Development of a perceived personal power inventory for undergraduate university women

• Main Author: Bushnell, Bobette
• Other Authors: Courtney, E. Wayne
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Self-perception in women > Measurement; Control (Psychology) > Measurement; Women college students > Oregon > Corvallis > Psychology; Rhetoric and psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1957/36810

Communication cannot be successful without the cooperative listening response of an auditor. Auditors must feel empowered to act as agents of change or their decisions and actions cannot be influenced by the discourse. Their every response depends upon their ability to perceive themselves as potential mediators of change. A review of the literature supports the notion that women auditors are affected by biological, social, historical, and psychological forces which serve to inform their ability to perceive themselves as agents of change. In many instances, their lack of perceived personal power is apparent. The purpose of this study was to construct and analyze an instrument developed for the purpose of measuring perceived personal power. The instrument was designed and validated through a Delphi process. The questionnaire contained thirty-six (36) items, with a four-point Likert type scale used to indicate the respondent's attitude. Questions were completed by 300 randomly selected female students at Oregon State University. The mean age of the respondents was twenty years, 34 percent were married and the mean years of university classwork completed was 2.4 years. The Hoyt-Stunkard method was used to assess reliability. The computed reliability coefficient was 0.948. An R-mode factor analysis was utilized by clustering items--acting as a tool for determining construct validity through the extraction of common factor variances, showing the highly correlated items which share variance. Five factors were extracted through use of a varimax rotation of the factor matrix loadings. Thirty-five (35) of the thirty-six (36) instrument items were clustered on one of the five factors. Based on the results, it is reasonable to believe that the Perceived Personal Power Inventory developed for this study is reliable and valid when used with the population from which the population was drawn. === Graduation date: 1993