Crafting an Online Instrument to Conduct Research on Workplace Bullying

Abstract

Instrument design is a powerful research approach to answer questions on a unique research topic. If the design was crafted to gather demographic information, and included open-ended remarks from respondents, the instrument could gather data that could be used in primary and secondary analyses on the same topic. Further, the quantitative data could establish independent and dependent variables for statistical tests, while the open-ended questions could garner qualitative data. This researcher created a 35-question instrument on workplace bullying for American higher education and conducted a study on 142 American community colleges. The findings revealed that 64% of respondents endured workplace bullying (Hollis, 2016). This data set supported several book chapters that included descriptive statistics, chi-square analysis, and qualitative data from the respondents. Further, by using the demographic data, the researcher was able to conduct a variety of analyses regarding workplace bullying and the association in community colleges involving race, gender, and sexual orientation. This practical essay will discuss insight to instrument development including a reflection on the literature review that informed the instrument design

Keywords

• Workplace bullying, instrument design, qualitative data

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