Abstract:
In Australia, we have plenty of empirical evidence that people want to have jobs, and want to work. This seems to go against journalism and certain''popular' opinion such as is expressed by writers like Conway ('Work is a four-letter word' and 'Land of the Long Weekend'). But we have the results from surveys carried out in populations or representative (often random) samples that refute this opinion. Examples of surveys are those carried out by Connell et al (1975), Hansen-Rubensohn-McCann- Erickson (1978), Williams et al (1980), Poole (1983), and surveys cited in Murdoch and Starford (1989). Perhaps Australians have a different view from residents of other countries about what work is, or about what work is for. Perhaps we differ from other countries in the satisfactions our workers seek to obtain from work in comparison with other activities in their lives. The international Work Importance Study (WIS), on data from which the present paper is based, was set up partly so that questions such as these could be researched with comparable instruments. WIS has been truly cross-national since its inception in 1979. Its main aims were to 1) clarify the constructs of work salience, such as job involvement and career commitment, 2) make these constructs operational through the development and validation of instruments sharing common content across participating countries, 3) produce internationally valid measures of work values and motivation, 4) investigate the relative importance of work and other major life roles both between groups within countries and across countries, and 5) investigate relationships between the constructs of work values, work motivation and work salience both nationally and cross-nationally. Australia's role in the cross-national instrument development and research is described by Lokan and Shears (1990, in press) in a forthcoming book about the international WIS. This role has included questionnaire development and conceptualising of research questions and strategies as well as data collection. We have been among the strongest of the 15 or so participating countries in data collection and analysis, however, through having the facilities of ACER avaliable to us. The extent of our data collection and related activities is summarised in Table 1. For the present paper I am looking again at data from Stages III and IV: Stage III because we have data on the same instruments (the Values Scale (VS) and Salience Inventory (SI)) from respondents at four levels (Years 10 and 12, tertiary, adult workers), and Stage IV because the samples were Australia-wide random ones of respectable size, thereby yielding reasonably accurate estimates of results for respondents at those levels (Years 9, 10 and 11). Another factor which contributes to the confidence with which one can regard the results is the reliability of the instruments themselves. The internal consistency reliability coefficients for the SI scales are uniformly high (around 0.9), while for the shorter VS scales they range from the mid 60s to the mid 80s, with most in the 70s. Results from Stage III of the WIS in Australia must be regarded as more tentative as those from Stage IV because of the smaller group sizes, although a correction for these has been applied to the multiple correlation results reported later.