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Likert Scale Essays and Research Papers

Instructions for Likert Scale College Essay Examples

Title: designing scales

Total Pages: 2 Words: 547 Sources: 0 Citation Style: APA Document Type: Essay

Essay Instructions: A major hotel chain wants to compare its hotels to other competitors on the following attributes: convenience of location, friendly personnel, value for money, good housekeeping services, and prompt check out procedures.

Help the hotel chain rate its hotels by designing the following:

a. A Likert scale

b. A semantic differential scale

c. A graphic rating scale

Excerpt From Essay:

Title: Downsizing

Total Pages: 8 Words: 3315 References: -28 Citation Style: MLA Document Type: Research Paper

Essay Instructions: Please note...Must be APA...including references in alphabetical order, which was not done previously...thank you

Methodology Section was wrong and needs to be redone.
This final draft paper will be submitted to the "Thesis Committee for Approval"

Write your Topic Approval Paper for your Integrated Thesis Project. This should include an Introduction, a Literature Review and the Methodology Section.

Crystal please write the Introduction and Methodology sections only...the Literature review was correct.

Please write for the final draft(I will add the literature section)
1.Introductions-"The effects of Downsizing"

2. The Methodology section-I need to say how I will test my hypothesis....I will survey employees, use the Likert Scale, collect the data, include in this section...write Statement of Purpose, Research Hypothesis & Variables, Data Collection and Procedures,Conclusions

Excerpt From Essay:

Title: How incentives effect the performance of managers

Total Pages: 4 Words: 1749 Works Cited: 3 Citation Style: APA Document Type: Essay

Essay Instructions: Empirical Research Project.

Guiding Questions When Reading Empirical Research
Research problem/question:
? Is the problem an important/relevant one to the field of study?
? Will this study contribute to our understanding of the problem?
? Do they provide a good rationale for why such a study is important?
Literature review:
? Does the literature review provide definitions of the key constructs they are investigating?
? Do the authors critically evaluate the studies they review?
? Does the literature provide support that this study is needed?
Research purpose/questions/hypotheses:
? Are the questions/hypotheses clearly stated?
? Will the answer(s) to the question(s) be applicable to practice in the field?
? Will the answer(s) to the question(s) help us understand the problem better?
Research Design and Methods:
? Is the sample (subjects) they used appropriate for answering the questions?
? Can you generalize findings to a larger population? Will you be able to apply their findings to similar settings?
? Were the instruments or measures they used clearly identified/explained?
? Do the authors convey clearly the procedures used for collecting and analyzing the data?
Results and Discussion:
? Are the analysis techniques they used (whether quantitative or qualitative) clearly explained?
? Do the authors report their findings in a clear manner using tables, figures, and text as appropriate?
? Do the findings they report seem plausible given the data they analyzed? Do they make sense?
? Do the conclusions they make follow logically from the data analysis findings?
? Do the conclusions they make match the questions they posed at the beginning of the article?
? Do the authors report limitations to their study?
? Do the authors provide important implications for practice?
? Do the authors make suggestions for future research in this topic?
Even MORE Guiding Questions

Introduction
1. Are more than half of the references current within five years?
2. Is the author using mostly primary sources?
3. Is the author using relevant literature?
4. Do references in the text match references in the reference list?
5. Are theories discussed, and are the theories related to the problem statement or hypotheses/questions?
6. Is the problem statement appearing early in the article?
7. Are the initial words in the problem statement the purpose or the problem?
8. Are hypotheses or research questions located in the introduction?
9. Are there diverse references, e.g., dissertations, journals, ERIC documents, theses, etc.?
10. Are many of the journals and conferences judged to be quality journals and conferences (refereed, wide readership for journals, etc.)?
11. What are the independent and dependent variables in the problem statement?
12. Are the constructs/variables in the problem statement clearly identified and defined?
13. Does the literature convey the importance of researching the problem?
14. Does the author review literature on the major constructs/variables in the problem statement?
15. Is the problem statement clear and simple and one sentence with no more than three dependent variables?

Hypotheses, questions or objectives
1. Does the author write null hypotheses, directional hypotheses, research questions, or objectives?
2. Is the alpha level indicated?
3. Is the population identified?
4. Are the data collection instruments identified?
5. Are hypotheses, questions, or objectives testable?
6. Do they (hypotheses, questions, or objectives) investigate parts of the problem statement?
7. Do they investigate no more than one or two dependent variables?
8. Are an independent and a dependent variable specified?
9. Are too many (more than four) variables investigated in the study?
10. Does the author incorrectly write null and directional hypotheses?
11. Are qualitative questions included with the quantitative hypotheses or quantitative questions?


