In order to provide a figure to express the sampled group’s overall response to a given question a figure called ‘positivity’ was created. This expressed the strength with which the sampled group expressed their opinion in the direction hoped for by the course organisers. The figure being the average of the value generated by a function that translates ‘much better’, ‘a lot’ etc. into the number 2, ‘better’, ‘a little’ etc. into number 1, ‘the same’, ‘not at all’ etc. into 0, ‘worse’ etc. into -1 and ‘much worse’ etc. into -2.; the sense being switched in the case of questions 11, 22, and 29 where the hoped for answer was ‘much less’.
Thus, if all those who answered question 12 ‘Do you respect others more or less?’ had answered ‘much more’ then the ‘positivity’ rating would be 100%; if all had answered ‘more’ it would have been 50%; if all had answered ‘much less’ it would have been -100%; and if 50% of those who took part said ‘much more’ and 50% said ‘more’ it would be 75% and so on...
Positivity figures were calculated for each question as an overall average and within each sampled group.
The same translation function was used to create a figure for the ‘positivity’ of course participants individually, being the average of the function’s product in respect of all the questions answered by that individual. Again, this produced a value that could be (theoretically) in the range -100% to +100%.
The questions are divided into four categories
A figure for the average ‘positivity’ of an individual in each of these subject areas was calculated being the product of the above-described function averaged over the questions in the subject area.
For each of the question categories, graphs for each of the question categories of the percentage of course participants who expressed at least a given level of ‘positivity’ were created.
To produce a simple figure to express the ‘positivity’ of the group of participants towards the course as a whole and in the four question categories, the area under the curve from 0 to 100% ‘positivity’ was calculated.
This was expressed as a percentage of 100% of the participants expressing 100% ‘positivity’. This figure is known as the Positivity Factor
A further category of graphs and figures was created being the average of the positivities in the three developmental categories. This figure was denoted ‘developmental impact’.
This Developmental Impact index is intended to represent a simple measure of the effectiveness of a course.