Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

4.7 Repeated Measures Variables: Social Sklls, Task Skills & Performance

Assume that in addition to examining interrelationships among the variables measured to identify employees with leadership potential, EZ execs also have asked you to develop a management training program to improve the leadership skills and performance of the employees in your study. Here also we will simplify and follow Blake and Mouton's (1980) suggestion that it is possible for all people to develop both social and task skills related to effective leadership. So the focus on your week-long training program is on improving employees' skills in both of these areas of leader behavior.

Since it is always important to assess the effectiveness of programs such as this implemented in an organization, you decide to rely on variables you have already measured to evaluate this management training program. Specifically, since both task and social skills are important in leadership, if your program is successful, we should see an increase in both sets of skills after participation in the program. Further, we would also expect to see increases in actual leader performance after the program.

Since you already obtained scores from employees on soc, task, and perform at the beginning of your study, you can assess your program's effectiveness by re-measuring employees on these variables after completing the workshop. The same scales and scoring procedures for these three variables will be used at the second measurement, but we will need to give these new scores different variable names. We will name them soc2, task2, and perform2 in the data file.

Another typical procedure in program evaluation is to obtain immediate and delayed assessments to see if any improvements are long-lasting. Thus, in addition to re-measuring soc, task, and perform immediately after participation, assume that you re-administer these scales three months later. Here also, we will need to give these new scores different variable names, which will be soc3, task3, and perform3.

Researchers refer to these as repeated measures variables, because we are obtaining more than one measurement of the same variable at three different times (e.g., perform1, perform2 and perform3). These types of variables must be treated differently than single-measurement variables when conducting statistical analyses,. We will explain this in greater detail in a later chapter.