Hi everyone,
I am working on developing a scale for measuring Collective Efficacy. My approach is rooted in the original works by Bandura, and I try to stick as close to his suggestions on constructing this scale as I can. Particularly, he mentions that the items should always include "can" or "able to" or "capable of" to indicate the ability element of the efficacy concept. Therefore, all the items are formulated as "I/we can ...". However, some of my pilot-testing respondents and I feel that "can" oftentimes has different semantic meanings, such as that of tendency. And sometimes the items sound really weird only because I try to stick to this "can" rule.
In other articles I've seen people using items that do not contain this "can" element in them, although the questions kind of imply this meaning.
From your experiences, is it okay to formulate some of the items without "can" providing that it is implied by the statements? I would appreciate it if you could share your thoughts on this!
Thank you!
I guess I need a definition of collective efficacy and for what. SE by dentition is behavior or domain specific.
Can is pretty central to the concept. We have had thousands of people answer these questions without any problem. The stem is usually "How certain (how sure) are you that you can...
If you give me an example of where this sounds funny, maybe I can help. Please feel free to write me privately.
Hi Dennis,
This is really interesting! However, from what I've read in Bandura's works, self-efficacy and collective efficacy are process-oriented and reflect your beliefs about your capabilities to produce a desired level of performance (or collective beliefs about group's capability to perform successfully at a certain task). Moreover, Bandura (eg, in this paper: https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/BanduraGuide2006.pdfexplicitly) claims that the semantic element of ability is extremely important and cannot be substituted for something else. This is why I had this question. How did you address this issue when constructing your scale? If "can" is so central to Bandura's theory, how did you justify the absence of this element in your scale?
Ira
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