CATEGORY WIDTH COGNITIVE STYLE AS A FACTOR IN ACCOUNTANTS' PERCEPTIONS OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
This paper reports the findings of a laboratory experiment designed to investigate the relationship of category width (CW) cognitive style with accountants' perceptions of accounting information. Subjects drawn from large accounting firms in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, Australia, were classified into broad, medium, and narrow categories following the test devised by Pettigrew [19]. Subjects were requested to state their level of confidence in decisions they had made after receiving (1) conventional accounting information or (2) conventional accounting information and human resources accounting (HRA) information using a one-group pretest-posttest design. The results indicated a significant relationship between CW cognitive style and the accountants' confidence in their decisions. Furthermore, CW cognitive style moderated the accounting-information/decision-making relationship.
The function of subjective utility as an indicator of job satisfaction
El objetivo del trabajo ha sido la construccion de una serie de funciones de utilidad que permitan pronosticar el nivel de satisfaccion general que alcanzaran los sujetos que acceden a los programas de Escuelas Taller y Casas de Oficios, de formacion ocupacional, patrocinados por el Instituto Nacional de Empleo (INEM). Para ello, se ha utilizado una muestra de sujetos de la provincia de Cadiz, que habian accedido a este tipo de programas, y se les aplico el cuestionario MPS de Fernandez Seara (1987), en su version original y en una version abreviada, y se les pidio que emitieran un juicio, en una escala del 1-10, acerca del nivel de satisfaccion (NSG) alcanzado. Con los datos obtenidos se construyeron las distintas funciones de utilidad.
Reading research critically: assessing the validity and reliability of research instrumentation--Part 2.
Accurate measurement of research variables is necessary so that research consumers can trust that it is the research intervention that affected the change in the outcome variable, not some extraneous error component. Reliability is the accuracy with which the research instruments measure the variable that they are designed to measure. A number of known threats to instrument reliability should be anticipated by the researcher and looked for the consumer. These threats are presented in this article.