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Differences among elementary, junior high, and senior high school principals' perceptions of their administrative task competence; involvement with central office; autonomy; job satisfaction; and length of work week were investigated in relation to social forces confronting the principalship and characteristics of traditional principal preparation programs. Questionnaires mailed to a random sample of 450 principals in rural, urban, and suburban districts yielded a 64 per cent return. All principals perceived themselves competent in administrative tasks. However, suburban principals were more involved with central office and experienced greater autonomy than urban principals. Urban principals worked similar hours and were uniformly satisfied unlike suburban principals who varied significantly in level of satisfaction and hours worked. Revisions in principal preparation programs were mandated.

There now appears to be a real prospect that the present chaos will give place to a well‐ordered set of enactments. In the House of Lords there has been introduced by the Lord Chancellor a Food and Drugs Bill, which is a purely consolidating measure of 137 clauses and twelve schedules, designed to replace virtually all existing Food and Drugs statutes dealing with England, Wales and Northern Ireland (without amending their substance), and in particular to repeal wholly the Food and Drugs Act, 1954. In the House of Commons the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Bill, which is both an amending and consolidating measure—has for the third time been launched on its Parliamentary career. Meanwhile, much progress as been made with the preparation of the promised Regulations, which, before this note appears in print, will have received some consideration from the Food Hygiene Advisory Council. And, simultaneously, the contemplated revision and enlargement of Codes of Practice appear to be near completion. We know of no reason why all these operations should not be completed before the end of the present year. One of the important matters to be settled is the way in which the Minister of Health will exercise his discretionary powers in relation to the local governing bodies which will be Food and Drugs Authorities.

In the field of public relations and communication management, message evaluation has been one of the starting points for evaluation and measurement research at least since the 1970s. Reliable and valid message evaluation has a central role in message effects research and campaign design in other disciplines as well as communication science. The purpose of this paper is to offer a message testing protocol to efficiently acquire valid and reliable message evaluation data.

A message testing protocol is described in terms of how to conceptualize and evaluate the content and format of messages, in terms of procedures for acquiring and testing messages and in terms of using efficient, reliable and valid measures of perceived message effectiveness (PME) and perceived argument strength (PAS). The evidence supporting the reliability and validity of PME and PAS measures is reviewed.

The message testing protocol developed and reported is an efficient, reliable and valid approach for testing large numbers of messages.

Researchers’ ability to select candidate messages for subsequent deeper testing, for various types of communication campaigns, and for research in theory testing contexts is facilitated. Avoiding the limitations of using a single instance of a message to represent a category (also known as the case-category confound) is reduced.

Communication campaign designers are armed with tools to assess messages and campaign concepts quickly and efficiently, reducing pre-testing time and resources while identifying “best-in-show” examples and prototypes.

Message structures are conceptualized in terms of content and format features using theoretically driven constructs. Measures of PAS and PME are reviewed for their reliability, construct and predictive validity, finding that the measures are acceptable surrogates for actual effectiveness for a wide variety of messages and applications. Coupled with procedures that reduce confounding by randomly nesting messages within respondents and respondents to messages, the measures used and protocol deployed offer an efficient and utilitarian approach to message testing and modeling.