Professionalism of News Workers - Grady College of Journalism and ...

Professionalism of News Workers: The Creation and Evolution of the Concept Page 4
institutionalists, i.e., committed to a career in a given institution, and some are specialists, committed to
a career in a profession, and some combine both of these commitments. Marvick used 16 items in an
effort to determine if these three groups of individuals showed “differences in value-emphases” that they
attached “to various factors important in a job.” As expected, specialists (professionals) rated a number
of characteristics of job, such as “opportunity to learn,” “full use of abilities,” and “working with new
ideas” more highly than did institutionalists. The latter, in contrast, rated “salary,” “being sure a job is
permanent,” and “being able to make important decisions” as more important than did the specialists.
McLeod and Hawley adapted the Marvick approach in developing their measure of professional
orientation. They identified 24 potential types of satisfaction that could be obtained from a job. None of
these were taken directly from Marvick, though several are similar. Half of these 24 types of satisfaction
were identified as “professional” items, and half were identified as “non-professional” in nature. For
example, satisfaction obtained from “having a job that is valuable and essential to the community” was
considered to be “professional” in nature, while satisfaction obtained from “being with people who are
congenial and easy to work with” was considered to be “non-professional.” Satisfaction resulting from
“having a job with a paper that is known and respected by journalists all over the United States” was
considered “professional.” Satisfaction obtained from having a “job that does not disrupt my family life”
was considered “non-professional.” These items are shown in Table 1.
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Table 1 about here
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The McLeod and Hawley items were to be introduced to respondents as follows: “People look
for different things in their occupations which make their work satisfying to them.” The respondents were
to indicate how important each potential source of satisfaction was to them in assessing a job. McLeod
and Hawley proposed summing responses to the 12 “professional” items and subtracting from this total
the sum of the responses to the 12 “non-professional” items to create a score on professional orientation
for each respondent.