Sample
1. Is a target population/accessible population properly defined relative to size and major demographic characteristics?
2. Is a sample defined relative to size and major demographic characteristics?
3. Is a sampling method defined and the procedure for the sampling method described?
4. Is a convenience sample denoted?
5. Are there serious problems with external validity?

Instruments
1. Is the reliability coefficient and the reliability method stated?
2. Is the procedure for the reliability method summarized?
3. Is the reliability of the subtests delineated?
4. Is the validity described?
5. Are the examples of test items and examples of the scale reported?
6. Is credit given to the publisher of the instrument?
7. Is descriptive information provided for the measure such as the number of test items, test administration time, and information on confidentiality?

Design/Treatment
1. Is the research design described?
2. Is a rationale for using the design delineated?
3. Is the design appropriate for the problem statement?
4. Are the treatment and treatment period described in enough detail for replication?
5. Are extraneous variables controlled?
6. Are comparison groups equal on most characteristics through random assignment, matching, ANCOVA, etc.?
7. Are there serious concerns about internal validity?

Results and conclusions
1. Are findings objectively reported?
2. Are findings reported for each hypothesis/question?
3. Are tables used to report findings for the hypotheses?
4. Are all possible limitations and delimitations stated in the conclusions?
5. Is the author generalizing his/her findings appropriately (external validity)?
6. Are recommendations for further study provided?

Her is a sample of an Empirical Research Paper

itive Organizational Behavior: Self-Efficacy


Abstract
Self-efficacy is defined as the judgment of how well, or poorly, one expects to cope with a situation. Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with peoples? beliefs in their capacities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and courses of action needed to exercise control over given situations and events in their lives. Self-efficacy determines how people feel, think, behave and motivate themselves. These beliefs produce diverse effects through four major processes. They include cognitive, motivational, affective and selection processes. (Bandura, A. 1986)
A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. (Bandura, A. 1994) People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities. These same people set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to the goals. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks. They attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills, which are acquirable. They approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress and lowers vulnerability to depression.
In contrast, people who doubt their capabilities shy away from difficult tasks which they view as personal threats. They have low aspirations and weak commitment to the goals they choose to pursue. When faced with difficult tasks, they dwell on their personal deficiencies, on the obstacles they will encounter, and all kinds of adverse outcomes rather than concentrate on how to perform successfully. They reduce their efforts and give up quickly in the face of difficulties. They are slow to recover their sense of efficacy following failure or setbacks. Because they view insufficient performance as deficient aptitude, it does not require much failure for them to lose faith in their capabilities. They fall easy victim to stress and depression.

Sources of Self-Efficacy
People make judgments about their capabilities based on enactive experiences, vicarious experiences (observation), persuasory information, and physiological states. In school, children gain knowledge and experiences through experiential activities. They also gain information based on seeing how peers, that they judge to be similar to them, perform at various levels and under given circumstances. They also are told by teachers, peers, family and others about their expected capabilities. Children give themselves physiological feedback about their capabilities through symptoms such as soreness or sweating. These sources of efficacy information are not mutually exclusive, but interact in the overall process of self-evaluation.
In his 1977 study, Bandura advised that enactive experience is a highly influential source of efficacy information. Successful experiences raise self-efficacy with regard to the target performance while experiences with failure lower it. Another source of efficacy information is vicarious experience through observation. Observing peers, especially those with perceived similar capabilities, perform target activities results in evaluative information about one's personal capabilities.
Verbal persuasion, or convincing, serves as another source of efficacy information. Teachers, for example, can raise or inhibit students' percepts of efficacy by suggesting whether or not they have the capabilities to succeed in a given task. Models can also be used to demonstrate to self-doubters that personal capabilities are more often a result of effort rather than innate capability.

