Why do we Attend Refresher Courses? - A Case Study of Preference Data Analysis

Abstract

Abtsrcat

Participants of a refresher course sponsored by the University Grants Commission (UGC) of India were asked to rank six possible reasons for attending the course. They were later also asked to rate the reasons on a five point preference scale. In this paper, our objective is to characterise and quantify the preference for these six reasons. Standard methods for the analysis of contingency tables are not appropriate for ranked preference data so we develop a variant of the y measure of association for ordinal data to examine excess preference in pairwise comparisons. The bootstrap is used to derive p-values and condence intervals for the proposed statistic. Finally, we fit a Bradley-Terry regression model to the rankings and estimate the preference for each reason in terms of ‘worth’ parameters. We repeat this analysis on the ratings data and estimate the worth parameters as functions of covariates. The model is further extended to include dependencies between the ratings. Salient results indicate that career advancement has the highest preference across all covariate classes while the preference for service to society is by far the lowest. However, the magnitude of the preferences is influenced by the number of years for which a participant has taught and whether or not he holds a doctoral degree. There are some differences in conclusions from the analysis of the ratings and rankings datasets.