snowball sampling Recruitment of participants
based on word of mouth or referrals from other
participants
socialization Awareness about formal and in-
formal rules of behavior
Solomon four-group design An experimental
design involving four groups—some receive the
intervention, others serve as controls; some are
measured before and after the intervention, others
are measured only after the intervention
specificity The ability of the test to correctly
identify people without the disease by negative
results
split-half reliability A test for instrument reli-
ability in which the items are divided to form two
instruments. Both instruments are given and the
halves are compared using the Spearman-Brown
formula
stability An attribute of reliability when instru-
ments render the same scores with repeated mea-
sures under the same circumstances
standard deviation A measure of variability
used to determine the number of data values
falling within a specific interval in a normal
distribution
statistical conclusion validity The degree that
the results of the statistical analysis reflect the true
relationship among the independent and depen-
dent variables
statistical hypothesis A hypothesis stating that
there is no relationship among the variables; null
hypothesis
statistically significant When critical values fall
in the tails of normal distributions; when findings
did not happen by chance alone
Statistics The branch of mathematics that col-
lects, analyzes, interprets, and presents numerical
data in terms of samples and populations
statistics The numerical outcomes and prob-
abilities derived from calculations on raw data
Stetler model Step-by-step instructions for inte-
grating research into practice
stopwords Words, such as a, the, and in, that are
so commonly used that they can hinder accurate
record retrieval
storytelling A method of data collection associ-
ated with qualitative methods when researchers
and participants tell their stories about the phe-
nomenon of interest
strategic sampling Sampling in historical re-
search to locate a small group of people who were
either witnesses of or participants in the phenom-
enon being studied
stratified random sampling Selecting elements
from an accessible population that has been di-
vided into groups or strata
studies A level in the pyramid of 5 Ss that con-
tains quantitative and qualitative studies, case
studies, and concept analyses
study validity Ability to accept results as logical,
reasonable, and justifiable based on the evidence
presented
subject headings A set of controlled vocabu-
lary used to classify materials; organization of
databases according to topic
subject searching Searching databases using
controlled vocabulary
subjects Individuals who participate in studies,
typically studies using a quantitative design
summaries A level in the pyramid of 5 Ss
containing detailed descriptions of evidence
survey designs Descriptive design type involv-
ing data obtained through subjects’ self-report
synopses A level in the pyramid of 5 Ss contain-
ing brief descriptions of evidence
syntheses A level in the pyramid of 5 Ss contain-
ing evidence to present a whole depiction of a
phenomenon
systematic error Error that occurs in the same
way with each measurement
systematic random sampling Sampling method
in which every kth element is selected from a
numbered list of all elements in the accessible528 GLOSSARY