The Responsibility Scale.

As individuals mature, they show increasing responsibility for events in their lives, but with variation in this form of maturation from one individual to another. These individual differences can be observed in doctoral candidates' activities associated with completion of the doctoral dissertation. The purpose of this study was to assess doctoral candidates' concepts of responsibility associated with dissertation completion, questioning who is perceived as responsible for different dissertation tasks and whether the student or the university should be responsible for these tasks. The developed scale, which uses a semantic differential format, was completed by 142 graduates and 97 nongraduates in a college of education. A factor analysis of the scale indicated two factors, a conclusion supported by a Rasch analysis. Some differences in attributed responsibility were noted between graduates and nongraduates with the nongraduates rating responsibility for tasks higher for university effort than student effort. A two-group discriminant analysis predicted a group membership of 78% of the subjects. The scale is useful for assessing attitudes of doctoral candidates in a college of education toward responsibility for dissertation tasks and for planning student advising based on these attitudes. An appendix contains the responsibility scale. (Contains 4 figures, 7 tables, and 11 references.) (Author/SLD)