The central purpose of this study was to determine if affective work-related skills expected of workers by their employers could be identified using the critical incident technique. Additionally~ this study sought to determine if there were affective skills common among several selected occupational areas. The following research questions gave direction to this study:
1. Can the Critical Incident Technique be used to identify work related affective skills needed by persons employed in the television service and repair, electronic assembler (manufacturing), and television sales (retail) occupational areas?
2. Can these skills be grouped into meaningful clusters?
3. Are different affective skills required by persons in each of the three occupational areas?
The research procedure used in this study was the Critical Incident Technique developed by John Flanagan. Five steps are included: (1) determination of the general aim of the activity, (2) developing plans and specifications for collecting factual incidents, (3) collecting data, (4) analyzing the data, and (5) interpreting and reporting the data.
The instrument used to collect critical incidents was adapted from the form developed by W. K. Kirchner and M. D. Dunnette. It was composed of two major sections: (1) the Effective Critical Incident Form and (2) the Ineffective Critical Incident Form. Respondents in this study were divided into three strata according to occupational areas: television retail sales supervisor, television service and repair supervisor, and electronic assembler supervisor. Thirty names of line management personnel were randomly selected from each strata for individual interviews.
Critical incident interview reports were reviewed and work-related affective behavioral statements were abstracted from each incident. A panel of experts was used to review the list of behavior statements. The final instrument included 63 behavior statements.
A random sample of line management personnel (394) were potential respondents in this study. Each participant provided biographical data and indicated degree of agreement (Very Unimportant to Very Important) with 63 work-related affective behavior statements. The analysis of data consisted of computing means for each of the behavior statements and comparing them to an established criterion (mean score greater than 2.50). Factor analysis was used to reduce the data and to group the behavior statements into meaningful clusters (factors). One way analysis of variance was used to determine whether there were significant differences between the factors and the occupational areas used in this study. / Ed. D.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/38676 |
| Date | 22 June 2010 |
| Creators | Foster, George Shartle |
| Contributors | Vocational and Technical Education, Finch, Curtis R., Elson, Donald E., McGough, Robert L., Hoerner, James L., Moore, David M. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation, Text |
| Format | vii, 132 leave, BTD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 40294219, LD5655.V856_1978.F68.pdf |
Page generated in 0.0052 seconds