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Applied Hedges and Olkin's (1985) statistical meta-analytic procedures to summary data from all published studies that compared behavioral weight-control programs that formally involved partners in treatment (couples programs) to similar programs in which subjects participated alone (subject-alone programs). Based on tests of effect sizes, couples programs are significantly superior to subject-alone programs at posttreatment (p less than .05). A nearly significant (p = .06) statistical superiority for couples programs versus subject-alone programs is also found at 2- to 3-month follow-up, but not thereafter. The couples programs differed in the kinds of social support provided by partners, and the most productive kinds of partner support remain to be identified. In particular, the use of partners in providing social support to subjects after formal therapy has ended is still an area of largely unexplored potential.

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In 1993 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), in cooperation with several other international organizations, issued Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement in order to establish, and standardize for international use, a set of general rules for evaluating and expressing uncertainty in measurement. The ISO recommendation has been of concern to many statisticians because it appears to combine frequentist performance measures and indices of subjective distributions in a way that neither frequentists nor Bayesians can fully endorse. The purpose of this review of the ISO Guide is to describe the essential recommendations made in the Guide, and then to show how these recommendations can be regarded as approximate solutions to certain frequentist and Bayesian inference problems. The framework thus provided will, hopefully, allow statisticians to develop improvements to the ISO recommendations (particularly in the approximations used), and also better communicate with the physical science researchers who will be following the ISO guidelines.