ON USING RESIDUAL DIFFERENCE SCORES IN THE MEASUREMENT OF CONGRUENCE: THE CASE OF MET EXPECTATIONS RESEARCH

Despite meta-analytic support for the met expectations hypothesis, Irving and Meyer (1994, 1995) suggested that methodological problems such as the use of difference scores and retrospective measures of met expectations have resulted in an overstatement of this support. In a recent article, Hom, Griffeth, Palich, and Bracker (1998) simultaneously tested several potential psychological mediating mechanisms of realistic job preview (RJP) effects. These authors suggested that met expectations is a critical mediating mechanism, having direct effects on job satisfaction and indirect effects on organizational commitment, withdrawal cognitions, and actual turnover through job satisfaction and other mediating mechanisms such as coping efficacy and perceived employer honesty. However, they used "residual gain scores" to measure met expectations. In this article, we demonstrate that the use of residual scores for the purposes of operationalizing met expectations creates the same problemsas does the use of difference scores a technique that has been widely criticized in the literature.     

Normative Images of Communication Media Mass and Interpersonal Channels in the New Media Environment

This study is an extension of earlier uses and gratifications research that identified normative images of mass media. The article considers how well 12 different mass and interpersonal communication channels fill 11 communication needs. A sample of 649 adults completed self-administered questionnaires, the responses of which were submitted to cluster analysis, which identified five channel clusters: Video, Interpersonal, Print, Computer, and Audio. In general, the Interpersonal cluster (conversation and telephone) was rated the most useful at filling various needs, with Computer rated the least useful. Consistent with previous research, clusters that were most useful at filling personal needs were rated highest in social presence. The discussion relates this study's findings to previous research and notes implications for research on the newer communication technologies.     

Should Communitarians be Nationalists?

ABSTRACT It is widely supposed by both its proponents and critics that communitarianism is committed to the defence of lies of nationhood: the nation forms a surviving communal attachment in a world in which the individual is otherwise denuded of ties of community. I argue in this paper that this assumption is mistaken. It depends on a romantic image of the nation which was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That image hides the recent historical origins of the nation and its foundation in the suppression of older allegiances or their later privatisation; it continues to disguise the illusory nature of the national community. The nation is not a surviving pre-modern community to which individuals are attached as a bulwark against the impersonality of public life in modern society. Rather the nation is one of the main vehicles for the construction of the modern unencumbered self. Communitarians need not be committed to the defence of the specifically modem forms of public irrationality and immorality that nationalism embodies.