Scaling the information processing demands of occupations

Individual Differences in Capacity for Tolerating Information Overload Are Related to Differences in Culture and Temperament

“…Internal consistency reliabilities for the subscales and the total score have been estimated in independent data sets 8 with sample sizes ranging from 79 to 686 (Fernandes, 2013; Haase et al, 2008; Haase et al, 2011). Across these data sets, internal consistency reliabilities estimated by Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .76 to .82 for the 25-item total score, and from .39 to .74 for the 5-item subscales.…”

“…In recent years, our research group has been focused on the task of identifying and studying the stimulus and information processing demand characteristics that may exist in a wide variety of occupations (Haase, Ferreira, Santos, Aguayo, & Fallon, 2008; Haase et al, 2011). The purpose of this work has been to quantify the extent to which occupations inherently exert these demand characteristics and how occupations differ in the stimulus and information processing demands they place on their occupants.…”

“…When asked to provide magnitude estimates as to the strength of each of these demands across many occupations, respondents from both Portugal and the United States were able to reliably quantify profile differences between occupations within each of the five demand characteristics. The details of these cross-cultural studies of the magnitude estimation scaling of these demand characteristics across occupations and occupation types are given in Haase et al (2008, 2011).…”

“…The dimensions are parallel concepts to those that quantify the demand characteristics of occupational environments; each of the subscales documents the individual’s capacity for tolerating stimulus conditions from (a) impersonal information load, (b) interpersonal load, (c) change load; (d) activity structure, and (e) time structure. In so far as our recent work has shown cross-cultural differences in perceptions of occupations as perceived by Portuguese and American respondents, we are interested in testing some further hypotheses about the potential origin of any differences observed between these two cultures in their self-reported capacity for tolerating the same sources of information overload that have already been quantified across occupations (see Haase et al, 2008, 2011, for a review of these findings). We suspect that certain aspects of temperament and personality may be implicated in explaining any observed differences between Portuguese and American responses to coping with information and stimulus overloaded situations.…”

Development and Validation of a Revised Measure of Individual Capacities for Tolerating Information Overload in Occupational Settings

“…Now that we have established confidence in the psychometric characteristics of the EPI, our ultimate goal is to match the profiles of the self-assessed capacity for tolerating information processing loads of an individual with the profile of each of these 42 occupations in terms of their demand characteristics on the same five dimensions-in essence, a person-environment (P-E) fit approach to matching individual capacities with the demand characteristics of RIASEC occupations. The magnitude estimation scaled values of the 42 occupations across these five information dimensions can be found in Haase et al (2011).…”