This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Sociometric Corporation will establish the Archive of Exemplary Behavioral Science Research Instruments (BSRI). The BSRI Archive will contain searchable, edit-ready, and print-ready machine-readable versions of approximately 200 demographic, behavioral, and health science instruments used to collect the exemplary quantitative research data in the Sociometrics Data Archives and to document the effectiveness of the exemplary social intervention programs in the Sociometrics Program Archives. Norms for the scales and items comprising the BSRI instruments will be included in BSRI in the form of scale means and standard deviations and item frequencies or response distributions calculated from the linked data archives at Sociometrics. The approximately 200 instruments and 165,000 constituent items and scales that will comprise BSRI have been selected and acquired by Sociometrics for public use over a period of 14 years under the guidance of eight National Advisory Panels of scientist-experts. There will be three commercial product sets comprising BSRI: a book series, a CD-ROM series, and an Internet suite accessible on Socionet, Sociometrics World Wide Web server. Phase I will create prototypes for these three product sets. That Behavioral Science Research Instrument (BSRI) is characterized by comprehensive substantive scope, availability in multiple formats, and easy-to-use interface make it a natural product for several thousand institutional target markets serving several hundred thousand individual users. Examples are: (1) academic markets, including social science departments, social and health science professors and researchers working in the topical areas covered by BSRI, main libraries at colleges and universities, and medical libraries in universities; (2) policymaking and business markets, such as members of the Association of Public Data Users and employees of the federal and state Depts. of Health and Human Services; and (3) general information resource markets, such as libraries serving the general public.
