Negative Adjusted R Square is a "good" thing?

Posted by cynicalflyer on Feb 09, 2014; 8:18pm
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Negative-Adjusted-R-Square-is-a-good-thing-tp5724399.html

The theory: in K-12 education putting more administrative authority in the state board of education is "better" that leaving it to the local boards.

DVs: I have two ways to measure "better" from 26 states: % kids graduating high school within 4 years and scores by school district on a standardized test. I'll be examining them separately.

IVs: I have 37 different measures for the types of administrative authority: 3 (state has complete control), 2 (shared/split) and 1 (locality has complete control).

So I fire up SPSS, plunk in the % kids graduating high school within 4 years by state in 26 states as my DV, plunk in the 37 IVs, use "Enter" as my method (I've been told stepwise is evil, evil, evil) and...

Model Summary
Model	R	R Square	Adjusted R Square	Std. Error of the Estimate
1	.853a	.727	-.041	.148600607125323

This might be "good" if it means the predictors are useless. It is "bad" if I am getting this because my model stinks. How can I determine which?