The Effects of Context on Attitude Measurement: The Case of Job Satisfaction

Abstract

With data collected from nonmanagerial employees of four companies during the recession of 1975, this paper attempts to utilize the unemployment context as a contextual variable in explaining individual job satisfaction. It was expected that area unemployment rate would affect job satisfaction less strongly than would a more subjective measure of context perceived by each respondent. It was also expected that when no referents were provided the respondent in evaluating job satisfaction, this evaluation would be affected by local employment conditions. Our findings show that while unemployment rate has no direct relationship with job satisfaction, when used as a measure of context it influences the ability to predict job satisfaction. When the rate is high, variables that have usually been found to be good predictors predict less well or not at all. The perceived context measure was not as good a predictor as we had expected. Finally, the more global measure of the dependent variable, general job satisfaction, is more easily influenced by climate factors than the measure of comparative job satisfaction.