RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

572 MULTIDIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT
Clearly, the difference between the variable ‘yourself’
and the ‘students’ and ‘society’ variables is that
only 20 per cent of these teachers rated themselves
as very or extremely responsible for their own
stress, compared to 45 per cent and 60 per cent
respectively for the latter two. Possibly the degree of
responsibility which teachers attribute to themselves
for their occupational stress is associated with
their perceptions of their part in controlling
student behaviour. This would seem a reasonable
explanation, but requiring further investigation.
(McCormick and Solman 1992)
Box 25.9 shows the factors derived from the
analysis of the 38 occupational stress items. The
5 factors extracted were named: ‘Student domain’,
‘External (to school) domain’, ‘Time demands’,
‘School domain’ and ‘Personal domain’. While
a detailed discussion of the factors and their
loadings is inappropriate here, we draw readers’
attention to some interesting findings. Notice, for
example, how the second factor, ‘External (to
school) domain’, is consistent with the factoring
of the responsibility for stress items reported in
Box 25.8. That is to say, the variables to do
with the government and the Department of
Education have loaded on the same factor. The
researchers venture this further elaboration of the
point.
when a teacher attributes occupational stress to the
Department of Education, it is not as a member
of the Department of Education, although such, in
fact, is the case. In this context, the Department of
Education is outside ‘the system to which the teacher
belongs’, namely the school. A similar argument can
be posed for the nebulous concept of Society. The
Government is clearly a discrete political structure.
(McCormick and Solman 1992)
‘School domain’, factor 4 in Box 25.9, consists
of items concerned with support from the school
principal and colleagues as well as the general
nurturing atmosphere of the school. Of particular
interest here is that teachers report relatively low
levels of stress for these items.
Box 25.10 reports the factor analysis of the 32
items to do with occupational satisfaction. Five
factors were extracted and named as ‘Supervision’,
‘Income’, ‘External demands’, ‘Advancement’ and
‘School culture’. Again, space precludes a full
outline of the results set out in Box 25.10. Notice,
however, an apparent anomaly in the first factor,
‘Supervision’. Responses to items to do with
teachers’ supervisors and recognition seem to
indicate that in general, teachers are satisfied with
their supervisors, but feel that they receive too
little recognition.
Box 25.10 shows that 21 per cent of teacherrespondents
agree or strongly agree that they
receive too little recognition, yet 52 per cent
agree or strongly agree that they do receive
recognition from their immediate supervisors.
McCormick and Solman (1992) offer the
following explanation:
The difference can be explained, in the first instance,
by the degree or amount of recognition given. That
is, immediate supervisors give recognition, but not
enough. Another interpretation is that superiors
other than the immediate supervisor do not give
sufficient recognition for their work.
(McCormick and Solman 1992)
Here is a clear case for some form of respondent
validation (see Chapter 6 and 11).
Having identified the underlying structures of
occupational stress and occupational satisfaction,
the researchers then went on to explore the
relationships between stress and satisfaction by
using a technique called ‘canonical correlation
analysis’. The technical details of this procedure
are beyond the scope of this book. Interested
readers are referred to Levine (1984), who
suggests that ‘the most acceptable approach
to interpretation of canonical variates is the
examination of the correlations of the original
variables with the canonical variate’ (Levine
1984). This is the procedure adopted by
McCormick and Solman (1992).
From Box 25.11 we see that factors having
high correlations with Canonical Variate 1 are
Stress: Student domain (−0.82) and Satisfaction:
External demands (0.72).
The researchers offer the following interpretation
of this finding: