It is generally believed that homeless individuals—particularly those with substance abuse problems or mental illness—are unable to access the full range of available benefits and com munity services on their own. In recent years, community service providers have increasingly looked toward case management as the intervention of choice for solving this problem. Yet the evaluation findings of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Community Demonstration Program, which included three case management projects, showed few clear indications of case management effectiveness. The results of these studies—which focused on homeless clients with alcohol and other drug problems—are consistent with studies of case management services for the homeless mentally ill. This article identifies several phenom ena that potentially explain the apparent lack of positive effects and suggests that the reasons for negative findings may lie as much with the evaluations as with the interventions. These phenomena include bias due to differential attrition from measurement, lack of intervention intensity, lack of distinction between groups, contextual factors, and additional design and measurement issues. Suggestions for improving future evaluations of case management effec tiveness are offered.

The Test Anxiety Scale for Children (TASC) and the Lie Scale for Children (LSC) were administered to 60 children, half of whom were defined by schools as learning disabled. An analysis of covariance indicated that learning disabled subjects were more anxious than their nondisabled counterparts, and that their test anxiety was significantly related to reading and mathematics achievement scores.

Three studies were conducted. In Study I, 272 children were individually administered, via tape recordings, a questionnaire designed to assess their preferences for ingratiation tactics given particular targets. It was found that learning disabled children preferred ingratiation strategies which were judged less socially desirable by adults than those selected by non-learning disabled children. Additionally, scores on the questionnaire were not correlated with intelligence test scores, but were correlated with the child's sociometric ratings from peers and teacher ratings of the child's academic and attentional competence. In Study II parents of learning disabled and nondisabled children were compared as to their ratings of the social desirability of various ingratiation tactics. While no differences were found which were attributable to parent differences, parents made reliable discriminations as to the social desirability of various tactics addressed to particular targets. Study III attempted to replicate the results of adult judgments of ingratiation tactics obtained in studies I and II by employing an additional group of college students as subjects. Results across the studies suggest that adults agree on the social desirability of some forms of ingratiation tactics as used in interaction with particular targets. The implications of these findings for social-skills training are discussed.

Like measures of outcome, measures of implementation are most useful and analytically powerful when measured at client-level and are quantitative. However, high-quality, individual-level, quantitative service utilization data can be expensive, intrusive, or otherwise impractical to obtain. Cruder data--for example, presence versus absence of a given service--are often more feasible to collect, as well as more likely to be available. Consequently, evaluators can benefit by finding ways to better exploit such data at the analysis phase to compensate for shortcomings at the collection phase. This article documents one such instance in which this was done. Specifically, it describes how quantitative, client-level implementation scales were derived from qualitative (categorical) data and used to support a cross-site synthesis of implementation and outcome analyses in a multisite evaluation. It also suggests additional scenarios in which quantitative implementation scales might be derived form qualitative services data.

The purposes of the present study were (a) to replicate previous findings concerning naive judges' negative immediate impressions of learning disabled children, and (b) to explore whether such impressions were correlated with the impressions formed by other naive judges concerning a second child viewed in a dyadic peer-group interaction. College students were shown videotapes of second-or fourth-grade boys playing either a host or a guest role on a simulated television talk show. One half of the hosts had been identified as learning disabled. Results indicated that while second-grade learning disabled boys were judged as at least as adaptable as and less hostile than non-learning disabled children, the opposite results were obtained with fourth-grade boys. Additionally, a second set of naive judges judged fourth-grade nondisabled children who interacted with learning disabled students to be more socially hostile than those children interacting with a non-disabled host. Reverse findings were obtained for the second-grade children. Mean ratings of the two children's social hostility by two independent groups of judges were significantly correlated.