Bifactor Engagement Measure: SIOP 2022 & 2023 Posters

Two conference posters on developing and validating a new employee engagement survey, built with R and posterdown.

Conferences: Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference, Seattle 2022 & Boston 2023 Collaborators: John Kulas, Morgan Russell, Renata Garcia Prieto Palacios Roji, Mike DeFabiis Code: heyimMIKE123/Engagement-Survey-Projects · Technical report

The idea

Researchers usually describe engagement in one of two ways: by substance (Vigor, Dedication, Absorption) or by attitude (what you Think, Feel, and Do). Instead of picking one, our team wrote items that measure both at once. Each item maps to one substantive and one attitudinal dimension, which gives broad coverage of the construct with a short survey.

SIOP 2023: Construct and criterion-related validation

• Gave the scale to a Qualtrics panel alongside two established engagement measures (UWES and Saks), an intent-to-quit scale, and two unrelated “discriminant” scales (pets, household activities)
• Screened out careless responders (excessive missing data, straight-lining, speeding), keeping 377 of 743 respondents
• Found strong convergent validity (r = .79 with Saks, .81 with UWES) and a meaningful negative link to intent to quit (r = −.39)

Download the 2023 poster (PDF)

SIOP 2022: Developing the measure

• Wrote 50 items, then kept the 36 that graduate students and faculty sorted most consistently
• Collected responses from 330 working adults through snowball sampling
• Reduced to 20 items using two parallel methods: corrected item-total correlations and CFA modification indices
• The bifactor model fit well: CFI = 0.92, RMSEA = 0.07; subscale alphas ranged from 0.69 to 0.86

View the 2022 poster as a web page

Tools

R: tidyverse, lavaan (CFA/bifactor models), semPlot, psych, DT, and posterdown for the posters themselves.