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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Res. Metr. Anal.
Sec. Research Assessment
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frma.2025.1516726
This article is part of the Research Topic Evaluating Supervision and Research Leadership in Promoting Responsible Research View all articles
Climate of Accountability, Respect, and Ethics Survey (CARES): Development and Validation of an Organizational Climate Survey
Provisionally accepted- 1 Other, Saint Paul, MN, United States
- 2 Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Texas, United States
- 3 University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States
- 4 University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
- 5 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States
Background This research describes the development and validation of the CARES Climate Survey, a 22-item measure designed to assess interpersonal dimensions of work-unit climates. Dimensions of work-unit climates are identified through work-unit member perceptions and include civility, interpersonal accountability, conflict resolution, and institutional harassment responsiveness.Methods Two samples (N=1384; N=868) of academic researchers, including one from the North American membership of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and one from a large research-intensive university, responded to the CARES and additional measures via an online survey.We demonstrate content validity of the CARES measure and confirm structural validity through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses which yielded four dimensions of interpersonal climate, and. In addition, we find evidence forconfirm the CARES internal consistency, and convergent and discriminantreliability, construct validity of the CARES, and excellent sub-group invariance.The CARES is a brief, psychometrically sound instrument that can be used by researchers, institutional leaders, and other practitioners to assess interpersonal climates in organizational work-units.Originality/Value This is the first study to develop and validate such a measure of interpersonal climates specifically in research-intensive organizations, using rigorous psychometric methods, grounded in both theory and prior research on work-unit climates.
Keywords: Organizational climate, workplace civility, harassment, accountability, Psychometrics, scale development
Received: 24 Oct 2024; Accepted: 10 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Martinson, Smallfield, Magley, Thrush and Gunsalus. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Brian C. Martinson, Other, Saint Paul, MN, United States
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