DEFINICIÓN DE LOS COMPONENTES DE LA MODERNIZACIÓN DE LA

This section of the chapter will outline the methods used in the data collection beginning with the participant selection before moving to questionnaire development and the pre-test of the questionnaire.

5.4.1.

The Sample

Chapter 3 set the context for this research: business academics within the Higher Education sector in Australia. Much of the engagement literature has ignored academics as a sample group, with the exception of Barkhuizen and Rothmann (2006) who studied work engagement in a Southern African university. There is a clear gap in the literature in this sector on engagement. This research approached the investigation of business academics as a sector-wide analysis of all permanent business academics within the 37 publicly funded Australian universities.

There are a number of reasons to justify the selection of business academics as opposed to other disciplines within this sector. Typically within most universities in Australia business academics make up the bulk of the academics and students. This group would be quite distinct from other disciplines for this reason. One limitation of studying this group as part of a PhD is the necessary time constraints and as such this research needed to be limited in its scope. For instance, the study sought to use a sector wide approach of an entire discipline, rather than a limited coverage over all the disciplines. Whilst this poses a limitation to this study, future research may want to explore other disciplines as a comparison.

The participants recruited for the pre-test of the questionnaire, were academics in the Faculty of Business and Law at Victoria University. This was a convenience sample as information was easily accessible. Nevertheless, this is a valid data source for preliminary information (Cavana, Delahaye & Sekaran 2001). A list of business academics from Victoria University was compiled from the University’s internet site (N=175). Following University Ethics approval, each academic was sent an introductory letter and a questionnaire via the internal mail. The questionnaires were sent during September 2007 and a follow up email was sent at the end of September. 175 questionnaires were posted out with 46 usable returns, a response rate of 26%. Five follow up interviews were conducted which helped to clarify some of the inconsistent findings as the questionnaire had asked participants to consider volunteering for follow up interviews. This is considered an appropriate strategy for the recruitment of interviewees. The interviewees consisted of one academic from each of the lecturer classification levels (A-E) from a variety of schools within the faculty. Further discussion of the pre-test is provided in section 5.4.3.

After consideration of the findings from the pre-test the final questionnaire was mailed out to the full sample (November 2007) which consisted of business academics from 36 of the 37 publicly funded universities. The researcher compiled a database of the details of the academics from each of the corresponding business faculties from the 36 university websites. This database approach was used by Bellamy, Morley and Watts (2003) to survey Australian business academics. As there was no known database other than that composed by Bellamy et al. (2003), the researcher in this instance developed a new, more current database. A total of 4454 questionnaires were posted out from which 704 (16%) questionnaires were returned and of these 664 were deemed usable responses. A usable response rate of 15% was achieved. The response rate is relatively low however, considering the questionnaire was sent to the entire population of business academics from Australia’s 37 publicly funded universities, the responses provide a good sample of the entire population. For this reason it was not considered necessary to follow up on the questionnaire given that the entire population was sent the questionnaire. A sample size of 664 is considered to be large which allows for the use of a calibration/validation split sample which will be discussed in section 5.6.4.

Following the guidelines of the Victoria University Ethics Committee the questionnaires are now stored in a secure location. All research log books and information from the preparation of the research are stored with the questionnaires and these are accessible on request.

5.4.2.

Questionnaire Development

The measures that formed the questionnaire were detailed in section 5.2. The questionnaire was designed with four distinct sections comprising demographic questions and a section representing each of engagement dimensions. Under each of the engagement dimensions the associated measures as described in the conceptual framework in Chapter 4 were presented. The questionnaire items that refereed to ‘organisation’ were altered to reflect the university and worker was changed to academic. The full questionnaire is presented in Appendix A1.

The questionnaire met the design elements proposed by Babbie (2005) and Cavana et al. (2001), for an effective questionnaire design:

¾ Introductory comments.

¾ Basic Instructions – questions that can be answered with minimal effort and time. ¾ Organised logically and neatly – created in logical sections and the questioning

flows.

¾ An introduction to each of the different sections. ¾ Question alignment is neat, logical and consistent.

The participants were provided with a cover sheet introducing the research, the questionnaire and a return envelope. They were given space on the questionnaire to provide comments if they required. The participants were assured of the confidentiality and anonymity in the write up of this study. The participants were supplied with the contact details of the researchers so that if they needed clarification, assistance or questions they could directly contact the researchers. Furthermore, as per requirements of the Victoria University Ethics Committee, the committee details were also provided.

5.4.3.

Pre-Test of Questionnaire

As discussed above, upon approval from the Victoria University Ethics Committee, the questionnaires were sent via internal mail to all academics within the Faculty of Business and Law at Victoria University (N=175). Pre-test participant details were provided in section 5.4.1. The data was analysed for reliability using SPSS. Even though the measures were pre- established, the changing climate in higher education, and the limited testing of some of the measures within this context (for example, disengagement and exhaustion) it was deemed necessary to reinforce the appropriateness of the measures for this sample. The goodness of the data was considered with the use of frequency analysis, the reliability of the measures was calculated and the Pearson’s correlation matrix was calculated to ensure that the correlations between the measures were at appropriate levels (Cavana et al. 2001). The reliability coefficients of the measures ranged between 0.7-0.9 which are within acceptable levels (Cronbach 1951) except for the measures psychological safety (0.57), dedication (0.33), absorption (0.48) and intention to quit (0.6). The poor reliabilities for these measures may be due to random error caused from a small sample size (N=46) or from the small number of items per scale. After the pre-test no additional changes were made to the final questionnaire. The next section will identify the key limitations with the methods adopted for this study.