The significance of best-friend relationships in adolescence

Research is summarized that documents the nature of the best-friend process in adolescence. Similarities and differences between the sexes are detailed. Female relationships are described as more intense, demonstrative, exciusive, and nurturant than male. Females depend heavily on the friend as a confidante with whom to process their mutual experiences and psychological reactions, apparently in an effort to understand and develop their own personalities. While males also confide at an intimate level, male relationships are more likely to be based on enjoyable companionship and similarity in attitudes, with less emphasis on continual analysis of experience. For both sexes, but especially for females, the relationship is important enough to development that lack of a close friend should be viewed as a deficit that responsible adults should help a student to remedy. Resources are cited that may be utilized by school personnel in helping the unfriended to make more effective contact with potential friends.     

Application of the Levenshtein Distance Metric for the Construction of Longitudinal Data Files

The analysis of longitudinal data in education is becoming more prevalent given the nature of testing systems constructed for No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). However, constructing the longitudinal data files remains a significant challenge. Students move into new schools, but in many cases the unique identifiers (ID) that should remain constant for each student change. As a result, different students frequently share the same ID, and merging records for an ID that is erroneously assigned to different students clearly becomes problematic. In small data sets, quality assurance of the merge can proceed through human reviews of the data to ensure all merged records are properly joined. However, in data sets with hundreds of thousands of cases, quality assurance via human review is impossible. While the record linkage literature has many applications in other disciplines, the educational measurement literature lacks details of formal protocols that can be used for quality assurance procedures for longitudinal data files. This article presents an empirical quality assurance procedure that may be used to verify the integrity of the merges performed for longitudinal analysis. We also discuss possible extensions that would permit merges to occur even when unique identifiers are not available.     

THE CHURCH AT WORK

Continuing the series of succint and practical accounts of the plans of churches employing Directors of Religious Education, we are glad to print this account with its emphasis on the Episcopal viewpoint and its statement of service with limited income and equipment.