RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

576 MULTIDIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT
held in school. By rescoring the stress items on
ascalerangingfrom‘Nostress’(1)to‘Extreme
stress’ (5) and using the means of the factor scores,
the researchers were able to explore associations
between the degree of perceived occupational
stress and the biographical data supplied by
participants. Space precludes a full account of
McCormick and Solman’s (1992) findings. We
illustrate some significant results in Box 25.12.
In the School domain more stress was reported
Box 25.12
Biographical data and stress factors
Stress
5
4
3
2
1
Infants/
primary
School type
Secondary
Means for significant differences of biographical
characteristics: External to school domain.
Stress
5
4
3
2
1
Male
Sex
Female
Means for significant differences of biographical
characteristics: Time demands.
Stress
5
4
3
2
1
Rural
Country–
city
Metropolitan
Means for significant differences of biographical
characteristics: Personal domain.
Source:McCormickandSolman1992
by secondary school teachers than by their
colleagues teaching younger pupils, not really a
very surprising result, the researchers observe,
given that infant/primary schools are generally
much smaller than their secondary counterparts
and that teachers are more likely to be part of a
smaller, supportive group. In the domain of Time
demands, females experienced more stress than
males, a finding consistent with that of other
research. In the Personal domain, a significant
difference was found in respect of the school’s
location, the level of occupational stress increasing
from the rural setting, through the country/city to
the metropolitan area.
To conclude, factor analysis techniques
are ideally suited to studies such as that
of McCormick and Solman (1992) in which
lengthy questionnaire-type data are elicited from a
large number of participants and where researchers
are concerned to explore underlying structures and
relationships between dependent and independent
variables. 3
Inevitably, such tentative explorations raise as
many questions as they answer.
Examples of studies using
multidimensional scaling and cluster
analysis
Forgas (1976) studied housewives’ and students’
perceptions of typical social episodes in their
lives, the episodes having been elicited from the
respective groups by means of a diary technique.
Subjects were required to supply two adjectives
to describe each of the social episodes they
had recorded as having occurred during the
previous 24 hours. From a pool of some 146
adjectives thus generated, 10 (together with
their antonyms) were selected on the basis of
their salience, their diversity of usage and their
independence of one another. Next, 2 more scales
from speculative taxonomies were added to give 12
unidimensional scales purporting to describe the
underlying episode structures. These scales were
used in the second part of the study to rate 25
social episodes in each group, the episodes being
chosen as follows. An ‘index of relatedness’ was