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Gehlbach, Hunter

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Gehlbach, Hunter

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.23f86c59-ab41-4251-9896-af0cfeed5336

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 18
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    Developing questionnaires for educational research: AMEE Guide No. 87
    (Informa UK Ltd., 2014) Artino, Anthony R.; La Rochelle, Jeffrey S.; Dezee, Kent J.; Gehlbach, Hunter
    In this AMEE Guide, we consider the design and development of self-administered surveys, commonly called questionnaires. Questionnaires are widely employed in medical education research. Unfortunately, the processes used to develop such questionnaires vary in quality and lack consistent, rigorous standards. Consequently, the quality of the questionnaires used in medical education research is highly variable. To address this problem, this AMEE Guide presents a systematic, seven-step process for designing high-quality questionnaires, with particular emphasis on developing survey scales. These seven steps do not address all aspects of survey design, nor do they represent the only way to develop a high-quality questionnaire. Instead, these steps synthesize multiple survey design techniques and organize them into a cohesive process for questionnaire developers of all levels. Addressing each of these steps systematically will improve the probabilities that survey designers will accurately measure what they intend to measure.
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    How Changes in Students' Goal Orientations Relate to Outcomes in Social Studies
    (Informa UK (Taylor & Francis), 2006) Gehlbach, Hunter
    Do students tend to set similar types of goals throughout the school year, or do their goal orientations shift over time? If students become more oriented toward mastery or performance over the course of the year, do they improve in their academic achievement, have a more positive affect toward class, and develop the cognitive propensities that their teachers might hope for? A diverse sample of 9th- and 10th-grade world history students (N = 917) participated in a study addressing these questions. Substantial changes occurred in students' mastery- and performance-goal orientations. Increases in mastery-goal orientation were positively related, whereas increases in performance-goal orientation were unrelated to the following outcomes: world history knowledge, social studies grade, interest, course satisfaction, social perspective taking, and historical empathy.
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    Using the Theory of Satisficing to Evaluate the Quality of Survey Data
    (Springer-Verlag, 2012) Barge, Scott; Gehlbach, Hunter
    Increasingly colleges and universities use survey results to make decisions, inform research, and shape public opinion. Given the large number of surveys distributed on campuses, can researchers reasonably expect that busy respondents will diligently answer each and every question? Less serious respondents may 'satisfice,' i.e., take short-cuts to conserve effort, in a number of ways-choosing the same response every time, skipping items, rushing through the instrument, or quitting early. In this paper we apply this satisficing framework to demonstrate analytic options for assessing respondents' conscientiousness in giving high fidelity survey answers. Specifically, we operationalize satisficing as a series of measurable behaviors and compute a satisficing index for each survey respondent. Using data from two surveys administered in university contexts, we find that the majority of respondents engaged in satisficing behaviors, that single-item results can be significantly impacted by satisficing, and that scale reliabilities and correlations can be altered by satisficing behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of identifying satisficers in routine survey analysis in order to verify data quality prior to using results for decision-making, research, or public dissemination of findings
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    Teaching social perspective taking: how educators might learn from the Army
    (Informa UK (Taylor & Francis), 2012) Gehlbach, Hunter; Young, Lissa Virginia; Roan, Linda K.
    Frequently and accurately discerning others' thoughts and feelings is associated with multiple valued educational outcomes across an array of settings. Despite its foundational role in social interactions, it is unclear whether individuals can be taught to improve their social perspective taking capacities. This experiment assesses whether a curriculum taught to US Army personnel (N = 116) improved their social perspective taking prior to deployment. Results showed that participants improved their social perspective taking in three ways: through more accurately detecting biases in others, by generating more initial hypotheses to explain others' behaviors, and by adapting their hypotheses in the face of new evidence. The curriculum did not affect participants' perspective taking accuracy on a video measure. We discuss these findings with respect to their implications for other learning environments
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    A New Perspective on Perspective Taking: A Multidimensional Approach to Conceptualizing an Aptitude
    (Springer-Verlag, 2004) Gehlbach, Hunter
    Social perspective taking (SPT) is thought to be important in its own right and is often associated with other important skills, such as interpersonal conflict resolution. Thus, it is critical for researchers to systematically understand SPT and how it relates to other valued educational outcomes. In particular, a complete understanding of SPT might assist educational psychologists to apply this knowledge in school settings to improve the effectiveness of students’ social interactions. Previous research on SPT, however, has conceptualized it as a unidimensional construct leaving scholars with an insufficient understanding of this aptitude. To best understand SPT, a multidimensional approach should include assessments of personal characteristics (including the propensity and the ability to engage in SPT) and features of the situation (including features of the SPT task and the larger context). Using Snow’s conceptualization of aptitudes as a framework, this article illustrates the problems with treating SPT as a unidimensional construct, defines SPT as a complex aptitude, and provides a taxonomy to develop our understanding of SPT and to guide future research in this area. The taxonomy organizes and reviews the existing literature that relates personal and situational characteristics to SPT aptitude. Where research has not yet been conducted, this article hypothesizes how these characteristics will relate to SPT aptitude.
