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The failure of many complex social interventions can be attributed to a lack of comprehension on the part of respondents with respect to the appropriate behavioral response. This research details the means by which such "comprehension artifacts" can be detected and offset. The study employed data obtained from a large-scale electric rate demonstration experiment, in which treatment group subjects'rates were tied to the time of day at which they used electricity. Standard analytic approaches suggested no treatment influence on respondents' usage behavior. However, reanalysis disclosed that the rate variation manipulation had a considerable impact on those who could be identified as having understood the complex features of the treatment. This article details a methodology for discriminating knowledgeable from nonknowledgeable respondents, and outlines the manner in which this categorization can be validated in secondary analysis settings. In addition, the use of the empirically derived categorization as a "blocking "variable is discussed, along with a consideration of alternative methodologies. In research involving complex social interventions, the suggested approach can provide information of considerably greater precision than that obtained through more traditional analytic techniques.

Developments in ethnographic data compilation over the past decade provide the basis for a new and extended study of the dimensions of culture. The approach taken in the current research was to apply various multivariate statistical analyses for the purpose of revealing the dimensions by which culture traits tend to be associated. Based on Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, 65 cultural traits were coded, scaled, and intercorrelated over a sample of 863 societies. Intercorrelations were also computed between traits for each of six regional subsamples. Factor analyses were then performed on the intercorrelation matrices. The general results of these analyses were the identification of 14 dimensions of culture each of which was reasonably stable over culture regions and interpretable in terms of functional relationships. Hierarchical cluster analyses were also performed on the intercorrelation matrices for the dual purposes of sorting out spurious results attributed only to a particular method of analysis and also of developing an empirical model of the dimensional structure of culture. The theoretical implications, the utilizations, and the extensions of the results in future research were considered. [Ethnographic Atlas, cultural dimensions, culture trait associations, multivariate structural analyses]