Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentperiod. The numbers rose in a step-wise manner approximately everytwo weeks for the eight weeks of the Project with an average of approximately1,000 participants during the first month, 2,500 participants forthe next two weeks, and close to 4,000 for the last two weeks (Hagelin,et al., 1999). In the structural break analysis, the independent variablewas operationalized as an increasing trend starting at the beginning ofthe Demonstration Project.Dependent VariablesAll data were received from sources not affiliated with the researcher orthe researcher’s institution. Independent researchers gathered the dataand, in the case of the media data, coded it. The coders of the data wereunaware of the hypotheses of the studies at the time when the datawere being coded. After acquiring the data, the data were aggregatedby averaging it to the necessary time period. Thus, a strong measure ofobjectivity was maintained in each of the studies. The dependent variablesare as follows:1) Presidential popularity was measured by Presidential approvalratings from public opinion polls. In the case of the Clinton period,aggregated (averaged) weekly and bi-weekly data-sets were createdfrom public opinion ratings gathered by several polling organizationsand compiled by the American Enterprise Institute for Public PolicyResearch (Bowman, 1995). The first poll data available to the researcherwere purchased from the Roper Center, and the analysis of this setwas included in an earlier report on the Washington D.C. NationalDemonstration Project (Hagelin et al., 1999). However, rather thanpurchase a set for 1994, American Enterprise data were obtained withoutcharge. Certain smaller polling organizations were included inthe American Enterprise data-set that had not been in the Roper set.Thus, to allow the final data for 1993-1994 to be consistent with thepreliminary data for 1993, only those polling organizations (with theexception of NBC) that had been available from Roper were includedin the American Enterprise data-set. NBC was included, as the RoperCenter usually used it (although not in the set they originally sent), andit was considered a comparable polling organization to those of ABCand CBS (Bowman, personal communication, 1995). The correlationbetween the 1993 Roper Center data and the 1993 edited American236