TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring agency attributes with attitudes across time
T2 - A method and examples using large-scale federal surveys
AU - Bertelli, Anthony M.
AU - Mason, Dyana P.
AU - Connolly, Jennifer M.
AU - Gastwirth, David A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Previous versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, Washington, September 2011 and the Public Management Research Conference, Syracuse, New York, June 2011. We thank Dan Mazmanian, Shui Yan Tang, and the Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise for intellectual and financial support of this project. Preston Canter contributed substantially to earlier stages of the project. Rachel Finfer provided invaluable research assistance. We thank Klaus Brösamle, Scott Lamothe, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Thad Kousser, Pamela Clouser McCann, Nolan McCarty, Koen Verhoest, and seminar participants at the Hertie School of Governance, the University of Washington and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for helpful comments as well as Tim Johnson for assistance with the raw data. Upon publication, the measures in this article will be made available at http://agencydata.wordpress.com. Address correspondence to the author at bertelli@usc.edu.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/4/1
Y1 - 2015/4/1
N2 - Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response theory. Focusing our attention on US federal administrative agencies, we marshal a variety of questions from surveys commissioned by the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board and employ statistical models to measure three important attributes - autonomy, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation - for 71 agencies between 1998-2010. Our study provides a wealth of data for quantitative public management research designs as well as an adaptable framework for measuring a wide range of concepts.
AB - Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response theory. Focusing our attention on US federal administrative agencies, we marshal a variety of questions from surveys commissioned by the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board and employ statistical models to measure three important attributes - autonomy, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation - for 71 agencies between 1998-2010. Our study provides a wealth of data for quantitative public management research designs as well as an adaptable framework for measuring a wide range of concepts.
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U2 - 10.1093/jopart/mut040
DO - 10.1093/jopart/mut040
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84940823074
VL - 25
SP - 513
EP - 544
JO - Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
JF - Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
SN - 1053-1858
IS - 2
ER -