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    Increasing interest in social studies: Social perspective taking and self-efficacy in stimulating simulations
    (Elsevier, 2008) Gehlbach, Hunter; Brown, Scott W.; Ioannou, Andri; Boyer, Mark A.; Hudson, Natalie; Niv-Solomon, Anat; Maneggia, Donalyn; Janik, Laura
    This study examined the potential of simulations to bolster interest in middle school social studies classrooms. Using a pre-post design, we examined 305 middle school students (49% female) who participated in the web-based GlobalEd simulation. Unlike the motivation declines middle school students usually experience, participants in this simulation became more interested in social studies. We investigated four hypotheses as to why these increases may have occurred. We found no support for the possibility that, (a) students’ interest in a particular issue area or (b) their increased valuing of the subject matter, were related to their increased interest. However, results suggested that, (c) the challenging nature of the activity may have bolstered their interest in social studies and (d) students’ increased propensity to engage in social perspective taking. The discussion explores future research directions and whether implications for classroom teachers are warranted given the correlational nature of the research.
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    The Social Perspective Taking Process: What motivates individuals to take another’s perspective?
    (2012) Gehlbach, Hunter; Brinkworth, Maureen Elizabeth; Wang, Ming-Te
    Background/Context: A growing literature describes multiple benefits of social perspective taking – many of which are particularly important for schools. Despite these potential benefits for administrators, counselors, teachers, and students, little is known about social perspective taking as a process. Purpose/Research Question: If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process. Particularly important is the need to understand: What initially motivates individuals to take the perspective of others? Participants: To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study. Research Design: Participants completed a survey, a performance task, and in-depth interviews as part of this mixed-method, exploratory study. The interviews served as the primary source of data and were coded for evidence of what triggered (or inhibited) participants’ motivation to engage in the social perspective taking process. Findings: The interview data established the existence of at least thirteen specific factors that impacted participants’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking across a wide array of contexts. Seven factors generally enhanced individuals’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking; three factors were mixed; and three factors inhibited their motivation. Conclusions/Recommendations: This research indicates that not only might individuals be motivated to engage in social perspective taking through multiple pathways, but that these pathways might be combined and/or interact with one another. These motivating factors raise important issues for further research. In addition, at a practical level, they provide a foundation for developing structures to motivate individuals in schools to engage in perspective taking more often.
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    Measuring Parent Perceptions of School Climate
    (American Psychological Association, 2014) Schueler, Beth; Capotosto, Lauren; Bahena, Sofia; McIntyre, Joseph; Gehlbach, Hunter
    Parents' attitudes about their children’s schools matter. Their views can shape their children’s attitudes about school, affect their levels of family-school engagement, and influence their residential and school enrollment decisions. This paper describes the development of a survey scale to assess parent perceptions of the climate of their child’s school. Our comprehensive scale development process incorporated feedback from academics and potential respondents from the outset of the design process to enhance scale quality. We conducted three studies with national samples of parents (n = 385; n = 253; n = 266) to gather evidence of scale score reliability and valid score inferences based on convergent/discriminant validity. Through confirmatory factor analysis we identified a theoretically grounded factor structure that fit the data well. Interestingly, we found no evidence that parental response patterns distinguish between academic and social elements of school climate. Furthermore, we found that parents of younger children, on average, had a more positive perception of the school’s climate than parents of older children. We conclude by discussing how researchers and Pre-K – 12 schools and districts can use the scale to aid school improvement efforts.
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    Anchoring and Adjusting in Questionnaire Responses
    (Informa UK (Taylor & Francis), 2012) Gehlbach, Hunter; Barge, Scott
    When ordering items on attitude/opinion questionnaires, do survey designers bias respondents’ answers by the mere act of choosing to organize their survey in a particular way? We hypothesize that, under specific frequently-occurring conditions, respondents employ an anchoring and adjusting strategy in which their response to an initial survey item provides a cognitive anchor from which they (insufficiently) adjust in answering the subsequent item. Three experiments indicate that respondents anchor and insufficiently adjust in certain situations, anchoring and adjusting leads to higher inter-item correlations between adjacent items, and these inflated correlations can (spuriously) increase the reliability estimate of the scale that they comprise and affect the resultant correlations with other measures. These effects are not consistently accounted for by a “superior memory search” explanation. In organizing their surveys, researchers may wish to combat this bias by intermixing items designed for different, but related constructs.