A REASSESSMENT OF STATISTICAL POWER ANALYSIS IN HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

This study conducted a statistical power analysis of 64 articles appearing in the first four volumes of Human Communication Research, 1974–1978. Each article was examined, using Cohen's revised handbook, assuming nondirectional null hypotheses and an alpha level of .05. Statistical power, the probability of rejecting a false null hypothesis, was calculated for small, medium, and large experimental effect sizes and averaged by article and volume. Results indicated that the average probability of beta errors appears to have decreased over time, providing a greater chance of rejecting false null hypotheses, but this also raised several power-related issues relevant to communication research in general.     

Just War Theory and the IRA

ABSTRACT The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sometimes claim that their violent actions are sanctioned by traditional just war doctrine. To what extent is this true? To answer this question it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the principles of just war and of the situation in Northern Ireland to which they are to be applied. This is done in the first sections, and it is then argued that just war sanctions some kinds of violence in Northern Ireland but only those of direct self-defence. Violence outside the borders of Northern Ireland or for the sake of Irish Unity is not justifiable. Consequently the IRA must be viewed, in terms of just war theory at any rate, as in principle illegitimate, even though some of their actions are defensible. Finally it is suggested that non-violence, after the pattern of Gandhi, while not required by justice might nevertheless be preferable.     

INFORMANT ACCURACY IN SOCIAL NETWORK DATA II

This paper repeats and confirms the results of Kill worth and Bernard (1976), concerning informants'ability to report their communication accurately. A variety of self-monitoring, or nearly self-monitoring, networks are used for this study. The conclusion again appears that people do not know, with any accuracy, those with whom they communicate. The expanded experimental design permits a variety of other, related questions to be answered: recall of past communication is not significantly more accurate than prediction of future communication; no one set of data is more accurate than any other; the maintenance of personal logs of communication does not improve accuracy; informants do not know if they are accurate or not; there is no reason to choose either rankings or scalings as a data instrument save for convenience. It is suggested that future research should concentrate both on improving the accuracy of data-gathering instruments and on lessening the reliance of data-processing instruments on precise data.