Collection 2004

NEVOIA DE STIMULARE COGNITIVA SI DELIMITARI CONCEPTUALE SI CONSIDERATII PRIVIND EVALUAREA

Written by Petru Lucian CURȘEU on . Posted in Volume VIII, Nr. 2

ABSTRACT

Need for cognition refers to the individual's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein & Jarvis, 1996). The most widespread scale for assessing the need for cognition is the NFC scale (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Presently this scale has different versions and has been used in a wide variety of studies ranging from individual differences to psychopathology and personnel selection. The aim of this study is to investigate the psychometric properties of the 34 items version scale on a Romanian sample. A factor analysis was performed on a large and heterogeneous sample (N=980) and the results seem to replicate the factor structure reported by previous studies. The factor analysis revealed one dominant factor accounting for 20% of the variance and 32 of the 34 items have significant factor loadings with respect to this main factor. The scale proved to have an adequate internal consistency αCronbach = 0,85 and time stability rtest-retest = 0,81. NFC scores discriminate well between people having jobs with low cognitive task involvement and people having jobs with high cognitive task involvement. Also, NFC scale has moderate and negative correlation with the sensitivity to decision-making biases and indecisiveness and a moderate and positive correlation with the cognitive task involvement. Finally, we propose a NFC etalon for the Romanian population resulting from the analysis of the data gathered from a 980 respondents sample.

KEYWORDS: need for cognition, evaluation