Self-Efficacy and Decision Making
Participative decision making and employee performance in different cultures: the moderating effects of allocentrism/idiocentrism and efficacy by Lam, Chen and Schaubroeck is a study that examines an individual?s participative decision making abilities. The study looked at how self-efficacy affected an individual?s ability to participate in decision making both individually and in a group setting across different cultures. Self-efficacy in this study was broken into collective and individual. This was to aid in the analysis of the decision making contribution. The study gathered data from two groups within an organization. In order to meet the cross cultural requirement, they used a company that has a US division and a Hong Kong division. Chen, Xiao-Ping, Lam, Simon & Schaubroeck. (2002.)
The study was delivered via a survey and it was translated by professional translators and tested to ensure cross-cultural equality. The questioners were sent to US and Chinese junior workers and returned at an acceptable rate. The results of the study were very interesting in terms of how self-efficacy impacted participative decision making in the two countries. In China there was a much larger self-efficacy in group settings. This is due in part to the cultural influences in China. There is great reward for group/organizational success in their culture so that played a large role in the employee?s participation in group decision making. It found that individual self-efficacy was substantially lower. This was a direct contrast to the US results. There was a much lower group self-efficacy because there is not as much emphasis put on reward for group accomplishment. Personal self-efficacy was quite high because personal reward could be associated with the decision making. Chen, C. C., Chen, X.P. & Meindl, J.R. (1998)
This study will be beneficial to most international companies. It provides some clues as to how managers can build teams across cultures to provide the greatest balance between group and individual self-efficacy. The study clearly provides that cultures that support the collective will have a much higher group self-efficacy than those societies that have an individual focus.
The study is limited because there was no real adjustability in the degree of decision making capacity. The respondents were simply asked if they were involved, it did not address to what degree. Additionally, only one occupation was used for this study. It has been proven in other studies that different occupation levels will provide different feedback in terms of self-efficacy. The creativity study, which we will look at later, showed a difference from the blue collar workers to the manufacturing division. Another weakness of this study is the time. A longer study would allow individuals working in groups to develop their group self-efficacy. There is evidence that efficacy may be slightly unstable and might take time to develop in a group setting. (Gist, M.E. 1987)
This study was interesting in that it evaluated how individual and group self-efficacy played a role in collective decision making. The idea that culture can play such a large role in where your self-efficacy is most predominant is quite impressive. When looking at societies that have a ?me generation? it is easy to see how individuals will develop high individual self-efficacy. This study will also be very valuable to organizations as they try to develop tools to train employees. They will be better able to target the training to the cultural background of the workforce. Overall this was a strong study that uncovered some strong trends. Further work is needed in order to broadly apply the information. There needs to be input from managers as to how valuable the participative decision making from the individuals and from the groups was. Expanding the study could provide a powerful tool for training and organizational development and planning.

Creative Self-Efficacy
Creative Self-Efficacy: It?s Potential Antecedents and Relationship to Creative Performance looks at self-efficacy and how it affects creative performance in the workplace. The study looked at this on several different levels to see how different types of variables combined together would affect creative self-efficacy. There were two types of organizations used in this study; the manufacturing division of a large consumer products company for blue collar individuals and the operations division of a high tech firm for the white collar individuals.
They gathered data using several different measures. Job tenure was measured in years, education was measured on an 11 point scale (0 = high school, 1-10 = number of college years completed), job self-efficacy was measure with a three item 7 point Likert scale, supervisor behavior was measured using a nine item 6 point Likert scale, job complexity was based on a Dictionary of Occupational Titles substantive complexity scores, and creativity was assessed by supervisor ratings of six creativity performance items on a 6 point Likert scale.
They had seven hypotheses that they were trying to prove in this study. Hypothesis 1 said that job tenure and education level would positively predict creative self-efficacy. Hypothesis 2 said that job self-efficacy would positively predict creative self-efficacy. Hypothesis 3 said that supervisor support (role-modeling and verbal persuasion) would positively predict self-efficacy. Hypothesis 4 said that job complexity would positively predict creative self-efficacy. Hypothesis 5 said that job tenure will moderate the effects of job complexity on creative self-efficacy, such that the positive relationship between job complexity and creative self-efficacy will be stronger for higher levels of job tenure. Hypothesis 6 said that creative self-efficacy will positively predict creativity and will explain variance in creativity beyond that provided by job self-efficacy. Hypothesis 7 said that job self-efficacy will moderate the effects of creative self-efficacy on creativity in such a way that the positive relationship between creative self-efficacy and creativity will be stronger for employees who have higher job self-efficacy. Results found partial support for Hypotheses 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 and there was significant support for Hypotheses 5 and 6. The possible flaws or shortcomings of this study are that it can be difficult to determine and track creativity, especially when you are looking at several different types of jobs and getting the opinions of several different managers and employees. Tierney, Pamela, Farmer, Steven M. (2002)
This study provides several things for managers and future theorists. First, it develops a new efficacy construct that is specific to work creativity by integrating research finding on self-efficacy and creativity. Second, it provides evidence for the validity of creative self-efficacy as a distinct construct and tested a new model drawn directly from an existing model of self-efficacy development. Third, this is the first study to examine specified creative efficacy beliefs in direct relation to employee creativity in an ongoing corporate setting. A fourth finding is that multiple efficacies come into play for creative work. Additionally, creative self-efficacy and job self-efficacy both have criterion for employee creativity.

