How to Measure Professionalism
- 1). Establish factors that define professionalism. The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education lists six factors that describe professionalism. These factors include; honor/integrity, excellence, accountability, respect for others, duty and altruism.
- 2). Choose a sample group for a survey. You'll need to target a specific group of people to determine professionalism. If you're trying to gauge the professional level for one person, such as a prospective employee, then design a survey for one person. If you're measuring the level of a company's professionalism, use a survey to ask customers about their perception of the company's professionalism.
- 3). Create a survey using the Likert scale. Likert scales require survey participants to use scales to rate attributes such as agreement, frequency, importance, quality and likelihood. For example, a survey may ask, "How important is duty?", with the possible answers of: "very important, important, somewhat important, unimportant, or very unimportant." To measure frequency, the survey might ask, "How often do our customer service representatives treat you with respect?", with potential answers of: "always, frequently, occasionally, rarely or never."
- 4). Administer the survey. Give the survey to the person or people who you've decided to research. Plan the best time and place to carry out your data collection. Plan for how long you think the survey will take and make appropriate accommodations.
- 5). Calculate results. Likert scales assign numerical value to each response. So, to use the earlier example of measuring frequency, an answer of, "Always" would be a four points, "Frequently",would be a three, all the way down to "Never", which would be zero.
- 6). Analyze results. Use the total numbers to determine how professional people are, or how professional a company appears. You can compare the numbers from one person to another or compare total scores to industry standards.
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