detailed measures of uncertainty. The book assumes minimal knowledge of statistics, and no previous knowledge of demography. The authors have developed a set of R packages implementing the methods. Data and code for all applications in the book are available on www.bdef-book.com. "This book will be welcome for the scientific community of forecasters...as it presents a new approach which has already given important results and which, in my opinion, will increase its importance in the future." ~Daniel Courgeau, Institut national d'etudes demographiques

* Explores the overlap/parallels between the work of clinicians and qualitative researchers. * Suggests how postmodern therapeutic approaches can be integrated into methods of data collection and analysis. * Examines a range of postmodern therapies, including collaborative language systems, narrative therapy, and solution-focused brief therapy. * Offers an innovative and unique way of enhancing the skills of the qualitative researcher, with an emphasis on reflective practice.

Confidence Intervals for Proportions and Related Measures of Effect Size illustrates the use of effect size measures and corresponding confidence intervals as more informative alternatives to the most basic and widely used significance tests. The book provides you with a deep understanding of what happens when these statistical methods are applied in situations far removed from the familiar Gaussian case. Drawing on his extensive work as a statistician and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine, the author brings together methods for calculating confidence intervals for proportions and several other important measures, including differences, ratios, and nonparametric effect size measures generalizing Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon tests. He also explains three important approaches to obtaining intervals for related measures. Many examples illustrate the application of the methods in the health and social sciences. Requiring little computational skills, the book offers user-friendly Excel spreadsheets for download at www.crcpress.com, enabling you to easily apply the methods to your own empirical data.

This is an essential how-to guide on the application of structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques with the AMOS software, focusing on the practical applications of both simple and advanced topics. Written in an easy-to-understand conversational style, the book covers everything from data collection and screening to confirmatory factor analysis, structural model analysis, mediation, moderation, and more advanced topics such as mixture modeling, censored date, and non-recursive models. Through step-by-step instructions, screen shots, and suggested guidelines for reporting, Collier cuts through abstract definitional perspectives to give insight on how to actually run analysis. Unlike other SEM books, the examples used will often start in SPSS and then transition to AMOS so that the reader can have full confidence in running the analysis from beginning to end. Best practices are also included on topics like how to determine if your SEM model is formative or reflective, making it not just an explanation of SEM topics, but a guide for researchers on how to develop a strong methodology while studying their respective phenomenon of interest. With a focus on practical applications of both basic and advanced topics, and with detailed work-through examples throughout, this book is ideal for experienced researchers and beginners across the behavioral and social sciences.

Psychoeducational Assessment of Preschool Children, Fifth Edition, provides academics and school-based practitioners such as psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and social workers with an up-to-date guide to the assessment of young children. Long recognized as the standard text and reference in its field, this comprehensive, skill-building overview is organized into four sections: foundations, ecological assessment, assessment of developmental domains, and special considerations. Chapters written by recognized scholars in the field cover theory, research, and application. This thoroughly revised new edition addresses current developments in preschool assessment, new policies and legislation, and student/family population demographics.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of how happiness and wellbeing are measured. It presents an accessible summary of the philosophy, methodology, and applicability of the various measurement techniques that have been generated by the leaders of the happiness movement. It traces the history of development of the core ideas, and clarifies the unexpectedly wide range of techniques that are used. The book provides an unbiased assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and differentiates the contributions that have been made by psychologists, economists, environmentalists, and health scientists. It examines applications at a personal scale, in the workplace, at a societal scale, and on the world stage. It does so in an easy-to-read anecdotal writing style that will appeal to a wide range of academic and lay readers who enjoy popularized non-fiction that address matters of social concern.

Practice prepare and get ready to pass. Don't let a psychometric test stop you getting the job you want. Packed with practice questions and practical Passing Psychometric Tests will help you lose the fear, prepare and practice with everything you need to know to pass with flying colours.

This breakthrough volume details the psychological and interpersonal skills needed to meet the practical challenges of building, developing, adapting, training, and managing multicultural global teams. Its self-regulation approach offers cognitive keys to understanding and embracing difference and its associated complexities for successful global collaborations and lasting results. From this foundation, the book moves on to the various roles of leadership in facilitating team process, from establishing trust to defusing conflicts, reducing biases, and using feedback effectively. This synthesis of research and practice effectively blends real-world experience and the science of global team leadership to address the complex issues facing modern organizations. Core skills covered by the book: Structuring successful global virtual teams. Developing cross-cultural competencies through global teams. Managing active faultlines and conflicts in global teams. Coaching global teams and global team leaders. Utilizing feedback effectively across cultures. Meeting the global need for leaders through Guided Mindfulness. Leading Global Teams is mind-opening reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, work psychology, and applied psychology programs looking for the most current research and best practices regarding its timely subject.

Survey Development: A Theory-Driven Mixed Methods Approach provides both an overview of standard methods and tools for developing and validating surveys and a conceptual basis for survey development. It advocates logical reasoning that combines theory related to construct validity with theory regarding design, and theory regarding survey response, item review, and identification of misfitting responses. The book has 14 chapters which are divided into four parts. Part A includes six chapters that deal with theory and methodology. Part B has five chapters and it gets into the process of constructing the survey. Part C comprises two chapters devoted to assessing the quality or psychometric properties (reliability and validity) of survey responses. Finally, the one chapter in Part D is an attempt to present a synopsis of what was covered in the previous chapters in regard to developing a survey with the Theory-Driven-Mixed-Methods (TDMM) framework for developing survey and conducting survey research. This provides a full process for survey development intended to yield results that can support validity. A mixed methods approach integrates both qualitative and quantitative data outcomes. Including detailed online resources, this book is suitable for graduate students who use or are responsible for interpretation of survey research and survey data as well as survey methodologists and practitioners who use surveys in their field.

This core textbook offers an introduction to the basics of statistics that is uniquely suited to behavioural science students. The book offers coverage anchored to real-world stories, a highly visual approach, helpful mathematical support, and useful step-by-step examples. The book focuses on emerging trends that are redefining contemporary behavioural statistics.This textbook helps you get to grips with a challenging subject in an enjoyable and engaging way. The book can also be purchased with the breakthrough online resource, LaunchPad, which offers innovative media content, curated and organised for easy assignability. LaunchPad's intuitive interface presents quizzing, flashcards, animations and much more to make learning actively engaging.