Methodological, statistical, conceptual, and related topics and issues in research with human participants are longtime interests. When I was a doctoral student at American University, I studied and worked with social psychologist Robert E. Lana, who was doing empirical research using a design by experimental psychologist Richard Solomon to explore pretest sensitization in before-after experiments. I was fascinated both by the design and by Solomon's data analysis. Lana was specifically interested in sensitization when the pretest involved opinions or attitudes, and that deepened my interest in social psychology. For my doctoral research, I focused on R. L. Thotndike's idea in the 1930s that bolstering effects of a reward (or "satisfying state of affairs") could spread backward as well as forward in time. I started a program of research that I would continue after the Ph.D. It also led me to meet social psychologist William J. McGuire, who told me that he and I might be the only two living psychologists interested in the contiguous spread of effect. If you are curious, this early work of mine, is in an invited chapter I wrote (A "Spread of Effect" in Attitude Formation) for a 1968 book edited by A. G. Greenwald, T. C. Brock, and T. M Ostrom, Psychological Foundations of Attitudes, published in a general series that was edited by social psychologists Leon Festinger and Stanley Schachter. More importantly, Bob Lana and Bill McGuire were my mentors and friends for life.

In 1963, Mimi and I were married. For our honeymoon, we drove to Norwood, Massachusetts, to begin my Boston career. Mimi had gone to Wheaton College in Norton for her degree in English. She had been editor of the college's newspaper, and now she was eager to edit my work. We would also coauthor a popular writing manual. For me, living in New England and teaching research methods and statistics and advising master's degree students in a new communication research program, chaired by Edward J. Robinson, was the beginning of an adventure. My world was expanding, and I was meeting fascinating people. Mimi and I would have remained in New England forever but for the cold winter weather. Ed Robinson and I edited an annotated book, Experiments in Persuasion (1967), that also was published in the Festinger-Schachter series.

The early 1960s also was when Bob and MaryLu Rosenthal began their Boston adventure. Our first published collaboration was a little study I had completed but had not yet submitted for publication on "volunteer effects in opinion change research," inspired by Martin T. Orne's work on demand characteristics. Bob at the time was teaching a course at Boston University on research methods, and he also was lecturing at Harvard in clinical psychology. An AU friend (Gordon Russell, later to become professor at University of Lethbridge) told me of Bob's interest in volunteer bias. Bob and I met, I invited him to collaborate, he agreed, and we soon became good friends. Over more than 50 years, we collaborated on books, papers, studies etc., generally focused on methodological, statistical, conceptual, and related subjects. The couple semesters when Bob would be on sabbatical leave, I was invited by Harvard to teach Bob's large research methods course and an open seminar in social psychology. I made several new friends and acquaintances, with whom I also published together, and a couple who became friends for life.

Scanned copies of five books are freely available here. To download any of them, click on Images and Files tab (above), scroll down to the book you want to download, and click on it. They all are freely open for downloading. If you happen to find a used, original hardback copy of our 842-page text, Essentials of Behavioral Research (third edition, 2008), the inside front and back cover pages have equations discussed and repeated later in the text, but unfortunately, they were not scanned. The five books here are: (1) Paradigms in Transition: The Methodology of Social Inquiry, third edition (Rosnow); (2) People Studying People: Artifacts and Ethics in Behavioral Research (Rosnow & Rosenthal); (3) Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis (Rosenthal & Rosnow; (4) Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (Rosnow & Fine); (5) Writing Papers in Psychology, Proposals, Research Papers, Literature Reviews, Poster Presentations and Concise Reports, ninth edition (Rosnow & Rosnow).

Cheers.