RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

578 MULTIDIMENSIONAL MEASUREMENT
were held of specific social episodes. Participants
were required to rate the similarity between each
possible pairing of group members on a scale ranging
from ‘1 = extremely similar’ to ‘9 = extremely
dissimilar’. An individual differences multidimensional
scaling procedure (INDSCAL) produced an
optimal three-dimensional configuration of group
structure accounting for 68 per cent of the variance,
group members being differentiated along
the dimensions of sociability, creativity and competence.
Asemi-structuredprocedurerequiringparticipants
to list typical and characteristic interaction
situations was used to identify a number of social
episodes. These in turn were validated by participant
observation of the ongoing activities of the
department. The most commonly occurring social
episodes (those mentioned by nine or more members)
served as the stimuli in the second stage of
the study. Bipolar scales similar to those reported
by Forgas (1976) and elicited in like manner were
used to obtain group members’ judgements of social
episodes.
An interesting finding reported by Forgas
(1978) was that formal status differences exercised
no significant effect upon the perception of the
group by its members, the absence of differences
being attributed to the strength of the department’s
cohesiveness and intimacy. In Forgas’s analysis of
the group’s perceptions of social episodes, the
INDSCAL scaling procedure produced an optimal
four-dimensional solution accounting for 62 per
cent of the variance, group members perceiving
social episodes in terms of anxiety, involvement,
evaluation and social-emotional versus task
orientation. Box 25.14 illustrates how an average
group member would see the characteristics of
various social episodes in terms of the dimensions
by which the group commonly judged them.
Finally we outline a classificatory system
that has been developed to process materials
elicited in a rather structured form of account
gathering. Peevers and Secord’s (1973) study
of developmental changes in children’s use of
descriptive concepts of persons illustrates the
application of quantitative techniques to the
analysis of one form of account.
In individual interviews, children of varying
ages were asked to describe three friends and one
person whom they disliked, all four people being
of the same sex as the interviewee. Interviews were
tape-recorded and transcribed. A person-concept
coding system was developed, the categories of
which are illustrated in Box 25.15. Each persondescription
was divided into items, each item
consisting of one discrete piece of information.
Each item was then coded on each of four major
dimensions. Detailed coding procedures are set out
in Peevers and Secord (1973).
Tests of inter-judge agreement on descriptiveness,
personal involvement and evaluative consistency
in which two judges worked independently
on the interview transcripts of 21 boys and girls
aged between 5 and 16 years resulted in interjudge
agreement on those three dimensions of 87
per cent, 79 per cent and 97 per cent respectively.
Peevers and Secord (1973) also obtained
evidence of the degree to which the participants
themselves were consistent from one session to
another in their use of concepts to describe other
people. Children were reinterviewed between
one week and one month after the first
session on the pretext of problems with the
original recordings. Indices of test-retest reliability
were computed for each of the major coding
dimensions. Separate correlation coefficients (Eta)
were obtained for younger and older children
in respect of their descriptive concepts of liked
and disliked peers. Reliability coefficients are
as set out in Box 25.16. Secord and Peevers
(1974) conclude that their approach offers the
possibility of an exciting line of inquiry into
the depth of insight that individuals have into
the personalities of their acquaintances. Their
‘free commentary’ method is a modification of
the more structured interview, requiring the
interviewer to probe for explanations of why
a person behaves the way he or she does or
why a person is the kind of person he or she
is. Peevers and Secord (1973) found that older
children in their sample readily volunteered this
sort of information. Harré (1977b)observesthat
this approach could also be extended to elicit
commentary upon children’s friends and enemies