With these issues in mind, we tried to construct items of moderate difficulty. Psychometrically speaking, items of medium difficulty will provide maximum information on the distribution of knowledge of teamwork skills within each ALL country (Crocker and Algina, 1986). Items of medium difficulty were formulated by embedding the "best" alternative for each situational-judgment item ("best" in terms of U.S. research findings) among two alternatives that might reflect other cultures' expressions of team skills and one distracter that virtually no one would be expected to select. In addition, we plan to collect sufficient data during pre-feasibility and feasibility studies to determine each item's difficulty statistically. Item difficulty and other indicators of item performance will be used to select final items for the ALL teamwork measure.

4.4.3 Scoring

Several scoring procedures will be explored during feasibility testing. These range from a Thurstone-like scaling procedure (Anastasi, 1988) in which respondent ratings are compared to country-specific profiles generated for each ALL country to a dichotomous scoring procedure in which each situational judgment item is scored as right or wrong. Whether or not right versus wrong scoring is plausible will be determined by the extent to which rating profiles (i.e., respondent average ratings for the knowledge items) are similar across countries. The final scoring procedure for the team knowledge measure will be selected on the basis of these analyses and practical considerations associated with administration and scoring of ALL.

4.5 Attitudes toward teamwork

Team attitudes are defined as an internal state that influences a team member's choices or decisions to act in a particular way (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1995; Dick and Carey, 1990). Attitudes toward teamwork can have a significant effect on how teamwork skills are actually put into practice. Positive attitudes toward teamwork (Gregorich et al., 1990; Ruffell-Smith, 1979; Helmreich et al.,1986) and an attraction to being part of a team (i.e., collective orientation) have been found to enhance team process and team performance (Driskell and Salas, 1992; Eby and Dobbins, 1997). Therefore, each of these attitudes will be assessed as part of the ALL teamwork measure.

4.5.1 Measurement approach

Unlike the knowledge of teamwork skills, a significant body of work exists on the assessment of attitudes toward teamwork both in the US and internationally (see for example, Eby and Dobbins, 1997; Gregorich et al., 1990; Helmreich et al., 1986). The vast majority of this work, however, has focused on commercial pilot attitudes toward teamwork in the cockpit. Nonetheless, this research provides an excellent starting point for structuring our measurement approach.

A review of past attitude measures indicated that all employed some form of Likert scaling. A similar approach is proposed for ALL. Likert-type scales typically include a series of positive and negative statements about teamwork, and respondents endorse one of a series of graded response options (e.g., strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) for each item. Points are allocated to each response option (e.g., 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, etc.) and the sum of these values represent attitude strength.