Divergent Effects of Job Control on Coping With Work Stressors
This study identifies job self-efficacy as a moderating variable that may determine whether job control contributes positively or negatively to coping with work stressors. Data from two samples (health professionals and an occupationally diverse group) demonstrated similar interactions between demands, control, and self-efficacy predicting blood pressure. These results may reconcile the previous inconsistent and largely method-bound support for Karasek?s job demands-control model. It suggests that efforts to improve job efficacy may be as important to reducing the cardiovascular consequences of job stress as efforts to enhance control.
In this article, John Schaubroeck and Deryl E. Merritt review research and theory suggestions that the demands-control model contains the assumption that jobholders have a high self-efficacy. Further, they suggest that control may have adverse health consequences among those low in self-efficacy. The research was accomplished through the use of an extension of Karasek?s model that predicts workers? resting blood pressure levels with a three-way interaction between demand, control, and self-efficacy. Karasek, R. A. (1994)
Presenting the job demands-control model, Karasek posited that physical strain results from the joint effects of the demand of a work situation and the range of decision making freedom available to the worker facing those demands. The model contains two primary predictions. First, job strain increases as job demands increase. Second, if the challenges of a job can be matched by an incumbent?s ability to cope actively with those challenges, appropriate behavior patterns that lead to an effective channeling of arousal occur. Thus high-demand, high-control jobs are termed ?active,? and seen as not only less conductive to stress outcomes, but also as potentially leading to health improvements via anabolic process. However, if demands are high and control is low, arousal is not appropriately channeled and high strain is maintained. Additionally, if both demands and control are low, a job defined as ?passive,? the job provides little opportunity for its incumbent to cope directly with job demands. Karasek described the mediating physiological process as the process which makes demands and control particularly related to cardiovascular functions such as blood pressure. (Schaubroeck 1997)
Data was collected on site at a large rehabilitation hospital located in the Midwestern United States. The hospital provided comprehensive services in physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, physiological services and other services for severe trauma patients. The sample consisted of 110 full-time health professionals involved in the daily administration of patient care. This sample represented 42 percent of the hospital?s total work force and 86 percent of the direct patient care workers who were the target of this study.
The research and theory suggested an interactive relationship between self-efficacy, control, and demand perceptions. It also suggests the following general hypothesis. Hypothesis 1 said the three-way interaction between perceived job demands, control, and self-efficacy would be significantly related to systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Hypothesis 2 stated at higher levels of self-efficacy, job demands would have a more positive relationship with systolic and diastolic blood pressure among subject reporting lower control. Hypothesis 3 stated that at lower levels of self-efficacy, job demands would have a more positive relationship with systolic and diastolic blood pressure among subjects reporting higher control.
My group feels that a higher level of self-efficacy is a major contributing factor in both motivation and self-efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy to exercise control over stressors plays a central role in anxiety arousal. People who believe they can exercise control over threats do not conjure up disturbing thought patterns. But those who believe they cannot manage threats experience high anxiety arousal. They dwell on their coping deficiencies. They view many aspects of their environment as fraught with danger. They magnify the severity of possible threats and worry about things that rarely happen. Through such inefficacious thinking they distress themselves and impair their level of functioning.

Bibliography
Bandura, A. 1994. Self-efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71-81). New York: Academic Press. (Reprinted in H. Friedman [Ed.], Encyclopedia of mental health. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998).
Bandura, A. 1986. Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, Albert 1977. Towards a unifying theory of behavior change. Psychological Review, 84, 1999-215.
Chen, Xiao-Ping, Lam, Simon & Schaubroeck. 2002. Participative decision making and employee performance in different cultures: the moderating effects of allocentrism/idiocentrism and efficacy. Academy of Management Journal, 45: 905-914.

Chen, C. C., Chen, X.P. & Meindl, J.R. 1998. How can cooperation be fostered? The cultural effects of individualism-collectivism. Academy of Management Review, 23: 285-304

Gist, M.E. 1987. Self-efficacy: Implications for organizational behavior and human resource management. Academy of Management Review, 12: 472-485.
Karasek, R. A. 1994. Physiology of stress and regeneration in job-related cardiovascular illiness. Journal of Human Stress, 8:29-42

Schaubroeck, John, Merritt, Deryl E. 1997. Divergent effects of Job Control on The Coping With Work Stressors: The Key Role of Self-Efficacy. Academy of Management Journal,3: 738-758

Tierney, Pamela, Farmer, Steven M. 2002. Creative Self-Efficacy: Its Potential Antecedents and Relationships to Creative Performance. Academy of Management Journal, 6: 1137-1148

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