Checking for Relationships across Domains Measured by Triads and Paired Comparisons

Abstract

The authors discuss an extension of the use of the triads test for judged similarity among various roles to measure union consciousness and paired comparisons techniques to assess the relative importance of structural versus personal characteristics for negotiating good contracts, the nature of obligations between stewards and staff, and tasks that stewards find most important to them. The authors show how they moved from the mapping of cognitive domains to testing for relationships among different domains to measure the strength of competing models of union organization in the stewards and staff of a single union. The authors suggest that the detection of patterns across domains can strengthen or question findings from each separate domain. They developed this method when an officer of one of the unions with whom they worked challenged an interpretation based on a single triads test.