Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Major

Education

Major Professor

Walter A. Cameron

Committee Members

Gerald Cheek, John Lounsbury, John Mattews

Abstract

The increased awareness of the importance of a well-trained workforce to America's continued economic development has done little to improve the knowledge base and status of skills training initiatives for the nation's front-line, blue-collar workers. This research was conducted to: (a) develop an original survey instrument to assess blue-collar worker attitudinal favorability toward job skills training; (b) identify and describe the primary factor(s) underlying the scale items of the instrument; (c) assess the instrument's usefulness as a relative indicator of how favorably blue-collar workers view job skills training; and (d) identify and determine the magnitude of relationships that existed between identified factors, demographic variables, and special groups of scale variables.

Both the pilot and final phases of the study used probability-based cluster sampling procedures. Study participants were 246 hourly, blue-collar workers (76 in the pilot phase, 170 in the final phase) representing a variety of occupations from (a) an electrical materials manufacturing plant, (b) a property maintenance department of a public utility, and (c) a vegetable and pet food cannery. Basic descriptive statistics, principal components analysis, reliability assessment tools, correlational analysis, and various parametric and nonparametric tests were used to analyze the survey data.

Results identified three primary factors as being representative of respondent attitudes toward skills training: Job Satisfaction, Personal Outcomes, and Personal Advancement. Other findings included (a) moderate levels of reliability for the entire survey instrument and for the first factor (Job Satisfaction), (b) significant gender iii differences across several demographic and special scale variables, and (c) significant correlations between selected demographic variables and both the special scale variables and the primary factors underlying the scale items.

It was concluded that (a) respondents with more positive attitudes toward skills training reported more recent involvement in skills training activities, (b) older respondents with greater job tenure generally possessed the fewest marketable job skills, and (c) workers with less formal education had fewer certifiable job skills and had gone for longer periods of time without formal skills training. Other conclusions and implications are discussed.

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