Managing the unexpected: A case study

The measurement of the attitude of individuals about the concepts involved in mindfulness was carried out through nine scales proposed by Weick and Sutcliffe (2001, 2007), each one of which being constituted by a different number of items, ranging from seven to twelve items. Seven scales out nine contained ordered response categories such as “1 = not at all”, “2 = to some extent”, “3 = a great deal”. The two remaining scales (the 3rd and the 6th) had a binary set of options as response categories: “agree” or “disagree”. The questionnaire containing the nine scales was administered to four establishments of a selected firm, with 103 respondents. The evaluation of each score for each section, classified in three categories (Low, Median, and Optimal), followed different criteria: location with respect to the corresponding thresholds, and the concentration and dispersion of scores in the optimal category. The evaluation of the performance of each scale was carried out considering: its internal consistency through the Cronbach’s alpha, the distribution of the scores in response categories with respect to the direction of the scale, semantic analysis of items to ascertain coherence with the polarity of the scale. The data analysis revealed some critical items in various sections and suggested further studies and applications to ascertain their foundation, stability, and robustness. Another observation concerned a different set of options for the items: a self-anchoring Likert scale for the sections S1, S2, S4, S5, and S7-S9 (e.g.: «1=not at all, 2, 3, 4, 5=a great deal»), a classical Likert scale for sections S3 and S6 (2=totally disagree, 1=disagree, 0=neutral, +1=agree, +2=totally agree).