The objective of this study was to conduct a content analysis of indices and articles in the Journal of Interior Design Education and Research (JIDER) and Journal of Interior Design (JID) from 1975 to 1997. The purpose was to study characteristics of articles, including authorship and subject matter, to identify areas of scholarship in the academic discipline of interior design. Guided by previous studies in other disciplines, data were collected from two sources: examination of topical indices and content analysis of journal articles. Content analysis was performed on 23 volumes of JIDER and JID. The researchers jointly analyzed each index and article according to specific criteria. Frequencies and percentages were calculated and summarized in tables to categorize and classify data. Findings indicated that the most–often published subjects in JIDER and JID pertained to pedagogy/program development, professional practice, and history. This research identified opportunities for future studies in areas including color, technology, design process, barrier free design and international design. Research on these topics may affect interior design education and practice and therefore further investigation is warranted. Findings will be useful to three groups: researchers/graduate students, JID Publication Board Members, and practitioners. JID, an academic journal dedicated solely to the interior design discipline for 25 years, has operated as a communication vehicle in recording research conducted by educators and practitioners.

This study employs both objective and subjective testing to examine readability and quality of research in textiles and apparel. Flesch scores provided a quantitative measure of the readability of passages taken from published research in the field. U.S. active/reserve and graduate student members of ITAA (n = 208) completed subject specific questionnaires for the subjective portion of the study. Responses to open-ended questions reveal that clarity, structure, and terminology are most frequently mentioned when explaining perceptions of readability while value and methods are concepts closely related to definitions of journal quality. Positive correlations between readability and quality ( p ≤ .01) contrast findings in previous research. Time constraints facing today's academic community are noted as the primary reason for the need for published research to be readable and comprehensible.

The Canadian apparel industry has experienced erosion of its market share to imported products. Exporting is a strategy to counteract this situation, yet only about 3% of total Canadian apparel shipments are exported. The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of Canadian apparel CEOs toward exporting and compare characteristics of exporters and non exporters. A self-administered questionnaire was mailed to 511 apparel manufacturers, with 56 usable questionnaires returned. Results of t-tests, indicated that CEOs of non-exporting firms perceived exporting to be more complicated than did CEOs of exporting firms. CEOs of exporting firms tended to have higher educational levels and were more likely to have traveled to the U.S. than CEOs of non-exporting firms.

The objectives of the study were to determine the degree of importance that retail buyers (N = 86), retail managers (N = 73), and students studying merchandising (N = 252) place on certain competencies and to determine which competencies were most often listed as most important by each of the three groups. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. The rating of buying competencies among the three groups was facilitated by using Kruskal-Wallis tests. Twenty-one of the 35 competencies had significant differences in the mean scores between at least two groups. Managers and students placed greater importance on most of the competencies than did retail buyers. The competency ranked most often as important by buyers was the ability to negotiate effectively with sales representatives while both students and managers selected the ability to understand custom ers' needs. The findings have implications for retailers as well as for educators.

The purpose of this study was to examine volumes 1 through 7 of the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal (CTRJ) in relation to past trends in content areas of research reported, authorship, and sources of citations. Seven subject matter areas were identified: apparel design and manufacturing, consumer issues, cultural/historical, educational merchandising, social/psychological, and textile science. Of these, social/psychological research represented 26% of the empirical articles. Studies which focused on apparel design and manufacturing increased in number as the journal matured Individuals affiliated with land-grant institutions authored 94 of the 145 articles published Funding sources were acknowledged in one fourth of the articles. The Home Economics Research Journal was the most frequently cited publication in CTRJ articles.