Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1983

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Communication

Major Professor

Kelly Leiter

Committee Members

Paul Ashdown, James Crook

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a relatively new adjective check list and preference ranking to evaluate organizational image and logos. Because such an evaluation can be an expensive process and because many potential methods have only been partially discussed or not discussed at all in the literature, a simple evaluation method was proposed for use by practitioners with limited funds or knowledge of image or logo-perception measurement.

The Trait Ascription Questionnaire (TAQ), a list of 120 adjectives (with seven adjective phrases added), was used in a pretest mail survey to measure the perceptions of 10 logos and an organization's image. A random sample of 100 State Technical Institute at Knoxville mailing list members made up the first sample. Another sample of 420 members was later surveyed by mail on its perceptions of only four of the originally-tested logos and the school's image. Individual respondents checked all of the 127 adjectives which they thought described each logo and their perceptions of the school's image. They also ranked the logos in the order of their individual preferences for each one.

After analysis of the returned data, three null hypotheses for the survey were rejected with a confidence level of at least 95%.

First, a chi-square test of all adjectives checked for each test logo and the school's image rejected the null hypothesis that there are no relationships between organizational image nor logos and the adjectives used to describe them. Eighty-one of the 127 adjectives tested were found to be significant for describing specific logos or the school's image. The probability of significance for most was .0001.

Second, an analysis of variance test performed on responses to 25 choice adjectives chosen in advance by school administrators and faculty members showed that for those 25 adjectives, both the school's image and one logo were significantly different from the other logos. These findings rejected the null hypothesis that there are no differences among logos nor between a logo and an organization's image. The probability of significance for all differences was .0001.

Finally, a ranking of the preference given for each logo rejected the null hypothesis that there is no preference among respondents for one logo over another. One logo was found to be preferred by more respondents than any other.

The high probability of the significance of the findings for the test group (P = .05 or better) would suggest that use of the TAQ and preference ranking would prove successful in measuring the perceptions of logos and images in future research. The small return rate (28%) and the inability of the researcher to find statistical differences among many demographic groups of the sample prevented extension of the findings of this survey to the whole population, however. Consequently, even though the method used performed exceedingly well to measure the significance of the findings, they could not used to predict the perceptions of the State Tech population as a whole.

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