Definition of Quantitatives Methods

The Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) developed by McCormick, Jeanneret, and Mecham (1972) is a structured job analysis instrument to measure job characteristics and relate them to human characteristics. It consists of 195 job elements that represent in a comprehensive manner the domain of human behavior involved in work activities. The items that fall into five categories:

Information input (where and how the worker gets information),

Mental processes (reasoning and other processes that workers use),

Work output (physical activities and tools used on the job),

Relationships with other persons, and

Job context (the physical and social contexts of work).

Over the course of many studies, PAQ researchers have aggregated PAQ data for hundreds of jobs; that database is maintained by Purdue University. A wealth of research exists on the PAQ; it has yielded reasonably good reliability estimates and has been linked to several assessment tools.

Functional Job Analysis (FJA) is a task-based technique developed by Sidney Fine and colleagues in 1944. In this method, work elements are scored in terms of relatedness to data (0-6), people (0-8), and things (0-6), with lower scores representing greater complexity.