Suchergebnisse

This article describes the design of the evaluation of Healthy for Life (HFL), an adolescent health promotion project involving students in 21 middle schools in Wisconsin. The original design was a blocked random assignment of 21 schools to one of three conditions. However, most of the interested schools could not accommodate the random design. A two-step alternative procedure allowed schools to select one of two treatment conditions, with random assignment to the control condition from either treatment condition. This randomized control group design nested within two self-selected treatment options is a viable alternative to total randomization.

Looks at television that cross content boundaries (both between and within programming) provide an opportunity to examine the causes of attentional inertia—that looks at television become very much more stable after the first few seconds. Previous research left unresolved whether this inertia is due to expectations or biologic processes (strategic vs. nonstrategic processes), and this study allows direct comparisons. The strength of the inertial relationship varied considerably for different kinds of program boundaries, and also for within-program boundaries, with the latter varying as well by the genre in which they were contained. Taken together, the results provided no evidence for nonstrategic, biological processes causing attentional inertia. Instead, several genre-specific explanations based on expectations and cognitive demands are proposed.