Over the past two decades the different aspects of interpersonal mistreatment have been operationalised through researchers' definitions and treated as discrete constructs in distinct spheres of life; such as workplace harassment, sexual harassment, bullying, and incivility. These constructs have been researched primarily using self-report surveys such as the Negative Acts Questionnaire and the Interpersonal Conflict at Work Scale, and subsequently analysed using quantitative methods. This approach has articulated a range of interpersonal mistreatment constructs, and multiple survey tools have been used to operationalise these concepts.
Recently such an approach has also been criticised for construct proliferation and methodological short comings. Tepper and Henle (2011) argue that the way interpersonal mistreatment has been operationalised and analysed through self-report surveys may have missed important aspects of the constructs. Additionally, researchers have noted there can be marked differences in the respondents' reported experiences of interpersonal mistreatment and researchers' reported prevalence rates. However triangulation of the research findings using qualitative data has, in the main, been rare.
My research is an inquiry into the discrepancy between researcher and respondents' attribution of meaning by utilising online survey technology to ask respondents directly about the meaning they give to their reported behavioural experiences of interpersonal mistreatment.
Respondents will be presented with a list of behaviours drawn from the prior interpersonal mistreatment research. Based on these data, the survey tool will present respondents with one of four different summary statements. The purpose of the statement is to draw a reflective qualitative response from respondents about how they understand the experiences they have just brought to mind.
The researchers' definition of what constitutes an interpersonal mistreatment experience can be derived from the quantitative data, informed by the literature. The respondents' attribution of meaning about the behaviours they have experienced will be assessed independently through qualitative content coding. As the two perspectives describe the same data, the comparison of these assessments can articulate the different understandings between researchers and respondents. The outcomes of this research can provide a different perspective to the current debates on the operationalization of interpersonal misconduct constructs.