Constructing and Validating Students' Psychological Contract Violation Scale.

Yariv Itzkovich

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685468

Abstract

For two and a half decades, psychological contracts are researched mainly in work organisations as drivers of the attitudes and behaviours of employees, overlooking the importance of understanding the nature of the psychological contracts of students in higher education. This study constructs and validates a new scale for measuring the perceived psychological contract violations of students in the context of faculty incivility. A mixed-method approach was applied to study the issue in three phases. First, a qualitative method was used to capture and analyse the perceived entitlements of students, as described by 78 college students, resulting in 37 items or elements identified by students as reflecting their psychological contracts. Second, a sample of 244 students was studied to identify the perceptions of violated expectations of students. In the final phase, items were rephrased as expectations and were given to the third sample of 154 undergraduate college students to determine the level of fulfilment of these expectations. Additionally, to ascertain discriminate and convergent validity measures, students were asked about the extent to which they experienced faculty incivility (discriminant validity) and frustration with the quality of interaction with their faculty (convergent validity). From these results, students’ psychological contract violation scale was constructed and validated.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 25 March 2021 Accepted: 14 June 2021 Published: 22 July 2021Citation: Itzkovich Y (2021) Constructing and Validating Students’ Psychological Contract Violation Scale
Experts in the research area of higher education learning environments and interrelations between individuals in academic and work contexts, analysed the answers given by students as short paragraphs independently
The scale measures four dimensions of expectations: (1) fairness — the expectation that faculty will treat students fairly; (2) teaching — the expectation that faculty will use adaptive teaching practices and a variety of teaching methods; (3) knowledge — the expectation that faculty will be knowledgeable; and (4) deviant expectations — which refer to the assumption that faculty will help students get higher grades despite their lack of effort or prior knowledge

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 25 March 2021 Accepted: 14 June 2021 Published: 22 July 2021. Sub-populations of students that have been examined include master’s and Ph.D. students (Bordia et al, 2010); international students (Bordia et al, 2019); pharmacy students (Spies et al, 2010); student-athletes (Barnhill and Turner, 2015); and student volunteers (Haski-Leventhal et al, 2020) Some of these studies were qualitative (Koskina, 2013; Haski-Leventhal et al, 2020), and some used specific quantitative measures to Students’ Psychological Contract Violation Scale capture the uniqueness of a target population, including the expectations of students learning online (Dziuban et al, 2015)

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Conclusion