THE APPLICATION OF SOCIAL JUDGMENT THEORY TO A DESCRIPTION OF FACULTY EVALUATION IN TERMS OF ROLE BEHAVIOR

In applying social judgment theory to faculty evaluations, two underlying assumptions were made: (1) faculty evaluation requires complex judgments which, as natural phenomenon, are subject to analysis and (2) since evaluations are made on the basis of perceptions of desired behavior, a description of evaluation should also provide a description of role perception. On the basis of these assumptions, three questions were asked: (1) Can social judgment theory be used to construct a representative model of the judgment policies used in faculty evaluation? (2) What differences, if any, exist in the judgment policies among the faculty of a given college? (3) What relationship is there between individual judgment policies and variables known or suspected to influence role behavior? Representative judgment policies were derived for 101 teaching faculty and administrators from one community college using the official evaluation criteria of that college. The variation among those individual judgment policies was found to be extensive and tended to follow a normal distribution. No relationships were found between clusters of individuals having similar judgment policies and variables predicted to influence role perceptions. A slight relationship was found between the unclustered individual judgment policies and the same variables. The strongest of these relationships was with salary and faculty culture.