Individual Differences in Cognitive Editing Standards

This study is aimed at understanding how people edit their own arguments prior to uttering them (Hample, 1984; Hample & Dallinger, 1985a, 1985b). The main categories of editorial criteria are effectiveness, principled objection to type of argument, person-centered issues, and discourse competence standards. Our main purpose here is to begin an account of what sort of person prefers which criteria. Argumentativeness (Infante & Rancer, 1982), verbal aggression (Infante & Wigley, 1986), interpersonal orientation (Swap & Rubin, 1983), and respondent gender are associated with use of editorial criteria. Results point to two different approaches to editing one's own arguments. The task orientation focuses on effectiveness, and is taken by males, and by people high in verbal aggressiveness and low in interpersonal orientation. The relational orientation is taken by females, and by people low in verbal aggressiveness and high in argument avoidance and interpersonal orientation. Justification for using multiple arguments to instantiate each type of argument, and for using multiple situations was also found.     

THE MEASUREMENT OF WORK: HIERACHICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE MULTIMETHOD JOB DESIGN QUESTIONNAIRE

To study the changing nature of work, researchers need measures of work that are valid and comprehensive. One potentially useful measure of work is the Multimethod Job Design Questionnaire (MJDQ; Campion, 1988), which was developed to assess 4 general approaches to work design (i.e., motivational, mechanistic, biological, perceptual-motor). Although the MJDQ holds promise as a general measure of work, little information is available regarding its psychometric properties. This study examines the MJDQ, using alternative hierarchical factor structures to represent work at varying levels of abstraction. Little support was found for the 4-factor structure corresponding to the work design approaches underling the MJDQ or for various hierarchical factor structures that simultaneously depicted general and specific aspects of work. However, a 10-factor first-order model received good support and may provide a useful basis for scoring and interpreting the MJDQ in future research.