Professionalization in Higher Adult Education Administration

Abstract

Ninety-three higher adult education chief administrators served as subjects in this study which was designed to test whether or not there was evidence of increased professionalization between 1957 and 1967. Utilizing Hall's Professionalization Scales and some background scales to measure attitudinal and structural attributes of professionalization, an analysis of variance technique and a chi square analysis were used to determine the difference between the extent of professionalization of three cohorts of Ss. Findings revealed no significant change over time between the three cohorts at the .05 significance level. The average scores in this study were higher than those reported in previous studies using the Professionalization Scales with other occupations. These unexpected findings were viewed as attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the field of higher adult education during the past decade which mitigated against further professionalization of the occupation. Using a supplementary questionnaire, addi tional comparsions were made between 93 respondents and a sample of the 143 non-respondents to the initial questionnaire. The differences were not significant.

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